Serdar | Genji Press

The Red Spectacles is a little like what you might get if you took a screenplay for one of Jean-Pierre Melville’s movies (Le Samouraï) and gave it to F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu). That doesn’t mean it’s any good, though. Here, the director and screenwriter are Mamoru Oshii, he who gave us the digressions of the Ghost in the Shell films and the deeply underrated Avalon, so I expected at least something thoughtful. Red Spectacles is actually the first live-action movie after he’d already spent a great deal of time in anime (his dream-state production Angel’s Egg immediately predates this film), and it’s clear throughout this movie how he tries to apply an animation director’s sensibilities to what he’s doing. Unfortunately, he doesn’t produce a movie that’s worth watching, let alone one worth thinking deeply about, and in the end even the most hard-core movie buffs will be left scratching their heads.

The plot’s a reworking of a story that Oshii has revisited time and again throughout his career, where an elite metropolitan police force, the Kerberos, were established to combat growing levels of crime, insurgency and corruption. Then the Kerberos themselves succumb to the same vices that they’re allegedly combating, and are disbanded—except for a loyal few, who stick it out to the end after being outlawed. One of their number, Koichi, flees the city and returns several years later to pick up what he’s left behind, to reunite with his comrades and to strike a blow for justice, or something. (A much better version of the Kerberos saga was told in the animated film Jin-roh.)

You might not ever have guessed it from listening to most of his records, but Masami Akita, a/k/a, Merzbow, harbors a love of jazz and progressive rock that comes out through his own music in the oddest ways. Before he started Merzbow per se, he was drumming with a prog-style group, and his approach to noise reminded me more of the sensibilities of a jazzman than a shock-tactics terrorist. With his album Door Open at 8AM, he used jazz as the raw material and created a kind of meta-jazz. With Merzbeat, he’s taken what sounds like his own prog / jazz playing, run it through his digital shredder, joined the shreds end-to-end and made something that reminds us of prog-rock the way prog-rock itself reminds us of classical music, or jazz, or any of the half-a-hundred other kinds of music it also freely assimilates.

I’ve been listening to Merzbow’s records for over a decade now, but I didn’t really start hearing what he was really doing until I listened to Amlux, and applied what I heard there to everything else of his (Merzbeat included). Amlux sparked a realization that may seem obvious, but wasn’t really at the forefront of my mind before: just because something is loud or soft doesn’t mean it’s meant to be obnoxious or restful, respectively, and if something (e.g., Merzbow’s own electronic splatters) twitters and screeches like a bird that doesn’t mean it’s meant to remind us of a bird, or evoke a bird.

In the entire time I’ve been following Justin Broadrick’s career, he alone has assumed as many side-project identities as each member of any given band have released solo albums. Nominally, Broadrick is known for his longstanding band Godflesh (about which I really need to write a few things once I get the last of their albums in), but has worn so many other faces during his career that you could get lost: Jesu, Ice, Krackhead, Fall of Because, and Final, just to name a few. And, amazingly, almost all of these projects are good in their own ways; they’re not throwaways but clearly different facets of the same man’s creative output.

Final was actually one of Broadrick’s very first project names—as far back as 1983 he was making noise-blowout recordings under that name, many of which were edited together as a bonus track on the first Final CD, One. I picked up One based on Justin’s involvement and was not quite prepared for what I heard: the man who had given us the drum-machine-propelled and slashing-guitar violence of Godflesh could also do uneasy-listening or “illbient” landscapes just as easily. The Final formula seemed like a loose outgrowth of the kind of work Broadrick did when he remixed other people’s tracks—he’d ram them through a sampler and reconstruct them in fascinating ways. Likewise, with Final, he’d take individual snips of sound and create little drifting dramas of sound out of them.