Live Review: Merzbow and Balasz Pandi @ Camden Underworld

The experience of live noise is primal. Shuddering bass tones cascade through the body, more felt than heard. Shrieking feedback fills the air obliterating all conscious thought. With Merzbow and Balazs Pandi another layer is added, the frenetic pounding of drums battering almost ceaselessly beneath the textures of howling electronics. Sometimes a groove emerges for a while but it’s only a brief interlude, it soon dissolves away into more abstract snatches of blast beats and frenzied cymbal abuse. The shattering loudness engulfs and surrounds you, though there are hundreds of other people there the sonics are curiously alienating. This for me is a positive experience. Human connections are impossible... Kudos to the hammered lady grooving exotically to a beat only she could hear.

Review: The Fireclown by Michael Moorcock (1965)

Paranoias of the past often feel hopelessly optimistic to the future and so it is with Moorcock’s The Fireclown. A crazed harlequin preaches a doctrine of consciousness in opposition to intellect, seeking the dissolution of all human society. His activities expose seismic fault lines in a carefully managed future government. Old lusts for power are still there even in a world without war. How delightful! In the 21st century we have abandoned consciousness and intellect in favour of a species of sneering ignorance that makes the Fireclown’s apocalyptic dogma seem like benevolent humanism. We will all choke to death on the thanatotic effluent spewing from our leaders who cut capers out of a Punch & Judy show with a straight face and smeared greasepaint.