Monde Bruits – Portuguese Man-Of-War [CS]

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The name comes from the French for "noise world" - Monde Bruits, the project of Shohei Iwasaki (岩崎昇平, 1962-2005), a figure whose significance to the entire architecture of Japanese noise exceeds what the relatively small scale of his recorded output might suggest. It was Iwasaki who organized Masami Akita's first Merzbow concert in Osaka - a founding act of the network that would, over the following years, connect Japanese noise to the international underground via cassette trade, mail order, and the slow accumulation of mutual attention. He was also active in ABM (with Fusao Toda and Naoto Hayashi), MXM (with Macronympha), and Sian (with Aube's Akifumi Nakajima). He died in a motorcycle accident in April 2005.

Portuguese Man-Of-War, recorded and mixed in July 1991 and released on Vanilla Records as a single-sided C60 cassette, is the work for which Monde Bruits is most celebrated - a single thirty-minute piece that has been described, without significant exaggeration, as one of the great noise releases of all time. The man-of-war is a colonial organism, multiple beings functioning as one, its tentacles extending far beyond what the surface reveals. Iwasaki's noise has something of this quality - vast, extended, deceptively unified, genuinely dangerous at its extremities."

Vanilla Records, 1991