If jazz, as the eminent critic Whitney Balliet once wrote, is the “sound of surprise”, the intensely cathartic, fiercely turbulent live and recorded collaborations between Japanese noise purveyor Masami Akita (aka Merzbow), Hungarian drummer Balazs Pandi and Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustasfsson, are the “sound of shock and awe.”
Sonic assaults of epic proportions, their collaborations blend the bombast of Merzbow’s grinding white noise barrages with Pandi’s thunderous pulse on the kit and Gustafsson’s ferocious abandon on baritone sax and clarinet mixed with live electronics, bringing to mind a marriage of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Coltrane’s Interstellar Space, with touches of Sonic Youth’s sonic mayhem thrown in for good measure.
The trio released a first recording on RareNoise in 2013 (Cuts), followed by a four-way collaboration with Thurston Moore in 2013 (Cuts Of Guilt, Cuts Deeper), which developed into a further release in 2018 (Cuts Up, Cuts Out).
They are due to release a new album as a trio in 2020.
