Friday, September 18, 2009

Keiji Haino ( 灰野敬二 ) - The 21st Century Hard-Y-Guide-Y Man - The Plot To Disappear From This Person (2008)

| Avant-Garde | Experimental Hurdy-Gurdy | Noise |
| Drone | Experimental Percussion |


With the original japanese title of "Koitsukara Usetaitameno Hakarigoto", this is the last album from the Hurdy Gurdy trilogy "The 21st Century Hard-Y-Guide-Y Man" (Haino's other albums). Now we have five tracks, mostly 10min, instead of one giant as on "Even Now, Still I Think". This album is even more experimental than the previous, holding a giant midnight drone cloud with electrical stormy improvisation. Haino pushes the hurdy gurdy to the limit here, and break all the chains that lock him to our world, transcending to a spiritual realm and relieving its ambience deep into our minds. This album has some ambient sounds floating around, like doors closing, steps on the thin water, and more mysterious and unrecognizable noises, and it's the first on the trilogy to feature percussion, very bizarre and Haino-ish percussion.

The 1st track is a very heavy and dark piece, noisy, with low and high hurdy gurdy screams that gives to it a very ghostly sound. The 2nd is a very melodic piece, filled with a harsh drones on the background, further getting very furious, noisy and guitar-y, and then changing to some experimental percussion with a light and muted strings accompaniment at the very end. The 3rd is a loud ear-bleeding song, with high-pitched drones and some mauling improvisation, all soaked into a dense 20min noisewall. The 4th is a crystally melody improvisation, with light structure and a nice reverb, and also a small feedback, into it. There's a fine random percussion passage again, sounding like tribal drumming a bit. The 5th and last track is a heavy and massive song, with some haunting drone and agonizing horse-like hurdy gurdy screams, filled with a grave percussion, that sounds more like a ship tearing and sinking or an earthquake than actually a percussion piece... And I swear I can hear a woman laughing for a short time, underneath all this destruction.

So bad the cover does not follow the same pattern of the previous albums... that was a really nice cover desing. Despite, I like the dense gray used here.

Catalog: PSFD-8029 (P.S.F. Records)
On Last.fm
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