Gensho, Boris With Merzbow, Relapse
Japanese rock power trio Boris and the noise musician Merzbow, aka Masami Akita, both make simple work with intent and power, and both produce a lot of albums: for Boris, 23 over the last 20 years; for Merzbow, more than 200 since 1980. They have recorded six collaborations since the late ‘90s. This double-disc joint album could be understood as merely another, but for the challenge inside it.
Boris plays various kinds of romanticist, distorted, slow-release music, not without humor and mischief, and sometimes verging on pop. Merzbow makes scrofulous clouds of hiss and crackle. (It’s not always clear how he makes it, but for recent live performances, he has had an amplified guitar-like object strapped around his neck, with heavy springs stretched over what looks like a film canister.) Their new record is titled Gensho, which means “phenomenon.” The phenomenon isn’t in the record as it is given to you. It is in what you do with it.
The album is delivered in discrete parts: Boris in the first disc or first two LP sides, Merzbow in the rest. Each half is exactly one hour and 15 minutes long. The idea is that you can play them simultaneously and control the mix or ignore either half if you like. You may want to take the second option, especially if you have any skepticism about the degree to which the album was made with this listening strategy in mind.
In their past recordings, there has been recognizable cooperation between Boris and Merzbow: When Boris plays a quiet drone note, Merzbow will hold back. When the band pours it on, Merzbow will intensify in kind. Here, the two halves do not line up in ways that require each other for completion.
Merzbow’s tracks are long, alienating, dense, super-harsh. By contrast, Boris’ tracks — with singer-guitarists Wata and Takeshi, and charismatic drummer Atsuo contributing only electronics and tambourine to drumless versions of the band’s old songs — are sensitized and inviting. If you hear the record in the manner suggested to you, Merzbow’s music, unsentimental to the core, sluices through the elegant silences in and among the Boris tracks. There is an aggressive tension here, which often feels awkward or wrong. But then it can remind you of the aggressive tension you may have heard and liked in Boris or Merzbow in the first place.
— BEN RATLIFF
At This Time ... , Steve Kuhn Trio, Sunnyside
There’s a reason jazz musicians like to line up recording sessions right after a stint in a club. You could explain it in terms of familiarity with the material and personnel; you could talk about flow states and field awareness. But the best way to understand these intangibles is to hear an album like At This Time ..., the latest by the Steve Kuhn Trio.
Kuhn, an astute and lyrical pianist who began his career more than 50 years ago, has long favored the trio as a working unit though he still appears in other settings. When Kuhn has the right rhythm partners, he can make a trio feel expansive as well as intimate, full of shared confidences and sympathetic cross talk.
At This Time ... features the same trio heard on Kuhn’s luminous album Wisteria, released in 2012 on ECM. With Steve Swallow, a longtime peer, on electric bass guitar, and Joey Baron, a newer colleague, on drums, it’s a group predisposed to alertness and buoyancy. The new album was recorded last summer, after several nights on the bandstand, and it radiates the heat and enthusiasm of a nightclub set within the framework of a studio album.
Some of this boils down to immediacy, as on the opening track, My Shining Hour, a standard that Kuhn might have played during his brief stint in the John Coltrane Quartet. On an up-tempo version of This Is New, the Kurt Weill song, Kuhn’s solo begins with lapidary eloquence and edges out onto a limb, teetering precariously before regaining balance. But he also excels in a more relaxed vein, sauntering through Carousel in easy waltz time, or delivering an elegant disquisition on The Pawnbroker, the movie theme by Quincy Jones.
There’s a fine, rubbery intuition in Swallow’s bass lines, which sit right on the beat but feel somehow ahead of the curve. And Baron treats rhythmic ebullience as a renewable resource, often pointing toward the swinging influence of Mel Lewis. The album relies on an indivisible group effort, so it’s almost an indulgence when Kuhn plays an original ballad, “The Feeling Within,” as a solo piano piece, deeply resonant and in no sort of hurry.
— NATE CHINEN
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located