Feedback Fruit Loops
Todd Burns has taken up the ultimate fools errand in modern music: reviewing the entire Merzbox (you know, the 50 CD [literally] fetishist packaged Merzbow box set, surest sign yet we live in the best and worst of all possible worlds), disc by disc, five at a time. On one level this is exactly what I would have liked to have seen from the Wire’s Merzbow feature a year or so back (if Edwin Pouncey did listen to the whole thing…I have my doubts it’s even possible for any but the most deranged. Meaning I doubt whether Todd will reach the end. As does Todd, I think.) On the other, I know The Wire would have turned into a sterile academic exercise. Burns has already made his feelings on the subject clear – he hates it and the music, finds it an oppressive chore yet bleakly compelling all the same – and the writing has already become a rather personal journey through blasted countryside, an avoidable (yet far more entertaining) byproduct of the fact that – as Sigmund would say – “sometimes noise is just noise, Herr Akita.” I downloaded some Merz-produkt this morning to remind myself what Burns is putting himself through. I don’t envy him.