Kikuri Keiji Haino / Masami Akita

Thunderous blankets of distorted synth feedback flood from the speakers in the opening minute of Kikuri’s Pulverized Purple. Where Merzbow would often be comfortable milking the minutiae of oscillating waveforms for most of a full performance, this Kikuri collaboration tinker with a much more diverse set of audio experiments. Ethereal voices wail and hang like tortured ghosts haunting the rafters of an old cathedral. Square waves grind violently with their saw tooth comrades, stumbling over each other like drunken sailors on shore leave, creating a skittering, disjointed landscape. Demented, flanged banjo plucking and strumming, coupled with guttural shouting and noise-filter-drenched synth, run through manic, delay speed permutations, fill the second track, the latter of which carries over into harsher sonic grit and spastic free-time drumming for the album’s middle section. A 30-minute epic ends the disc, never waning on the heavy synth fetishism but Pulverized Purple is always willing to take larger within-song leaps than most of their noisy brethren, making for an engaging listening experience.