Martin Tetreault/Otomo Yoshihide

This CD marks the first in a series of releases by sound artists Martin Tetreault (Quebec) and Otomo Yoshihide (Japan). The music has been drawn from a series of live gigs in Europe in 2003 and assembled into a series of 3 discs: 1. Grrr (distorted, aggressive, noisy), 2. Tuk (fragmented) 3. Aah (smooth) and possibly 4. Bouf (throwaways). Grrr is basically, full spectrum abrasion, but not of the sometimes sterile world of more formal noise art, but more reminiscent of drum oriented music and more specifically heavy rock, metal etc. These improvisers have managed to create music that has the integrity and compositional arc of songs and have done it pretty much with analogue tools. The tone of the sounds themselves remind me more of the crashing finales of the rock/metal world (Neil Young’s feedback-driven Arc comes to mind), stretched out and basted in the on/off schizophrenic babbling of electronics artfully malfunctioning at an incredible rate. The communication level between these musicians is incredibly high and this has given us a CD of some of the best moments of power and aggression since Never Mind the Bollocks. I can’t wait to hear the next instalment.