Well, I finally got time to check out Moenai Hai. I was quite pleased to be able to get a sense of it before listening from some of the comments here and many ring true.
It begins with a track that sees wee Junty flexing his electro acoustic muscles for about 1 second as recording of a kid laughing is cut out into a bit of reverb before kicking into the bulk of the piece. Here, wee Junty insists in the inlay this is is NOT a field recording but it absolutely fucking is. Or is at least heavily built around one. It sounds like (hopefully) him on a train causing trouble and it is great. Probably the most interesting piece to listen to on the record. Then it kicks horribly into that shoegaze style jam which most of us may have heard on youtube. Yep, it's a shock in terms of the sudden volume and the style but after a little while it feels absolutely like a Gero tuneful guitar jam a la some of the later Vis A Vis discs with that lad on guitar who has the youtube channel of all his clothes. Things get very close to sublime when somebody starts to do a bit of noisy soloing. Perfect noise guitar/slightly tonal wailing and at this point any doubt that Gero might not have delivered with this record is erased. It sounds like total shit and goes on for far too long which further cements this point and then we get a quiet number which, despite sounding a bit too modern dark ambient ends up nodding quite heavily (in my mind) to the None Friendly approach of ultra repetitive swells and textures which also go on for way too long. It's very nice to listen to. These are all tracks sound new and...up to date(?) while still holding enough technical or aesthetic similarities to older works to make sense as Gero songs.
But this is Gerogerigegege, and given that this album is the first to be issued after the mythology and legend of the band had truly set in (older listeners will have to confirm or refute this - I got into them just a bit too late to have known what it was like to deal with them as new releases came out) it forces you to ask some of the tougher questions:
what did I expect from this? Nothing.
why am I slightly sad not to have heard anyone masturbating or shouting 1234? because I am only human
why do I even listen to this in the first place? I hope never to find out
would I care about this if I listened without knowing it to be them? probably not
Is Gero a band which is really relevant today? Thankfully it seems so.
whatever the answers, this album stands up proudly because it has been put together in exactly the same way as the rest of their work: collaged chunks of sound baring no relation to one another besides whatever personal importance or sense of reason the creator has for throwing them together. Always a 50/50 chance of it being damn near unlistenable and half the time the more sonically interesting records are still full of dodgy shit, but still you need and want to experience it all, to the point where the audio content is almost unimportant.
Because of this, it is tempting to rewrite the art of Gerogerigegege as having been a carefully arranged attack of totally unpredictable releases aimed at leaving the listener scratching their head but this is the kind of genius which, like all the best art and music really, is only achieved through the singular creativity of someone who just does whatever the fuck they want and probably never thinks much about how it all fits together. Sure, on an aesthetic level you can be a bit disappointed in the quality or selection or type of pieces wee Junty has put on this disc, but was this ever a band that delivered what you wanted? How often do you reach for 'Saturday Night Big Cock Salaryman' over something like 'Yellow Trash Bazooka' or 'Nothing To Hear, Nothing To...' when you're after a satisfying listening experience? Similarly, how often do you go for a 3,0000 track noisecore 7" when you for some reason feel like listening to the Japanese national anthem or somebody taking a shit?
The true beauty of this stuff will always lie within the wholeness of its body of work and the way it constantly evades full understanding, categorisation or easily repeatable, contained experiences. Moenai-Hai is an album which slots perfectly into this body of work for all those reasons. Wee Junty has managed to make something that, rather than being stifled by all those years away, has managed to somehow work them in.
I also listened to the tape that came with it and it's as fine a piece of mucky, pervy noise as Gero have ever put out. Really, really short and I think they probably could have done better than to have just reversed the track on side B but whatever. I only hope that this hints at some sort of posh cd issue of similar unreleased works.
In short, I loved both of these and don't want to listen to either again for a long time.
