Quote from: Baglady on February 04, 2025, 04:42:43 PMKIYOSHI MIZUTANI - Cemetery LP (Ferns 2024, orig. Ulcer House 1991)
I chuckled - in a positive way! - when Ferns reissued Mizutani's Inferiors Betrayal as a DLP a couple of years ago. There's just no obvious audience for this guy. Too weird for most regular noise heads, too dated for today's arts n farts crowd. So to put out a thing like that, and barely promote it, I guess Ferns just want it to be out there for those who really need it? Noble!
Then this came out in April last year. Finally picked it up a few days ago, and I'm just as thrilled with this one. Fragmented in a dreamlike bizarre manner. Acoustic crackling, sawing and hammering, a car burning off somewhere, sampled voice fragmented, short radio snippets, outdated programmed percussion, the odd synth stab etc. Again and again I ask "why this sound? it makes no sense", which is usually the case with dreams as well. These odd elements and objects right in the center and completely out of place. At times, these four tracks balance on that threshold between the bizarre and the nightmarish, but that's where it stays, a restraint I appreciate. It never goes full on noise or nightmare.
Mizutani doesn't sound quite like anybody else (which is why he fits wo well on Ferns, who houses a bunch of other true originals!), but a few names do come to mind who treads similar dream countries where things often stop making sense, such as Ultra, Francois Douris (the RRR LP at least), P16 D4, certain older John Duncan stuff. It's a sonic space few newer artists care to thread - and perhaps all for the better, but still - which I guess might come across as almost cringy today for it's sonic qualities. The old sytnh sound, the theatrics, the percussion... I gladly go there now and again though. The Undying comp from 1989 on Freedom In A Vacuum summarizes that whole thing so well, as does a good chunk of the less raved about artists on Journey Into Pain for example. Just weird, old, almost pretentious racket without an obvious audience (at least today). Great LP!
Also, I had completely missed that Ferns recently reissued yet another old Mizutani thing, but on CD this time, Actual Infinity / 2 Variations from 1991. Instant buy, obviously.
This sounds really great, and I have been meaning to check it out since someone first mentioned it here around the time of the release. I like early duo-Merzbow, so this sounds quite good.
