Band:	Merzbow
Album:	Black Crows Cyborg [Collaboration]
Style:	Noise
Release date:	April 2021

01. Part I: City Barbarism Melancholy
02. Part II: Cylinders Raven

If you're listening to any noise album this year, make it this one.

As we here at Metal Storm enjoy a lot of our music to be loud, distorted, dense and inhospitable, we probably had at least someone tell us that "This is not music, it is just noise", even if it still is clearly music with melody, rhythm, harmonies and all that. But even that kind of breaks down when you go to actual noise. Up to the point where you wonder how far can you stretch the definition of music. We've had that issue before. Noise has been a great element to add to some extreme music to make it more visceral. But on it's own, noise music isn't just unmusical and boring, it's actively unpleasant.

And yet here is Merzbow. For the past 40 years he's been putting noise to tapes. Sometimes the noise was harsher, sometimes it was more ambiental, but it was nevertheless noise. And it worked, as he is now probably the first name that comes to mind when talking about the genre, and still manages to garner some attention with his releases. And there's a shitload of them, mostly because a lot of them are archival releases with different version from sessions of already released material, and we generally don't always add those. But I have to admit I'm never excited about a new Merzbow album. A Merzbow collab though?

Collaborations are the entire reason why the metal world as a whole cares about Merzbow. He's worked with Boris, Full Of Hell out of the featured alumni, and even outside of the metal world, collaborations with Sonic Youth, Xiu Xiu, Keiji Haino, Mats Gustafsson, all sit in the zone just outside of the metal world. When Merzbow is collaborating, I'm interested. But in all of these instances, it is a noise artist bringing a layer of noise to actual music. Black Crows Cyborg is two noise artists collaborating. Prurient's career only goes half as old as Merzbow's, but in that time, he's quite safely among the contenders for most recognizable name in noise music, second only to his collaborator on this record. In terms of how big this is, imagine if the first and second most popular bands on our website, namely Iron Maiden and Opeth, collaborated.

Both of the artists here have huge discographies, which might seem quite impenetrable from an outsider's point of view, and I'm only still barely up to my ankle in the most well-known releases. So other than recommending Merzbeat and Frozen Niagara Falls from each of the artists' involved solo endeavors, I don't think I have the proper depth to really compare this release to their back catalog. Other than to say that you'll find much much harsher and inhospitable stuff. In contrast to a lot of noise out there, Black Crows Cyborg is pretty accessible. It's barely half an hour in length, so it lacks the monumental runtimes often found in the genre, it sits more on the ambient side, and the Bandcamp page comes with a pretty slick description of the skylines of Tokyo and New York being covered with ravens, which is about the cold and haunting image that this album tries to conjure.

And with this in mind, listening to Black Crows Cyborg, I can't say that it doesn't sound like music, but neither that it does. I can say that it does conjure that desolate image that it tries to, and it showcases the abilities of two noise titans with more experience than the majority of bands out there. Droning ambiance that almost sound like lost organs, industrial soundscapes from back when there was life, a layer of noise that is just beneath the border of piercing. It's less about being unpleasant, it's more about being uneasy. It's lost space from a lost time.