Space Machine - 3
(Important)
Yamazaki Maso has been recording and releasing records under the name Masonna for a long, long time. For some reason, this project is named more or less after the studio in which the majority of the tracks were recorded: Space Machine Systems Studio. Of the album's 8 tracks, the first 7 were all recorded there by Maso. The last, which is also by far the longest (over 40 minutes!), is a live performance which includes a guest guitarist dear to my ears: Kawabata Makoto.
The studio tracks start out promising. However, it's a really quick start. The propulsion and menacingly broken rhythm/looped de-tuning synth hints at some exciting depth to the standard "noise" game. After 2 minutes of nothing else being added, it starts to feel a lot less threatening (exciting). By the time it ends 6 minutes later, it has ceased to sound damaged, unsettling, or interesting in the least. And this is the only studio track that has ever grabbed me for even a moment.
So, we skip to the live track. I mean, Kawabata Makoto, right? He's awesome, right? Yeah, totally. He'll save the day. And yeah, it sounds pretty ok, but the recording quality is terrible. While it's probably intentional, there are so many annoying feedback squeals and high-pitched drones that smother the mix that it's hard to really get a sense of any kind of interplay, or even discern between the aimless meandering of filter sweeps, clangs, and bowing sounds. This kind of thing has been done incredibly well (about a million times by Acid Mothers Temple in fact), but here it just feels bloated and thoughtless.
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