This past week Editions Mego brought together the UK noise artist Russell Haswell with Japan’s Pain Jerk (Kohei Gomi), for an outstanding release several years in the making. While the label reports that the two met back in 1997 at the Tokyo club 20000 volts, and had talked back then about collaborating in the future, this wasn’t realized until 2012 when the pair played their “extreme duet tag mass attack” gig at the Rammel Club in Nottingham. Electroacoustic Sludge Dither Transformation Smear Grind Decomposition nO!se File Exchange Mega Edit, the title says it all, really, is the result of that collaboration, and it began even before their performance when the artists started recording improvised solo works, trading them back and forth digitally, so as to build the sonic groundwork for their show. The Nottingham performance was then recorded, and both Haswell and Kohei Gomi left with copies, as well as the previous solo recordings, and the pair would spend the next two years editing, sharing, and re-editing, in a study of process that is interesting both conceptually and sonically. Possibly parodying, but also utilizing to the extreme, the ease with which digital culture and technology allows musicians to share and re-contextualise their music, this collaboration also seeks to blur the distinctions between the two artists, as well as between “recorded” work and “live” work, and they have created an extreme and challenging sonic document full of dislocations, ruptures, and true aural surprises! This YouTube playlist features both the “Russell Haswell Mega Edit“, as well as Pain Jerk’s, and it has run time of 1hr and 48 min…
