Friday 22 July 2011

Akita / Gustafsson / O'Rourke - One Bird Two Bird

Akita / Gustafsson / O'Rourke - One Bird Two Bird (Editions Mego)
This is a very noisy record made my Masami Akita, Mats Gustafsson and Jim O'Rourke. These three musician's all make their own kinds of strange music and first I shall talk about the music they make on their own. Masami Akita is a noise musician from Japan who has made hundreds of noise music records as Merzbow since 1979. Noise music is not like other music, it uses different sounds like feedback and distortion and static like when you tune a radio between stations. I have been listening to noise music so that I can write this music review and thought it was very good, it made me laugh too. Mats Gustafsson is a saxaphone player from Sweden who makes mainly free jazz and improvised music, he plays often with Peter Brötzmann who i have reviewed before and with lots of different other kinds of musicians too.  Jim O'Rourke is an american musician and producer who has made lot's of different kinds of music - i listened to some soft guitar music he made and some which sounded like keyboard or computer music.
             On the One Bird Two Bird record, which is just two very long songs one on each side, these three musicians come together to make weird music which is not like anything I have heard before, it doesn't have a beat like most music does and the instruments they use sound very different to normal instruments with lots of different sounds mixed up together.  Side one is quite slow, sometimes it sounds like train noises and sometimes like wind and sometimes like the noises machines make in factories, sometimes you can hear what sounds like screaming and when Gustafsson plays his saxaphone it sounds like the noise made by a ships funnel or maybe bagpipes or an alpine horn or sometimes like cows mooing, it is all very noisy and very interesting.  Side two is faster and even noisier. Here the noises sound like the engine of a car and metal being banged together, there are also sounds like car horns or air raid sirens and sometimes there are noises like birds screaming maybe because they are caught in traps. The saxophone playing on this side also sounds like animals screaming, maybe dogs.
            Overall i would say that this is a very scary sounding record and I think it is meant to frighten you but i like it very much because it is very different, I would give this record 10 out of 10.

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