Masami Akita seems to have four major sources of inspiration for the work he releases under the name Merzbow: “scum culture” (his term for pornography, fetish/bondage material, horror/gore, etc.), pure abstraction, animal and nature rights (viz., F.I.D., Bloody Sea, Turmeric, etc.), and Japan’s own history and culture. The latter gets some of the least representation in his catalog, but for me it’s some of the most fascinating stuff. Yoshinotsune has been my stock best example of that, but Collapse 12 Floors sits nicely alongside it, especially since it refers to a piece of Japanese history that I have my own affinity for.

There comes a certain point after which being extreme for its own sake stops becoming interesting, and you have to actually be creative. This was the problem I had with Masonna, and why I lost interest with them in favor of Merzbow: the former was pure overkill to the point of redundancy, while the latter was (and is) more artful and adventurous. In the same vein, that’s probably why grindcore bands like Carcass and Napalm Death, despite being completely over-the-top, managed to remain interesting—they tried to be at least somewhat evolutionary instead of just beating the same dead (rotting, bloated, stinking) horse.

Unnatural History was the second of many Coil albums that compiled a slew of non-album tracks in one central form, if only as a footnote for the completists. Before this was the “stopgap / breathing space” of Gold is the Metal (with the Broadest Shoulders), a closetful of outtakes from the Horse Rotorvator days or earlier. History pulls together pieces from as far back as 1984, but doesn’t attempt to make any kind of chronology or narrative out of them. Not that we really need one: if you’re a Coil fan, it’s almost certainly on your to-do list anyway, and if you’re only a casual listener then you should only come here after listening to the actual album material.

This is, strictly speaking, the first Coil album in name—but it’s probably not the first Coil album to start with, if only because you won’t have much of an introduction to Coil through it. Come to think of it, anyone who’s followed Coil for more than a couple of albums would know that they were not so much defined by a signature sound as the fact that they were constantly and restlessly trying out new sounds like snakes shedding skins. This was merely one of many, many dissimilar phases they went through.

I have no other record in my current collection apart from Peter Gabriel’s third album (“Melt”) that can drive me right to tears no matter what the circumstances. The 1982 edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide described this album as “songs of stark horror” wherein Gabriel “despaired the very modernity that makes his music possible.” Stark and despairing is too right. Melt Gabriel’s face completely off the cover (it’s already half-melted) and what you have is a black hole, albeit one where you are serenaded by the sympathetic Gabriel as you fall in headfirst. If Gabriel had been using his new-familiar two-letter album naming convention this far back, he might have just called this album No and left it at that.

Most people would probably find an unintentional laugh in me saying that some Merzbow albums are nowhere nearly as interesting as others. It does have the makings of a comedy sketch: you have someone listening to one long blur of noise and gushing “Exquisite!” and then listening to another long, equally indistinguishable blur of noise and wrinkling his nose in distate. The joke isn’t lost on me, believe me.

I have to admit, about half the time I’ve picked up a record just because the name of the band wouldn’t leave my head—and who can forget a name like Borbetomagus? Those of you who are historically-inclined will remember that being the archaic name for the German town of Worms, although there’s little (overt) connection between that bit of antiquity and three guys from New York—Don Dietrich, Jim Sauter and Donald Miller—who play sax and guitar and in the words of Byron Coley of Forced Exposure, throw down “balls on the line improvisation with enough energy to flatten buildings.”

I’m fond of quoting Jacques Barzun’s statement about “experimental art”—that if one considers a certain work of art to be experimental, one must also concede that there is the possibility that the experiment has failed. I’ve since expanded my thinking on the issue a bit, and responded with a few questions of my own: What are the parameters of success and failure for a given “experiment”, and who dictates them, the artist or the audience? I don’t think these questions have fixed answers, either; you have to ask yourself such questions every time you approach something new, and see what comes of it. Nobody is ever trying to do the same thing the same way, or for the same reasons, or with the same ends in mind.

The total number of records I have in my collection that I can play straight through without skipping tracks, I could probably count on one hand. Godflesh’s Pure; maybe one of Keiji Haino’s live sets. Yoko Kanno’s Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex album. Roxy Music’s Avalon. The list is short for a good reason: it’s a sign of the elect.

Granted, some of that is due to the way the album format has become fractured and fractured again—first by the CD, which allowed tracks to be re-ordered at will or dropped entirely; then by digital music systems, which are more song- than album-oriented. But there’s also the fact that precious few albums hold together that well as a whole: sometimes there’s just not enough strong, sustained material in that particular vein to support a whole record (the last couple of Nine Inch Nails releases felt like this for me), and sometimes the artist in question just works best as a creator of singles rather than anything more ambitious. It’s hard work to come up with a batch of songs that hang together well as a whole and survive being cut apart and heard independently.

You’ve probably had this happen a few times: you hear a song by an artist you’ve not heard much of (if anything); you buy the record the song is on; you get disappointed and throw the album back into the closet—and then months later you dig it out again and hear things you completely missed the first time. Chalk a lot of that up to misfired expectations: what you wanted was a whole record like that song, or something equally misguided. It took time for your ears to clear, to be able to hear the thing for what it is and nothing else.