Excrete Music has always been my favorite VOG. Excrete, along with Maso's Shinsen Na Clitoris, and Gero's Tokyo Anal Dynamite, would be my introduction to "Japanese Noise" – which, as you can imagine, made quite an impression on then-16-year-old me. (Merzbow I was familiar with, but had to that point associated with the already well-established field of "industrial noise". Which is, still, where he correctly belongs, in my view.) I wouldn't call Excrete disturbing so much as surreal; very odd, and (then) very unique, when taken together with the total package of the artwork, project name, up to and including the statement on the reverse: "Compiled from various unreleased tapes intended for release, including work done after their (death)", with copyright reserved for My Fiance's Life Work. (The notion that some poor grieving girl would release this in loving memory of her late betrothed was downright bittersweet, all the more hilarious of course when the truth would later come out.) That surreal atmosphere is part of what would elevate VOG above the mentioned peers; similar to how Nurse With Would would be elevated, in my brain, above, say, Illusion Of Safety (two artists I was listening to most frequently at the time I came across "that crazy Japanese shit"). But atmosphere alone is insufficient in elevating a recording project. What separates Excrete from Shinsen and Tokyo Anal is the apparent care and concern that went into the arrangement proper. However raw and punishing the sound, it is also quite well-composed, the hour-long disc flowing through a sparsely humored series of properly harsh episodes to achieve a very sound compositional whole. (This is something, because Shinsen Na Clitoris still ranks among my favored Maso. A lot of that essential rawness was lost when Maso cleaned up his act in preparation for entry to the hallowed chambers of Alchemy, but I digress...)
For anyone interested in more Excrete-like VOG – that is to say, more brutally puritannical VOG – the obvious recommendation would be the Violent Onsen Geisha s/t 3xcd reissue on Bloody Butterfly, which collects material from three early tapes. Personal favorite is the disc containing reissue of Cry Baby Killer, solely for the inclusion of "Hey! Bo Didley"- after Excrete Music, the second-ever thing I heard from VOG (via the RRRecords v/a Noise & Junk Omnibus) and imo a perfect encapsulation of the project strengths: starting with very heavy, live-sounding, harsh ambient power electronics, vaguely reminiscent of the live track from Incapacitants' Feedback Of NMS, the song mutates into total piss-take on what I'd assume to be a Bo Didley number, substituting straight feedback for guitars and offering distorted vocalizations-cum-screaming over a quite rockin' beat. "Anal Darth Vader!" makes a very obvious connection- and no less hilarious because so true – to death metal. And tracks like "Weasels Ripped My Ass" and "Toilet Torture Machine" speak for themselves with an authority as unhinged and indecorous as plainly harsh.
It must be said that, while I'm a very big fan of the existence of Violent Onsen Geisha, it is a rare occasion that the noisehead needs its VOG fix. For the reasons often given: plenty of miss to wade through in search of hit. Black Lovers: Early Lost Tapes 1988 would be the quintessential case-in -point. A single, hour-long, taking of the piss, forcing the listener to suffer through every indelicate morsel of un-tastefulness Nakahara would care to sandwich in between all the otherwise quite palatable intervals. Black Lovers is a sloppy mess, but stands as one of the better pissings I've heard from the project, largely owing to the, again, quintessential rawness that so defines a certain stream of Japan-originating noise.
