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Black Leather Jesus / Hiroshi Hasegawa – Control Your Surroundings
It hardly seems fair. One of Hiroshi Hasegawa and only nine Black Leather Jesus. Poor BLJizzers, never stood a chance. Still, due respect. The effort, obviously, is there. With titles like Effective Gag, this is one hard and demanding consort that seriously means the business: Sean E. Matzus, Richard Ramirez, Austin Caustic, Tanner Garza, Kevin Novak, Nathan Golub, Carol Sandin Cooley, Domokos, Bruce Springsteen, and Zach Guttowsky, all in, out to show 'em whose boss.
Effective Gag keeps things relatively short and to the point, delivering, as promised, no breathing room whatsoever. Likely culled from a lengthier session, as though someone just spontaneously pressed the record button some ways into the thick of it, emphasis on thick. To appreciate the full effects I recommend cranking the stereo to the max just prior to hitting pla- JESUS GAGGING CHRIST! that scorches. And yes, scorches. Not all that thick, not for a good few minutes at least, whereby the gag is duly tightened. In the interim, a seemingly collaged play of speaking voices, fidgety feedback honks, erratic pizzicato stabs of rougher belching blurt. The belching blurt soon resolves into a more steadily heaving layer, thickening, tightening, effectively cutting off all circulation, shutting down an otherwise wide-ranging mass of raging dynamics, completely subsumed in the all-crushing thunder. It's...pretty good. No bullshit no air, the straight harsh the way the 'holes crave. But all this has nothing on-
Hard and Demanding, the easy winner, and longest offering on the disc- another plus. Here, thirty seconds of space to breathe in the wide-open room acoustics before the heavy duty flatline. Much more dynamic in range, much wider stereo scope, much easier to imagine the full leather'd nine-piece in action. And much, and not to put too fine a point on it, more CRUSHING. So yes, I suppose nine of the buggers are in there, somewhere, but the majority would at best be straining through the glorious, kaleidoscopic accumulation of fantastically dense, blown-out, texture. Unlike the tightly regulated Gag, the underlying texture evolves continuously through myriad shifts in shape and color, sixty-nine lubricious flavors of sphincte-ludinous strangulation. At six minutes a jump in pressure, escaping the confines of Crush Almighty to erect teetering bulks of monolithic grey-walls, surges and bursts slamming into the unyielding DENSE. No, no one is going anywhere, not without permission, prospective bleed-throughs summarily crushed in fat flattened flatulent folds of low-brow, browned-and-blown out, distorted-to-shit, filth.
Hiroshi Hasegawa cuts quite the clean contrast, probing piercing punishing the 'holes with the smoothest psychedelic searings this side of Uranus. Though, brute honest, after the brute crushing pressures of BLJ, the initial impact smacks as, well, weak. Still, if there is one thing Japan's resident Astro Man excels at, it is in controlling his surroundings. As the earholes slowly acclimate to overlapping layers of white-sheeted scathe, so the noisehead begins its inexorable ascent to the next Astral plane, sickeningly sultry saturations dripping in the strangely arid, enveloping, heat.
I've been fortunate enough to have born witness to the man the moog the myth, live and in the flesh, a good number of occasions. And every one an occasion to stare, slack-jawed, as Astro-san seizes control of his surroundings, total domination, slowly drawing the assembled faithful into infinite blisses of mesmerizing, borderline spiritual, rapture. And that's on an off-night. Variations For Fringe Area, nos 1 & 2, could have been culled from one such rapture, but seems to have been subjected to a good and thorough studio workover. There's quite a range of material in the mix, acoustic, synthetic, flung out far across the fringes, wafting wet and whispering through singed buzz-waves, building to rapturous peaks, cresting among the whitened overtones, crashing down to marginally dirtied, distorted, depths. So too an effective use of panning, complex interlace of layered streams cycling suggestively into and through one another, confused signals radiating distressed alarm calls.
All this confusion, collision and concatenation of dissonant dis-settlement nets an effect at some remove from the soothing-if-somewhat-scathing waves of shimmering psychedelia often otherwise occasioned. Sure, the never-escapable sense of heavy-handed control is there, but freed a bit, to spasticize among the undertones, to suggest the possibility, however fleeting, that the hinges are less secure in their moorings, to admit, say it, the possibility of noise, proper, which, I suppose, for the man of the moment, has never exactly been a fringe pursuit.
Digest spew
BEND THOSE TO YOUR WILL. I'd have to assume referring here to the more-than-willing-not-to-mention-really-quite-able noiseperv. Well. Talk about low hanging fruit. Still, some would have to be more than adept in the dept than others. Take your Hiroshi Hasegawas. These are the sorts of chaps what can take disparate dis-settlements of confused collision and contrast, acoustic, electronic, white-sheeted, brown-buzzed, and net the rapturous psychedelic searing saturations your harsh-holes so worshipfully crave. Take, too, your Black Leather Jesuses. All nine of them. Does the prospect of densely textured, kaleidoscopic, blow-out, as filtered through continuously evolving crush of un-tethered fury, ineffectually fapping against teetering bulk of monolithic grey-wall, appeal? How could it not? Controlled surroundings await.
