In the age of electronic communication, Multiplication is a sign that through-the-mail collaboration is alive and well. The six tracks on this disc spent plenty of time traveling over the Pacific, shuttled between John Wiese’s Hollywood HQ and Masami Akita in Japan, with Wiese taking final production credits on the five shorter tracks, and Merzbow on the album’s half-hour closer. Both men, Akita in particular, have proven themselves capable of making heavy duty sounds, so it’s no surprise that Multiplication is rife with loud, harsh, and unrelenting onslaughts of noise. But just as the ocean between these performers harbors secrets deep below its surface, so does Multiplication, and while it’s all too easy to simply get seasick on the waves, there’s buried treasure to be found.
As “Bonanza” bursts from the speakers to open the disc, a million layers of static meet the ears in a solid mass. The track proceeds into a gauntlet of piercing cut and paste assemblage, not so hyperactive as to match some of Wiese’s most frenetic work, but rapid enough in its transitions as to keep the listener on guard. “Luxor Skyship” follows suit for a time, but just after the track hits the two-minute mark, near silence signals that Multiplication won’t be just another ear-piercing, brain-slapping storm of uninterrupted aural artillery. The music quickly builds to a reprised frenzy, and similar lulls on subsequent tracks are equally short-lived, but they’re just one sign of an approach by Akita and Wiese that’s not dependent on muscle and force. The majority of the album is still a boisterous and punishing affair, though the two collaborators seem particularly in tune with a mode of composition that more obviously lays bare the multitude of transitions and overlaps in the music’s construction, like a quilt of barbed wire, chain mail, and asphalt.
The album’s title track is its finale, a relative opus of twenty-seven minutes, and the piece that best evidences the spectrum of sound that lies within Multiplication’s crowded clouds. Repetitive motifs snake from underneath the crowded overgrowth in the music’s foreground, and shifts in sound that might have formerly taken place in hairpin turns and jarring redirections occur more slowly, to allow the more staid of the duo’s source material to come to the surface. The listening is no easier on delicate ears, but it’s nice to find added space in a recording that was formerly so dense. In encountering Multiplication, those expecting a full-on throttling from Wiese and Akita won’t be disappointed, but this track proves that those afraid of a monotonous affair needn’t be, either.
