Bruce Russell - Noh Budokan!! LP

absorb delightfully presents ‘noh budokan!!’ by the esteemed doctor bruce russell (he of xpressway/corpus hermeticum/the dead c/a handful of dust infamy), a zero-dimension infolding of partly-related japanese backroom tour recordings precision-retooled into the Perfect Live Album.

herr russell is no stranger to the frankenstein-treated live recording, what with his re-screwings of flying saucer attack live tapes on ‘in search of spaces’ or the living-room-as-arena monstrosity that is ‘clyma est mort’, yet ‘noh budokan!!’ represents perhaps an apotheosis in his enduring quest for ultimate performance-artifice, presenting a series of live accidents across japan & its boondocks as a single ideal corpse of bent electricity.

the rooms wherein this swill transpires are varied, from the meditative confines of supernatural deluxe to the grot of ufo, polaris’ concealed basement zen to the sweat box that is hokage, though – bound by the appropriately questionable fidelity of an android phone – the notion of space is flattened, all venues rendered zero-dimension playboxes for anti-aesthete electronics of the most wonderfully scudded varietal.

‘noh budokan!!’ serves a series of delightful cruditès, balancing acts of over/under/un(?)wrought tone that are interrogated with molecular precision, scalped applied to electricity & in turn to your ear. once more using clinton williams’ dirtbox kit & steering hard away from omit’s patented gutter-caked kosmische towards something perhaps better thought of as an adhd m.b., russell’s relatively new electronic praxis retains his signature restlessness, here laid out as a suite of high-wire manglings of pure electric tone that fixate upon a current, hurtling it down a mono tunnel into the cranium & puttifying it within the innermost crevice before it disintegrates & russell moves on to the next signal. gliding crystal-shard drones jut up against stutterance, ascetic skronk finessed into bent etude, electric roughage massing into fatbergs of convulsing muck, bottoming out into silence as are dragged into the next room.

it is important to state that this as ever is not your de rigeur noisenik fare. what remains utterly transfixing about russell transmuting his patented guitar farting onto an entirely foreign medium is that the search remains the same, even if the medium & the resulting sensations diverge. stripped of his contessa & abused strings, ‘noh budokan!!’ is still identifiably a bruce russell work, the obsession with phantoms within circuitry & the levitational capacity of pure sound born out via synthesis the same way they would otherwise be via axe, to make no mention of the preposterous/ambitious/patently absurd conceit – a perfected document of improvised fuckery? – that grounds the whole work.

against better judgement & taste (accordingly all the better for it), russell remains hell-bent on getting inside pure sound, a savant approach that for all his protestations as to craft & intent represents an enduringly fascinating, engaged, and (shudder) RIGOROUS approach to improvisation. ‘noh budokan!!’ is a right old rollick, to be filed alongside kiss & thin lizzy in the pantheon of faux-live ear roasters.