Kiyoshi Mizutani is name just about everybody has seen as he was a member of Merzbow in the '80s. Regardless, his solo work that has been done since 1989 is vastly less noticed. Or perhaps it is not often HARSH enough to be talked on pure noise people, but it was curious to notice that searching on SI forum, no topic about him and very little discussed.
Ferns just put out 2xLP reissue of Inferior's Betrayal, that is one of tapes that came on his own label between "The Same Thing Makes Always Her Laugh" LP (1990) on Merzbow's ZSF Produkt label and "Millstone" CD (Pure/RRR 1995)
"The Same Thing Makes Always Her Laugh" LP sound partially as it was still source material for Merzbow. First song with birds and electronics nice, 2nd track that is the 80's Merz vibe with that crap-impro drum nonsense and guitar noise ain't too good. B-side of LP is kind of noisy sound collage of all sorts of things. Sometimes good, sometimes not that good.
Millstone is somewhat challenging piece. Sparse, almost entirely acoustic, man scratching sounds with stone, some metal. Little quite feedback experiments at the end of long disc, but it is very much like "sound study"... "object study" of some sort.
But between these two, is "Cemetary 1-3" tape, that is 1991 recordings and again quite like the lowerst forms of music Merz. Good in a way, but perhaps not absolute masterpieces. And then "Inferior's Betrayal" (1994) is easily the best - and I am not surprised it is exactly this tape what was reissued! 70 minute long tape divided to 4 sides of vinyl, sounding better than the rip at youtube. It has the same kind of minimal, almost efx free approach of fairly simple sound sources, but very unique touch. As example, this one. Skipping and finding the sweet spots seems wrong way to give it a try, when material clearly benefits from conscious listening and may reveal itself when actually listened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGts_ZWknBoPeople into later works of Mizutani? It seems he is not very active since 2010 or so.
