[Ed. Note: Rocks Off would like to thank Ray Cummings for abusing our eardrums with all this delicious noise these past few months. He has decided to move on to other things and we wish him well.]

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Merzbow & Richard Ramirez, "Nails as an Enema, Pt. 2"

Back in late 1994, the respective kings of Japanese and Houston noise met in unholy collaborative congress; The Science of Dissecting Society (Praxis Dr. Bearmann) was the outcome. Unlike a lot of noise-world team-ups - and there have been a lot of them; too many, really - Society doesn't shortchange the listener by diluting what's unique about each performer: simply, Merzbow remixes Ramirez's bolts of raw, poisoned silk, and the result sounds exactly like what one would expect, in the best possible sense.

You would expect pulsating torrents of scabbed-over fury, wouldn't you? With buried screams? And it wouldn't come as a surprise that ol' Merz, like, superimposed a bunch of tracks over a bunch of different tracks, and that listening to the two halves of this LP is a lot like being whooshed and propelled through a black hole for almost 40 minutes... would it? Given how prolific these two were and continue to be, it's easy to overlook their many and sundry artifacts. Don't you dare sleep on this one.

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Werewolf Jerusalem "Cruel Kidnapping, Part I"

​Friday Night Noise wonders: is Mom to blame for our present-day fascination with/lust for noise musics? As a boy, Mom used hydrogen peroxide solution to loosen the wax in FNN's oft-clogged ear canals, and anybody who's been through that - sitting at a table, head on a folded towel, waiting patiently while this over-the-counter drug-store staple is carefully poured into the ear - is familiar with the seemingly infinite crackling, hissing sound the solution makes (as though a trillion wet, tiny explosions are happening just within earshot), with the chemical hint of warmth, with the slightly noxious odor that lasts all day, with the experience of having whatever's happening on an ambient level blotted out for a short period of time.

It takes some getting used to, but ultimately a sore neck and a tingly ear are a small price to pay for the ability to hear better. Anyway, that's almost exactly what this Werewolf Jerusalem track sounds like, only without the whistling whine of Mom's tea kettle or the damning roar of her vacuum cleaner in the background. Thanks, Richard Ramirez! Who says you can't relive your childhood?

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​There's no nice way to say this, so Friday Night Noise will just say it: MySpace is not enough, and if you are at all serious about making music and serious about building an audience of fans/listeners (be it 500 or 5,000 or 50,000 or 5 million) - and by "you," FNN doesn't just mean noisers, we means rapper, rockers, twee-pop imps, dulcimer soloists, 17th-wave punk upstarts, vegan/freegan hardcore nihilists, beardo folkies, classically-trained cellists, scatters, R&B hopefuls, beatboxers and everybody else besides - you've gotta think bigger than MySpace. Launching a MySpace page to rep yourself, your scene or your set should represent a mere component of a larger online promotional strategy - it shouldn't be that strategy's alpha and omega.

Look, FNN totally gets why musicians love MySpace. It's free. (Or "free.") To a degree, you can customize your page. It allows you to keep up with friends and fellow travellers, and you can plug in your upcoming tour dates, stream MP3s and YouTube clips, accrue admirers and allow random strangers to relentlessly plug their wares/shows in the comments. (Which, admittedly, has led yours truly to some significant discoveries.)

Status as Rupert Murdoch's property aside, it's a pretty awesome tool - FNN will give it that.

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This week, Friday Night Noise begins an ongoing effort to review a track by each and every one of H-town noise gangster Richard Ramirez's solo or group projects. No, really. Does FNN claim to be a Ramirez authority? Not at all; FNN would need an entire lifetime to track down, ingest, and get familiar with everything this prolific malcontent has had a hand in. So consider this more of a survey course series.

Black Leather Jesus "13/13"

​Two thirteens? That must mean twice the usual measure of bad luck. "13/13" is the Black Leather Jesus half of a 1994 split titled Sex Acts on a Child in a Full Body Cast (Deadline), and it's a crispy, crawly doozy: 21 uncoiling minutes of hissing, murky static dosed with what sound like severely distressed vocals and just-short-of-unrecognizable movie dialogue. This track isn't so much a destination as it is a furious, undulating journey through a psychic minefield where the mines shout shortwave-fractured gibberish at you before whistling like industrial fireworks, blowing you to pieces, reconstituting themselves, and continuing on with the grim and grisly task of killing as many people as possible.

One of the distinct pleasures here is the unyielding, free-for-all scree, which sometimes hints at hall-of-mirrors funhouse anti-melody but generally is just content to slink, contort, confront, and menace at any given moment. The louder you crank "13/13," the scarier it is, but there are harsher noise realms out there.

Ramirez appears to be one of the constants in this particular project, which dates back to the first Bush administration and continues to the present day.

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​In civilian life, Randa Golub styles hair, Nathan Golub works as a surgical technologist, Matt Coffey toils as an IT manager and the mysterious Alex C. isn't "into paying taxes." As Ascites, these four Austinnites like to fricassée eardrums with rending, no-holds-barred noise blasts.

If the quartet's first, noxious act - self-released debut CD-R Incisional Drainage, which comes packaged with the equally corrosive C-6 cassette - was a formidable slab of plutonium, new, synapse-fusing cassette Fluid Excess (Fonofobi Tapes) indicates Ascites has a lot more to offer. And guess what? You can buy Excess from the band - who kindly took some time to answer questions by email - when they rock Super Happy Fun Land this evening.

Rocks Off: Handling the packaging for Incisional Drainage - the biohazard bag, the CD spray-painted orange, the violet see-through cassette - makes me wonder: should I find a decontamination shower or have someone check me with a Geiger meter?

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​How I Quit Crack: "PREGNANCY SCARE 2008":

So for part of this week, FNN is home alone on staycation, which means only one thing: I can finally spend a few minutes checking out noise-rock YouTube videos. Namely, Houston's How I Quit Crack, a name that keeps popping up in the emails FNN exchanges with other H-town noise fixtures; apparently, everybody loves hitting this particular pipe. My guess is that HIQC (not sure of her name) operates as a strictly performance-only artist, because I can't find any traces of recordings for sale or even mp3s - it's YouTube vids or bust. Such is life, I guess.

"PREGNANCY SCARE 2008" offers blood-engorged she-stew - yeah, I said it again, put that in your Valet CD-case and shut it - fuzzy-navel vocal murmurings massaged and subsumed by synth washes that suggest kaleidoscopic, fish-eye lense acid-trips and college-dorm screensavers. Now, FNN has never popped a Quaalude. But let's say FNN found himself in a plush pink mansion full of fucsha beanbag furniture, lava lamps, and incense burners, and FNN was sleepy and slightly gone on Godiva chocolate liquor, and he happened to pop two Quaaludes and collapse into a beanbag, only to hallucinate himself immersed in a pink-tinted, strangely oceanic-yet-breathable world ala Abyss, full of friendly cartoon mermaids and crustaceans and seahorses singing FNN an aria? FNN would hope, if that happened, that said aria would be "PREGNANCY SCARE 2008." (In the YouTube comments, somebody refers to this as an "ethereal warble," which is probably more on-target than what I just wrote.) Anyway, why was HIQC scared of pregnancy? She already had, in this song, one dynamite lullaby in the can! Why there isn't a How I Quit Crack album available for sale already I don't understand, like, at all.

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​In The Land Of Archers "I Am The Monster That Walks On All Fours": Friday Night Noise is not even gonna try to decipher this Houston crew's web site - which suggests that they're still a going thing despite being entrenched in different projects - because we're way more interested in talking about the unhinged lunatic noise they're capable of making. (Hint: this is a prime opportunity for clued-in readers to get us - and everyone else - up to speed in the comments.)

"I Am The Monster That Walks On All Fours," sounds, basically, like a softened splice-edit of a recording of someone taking a bandsaw to a big-screen television playing videotape of demon-possessed whackjobs wilding out on shrooms at a sinister campsite, with demented guitar feedback piped in for good measure. Got all that?

The crime, here, is that "Monster" is only three fucking minutes long, and we're not ashamed to say that we could happily and contentedly do with a full hour of this kinda misanthropic crud, which is like Coldplay for psych-ward patients or Wire Orchestra gone completely haywire.

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Ascites Update!

​Last week FNN took on "Soft Adult Contemporary" from Ascites' Incisional Drainage album, all the while bemoaning a dearth of background and label information. Well, turns out that Ascites read the post; members Nathan Golub and Matt Coffey reached out to FNN via email, filling in some blanks. So here's some stuff you should know about Ascites:

• They're from Dallas! Besides Golub and Coffey, the members are Alex C. and Randa Golub, who is Nathan's wife.

• They're playing Super Happy Fun Land October 9 with Rosemary Malign, Last Rape, Zahava, Murex, and other ne'erdowells. So clear your schedule, mark your calendars, and start Googling Napalm recipes.

• They aren't signed to a label just yet, though they're working on that now. If you wanna buy their albums, write to Nathan at txnoiz@gmail.com.

• They know people in Sweden. Do you?

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​Tchrite, "Casahdt": Houston duo Tchrite - don't ask FNN how to pronounce that - are an experimentalist train wreck. They sew samples (No Doubt's "Don't Speak," the sorta public-access sound scraps that The Books go gaga over) into woozy patches of static tone. They puree and smush and smash samples together. They chop breakbeats into bits. They go in for disorienting-yet-forgettable laptop electronic wave modulations that aren't quite "techno" but aren't totally IDM, either - even if a lot of their unsexy song titles would give Autechre wood. All of which to say is that listening to the Tchrite albums FNN could find online (for free!) - Inner Sanctum Mysteries and Echoe Mae - is never, ever boring.

FNN nominates "Casahdt" as a standout for several reasons: it's not excessively schizo, it's not long and it's noiser than every other Tchrite out there. It's 29 seconds of pulse-pounding, take-no-shit ecstasy: an out-of-control algorithm beating the tar outta smooth, air-traffic controller chatter with manic, mescaline-drenched drums, wipe-swipe synth effects, and the unmistakable tonal whine of a 747 rising slowly into the sky.

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Dear cherished FNN party people,

Is there a Houston-area noise act that we haven't written about that you go apeshit over? Are you a Houston-area noise artist who would like to featured here? Then we really, really need you to email FNN links to your non-MySpace/Facebook Web site where we can sample your wares without pesky firewall interference. Or just send MP3s! (Live MP3s even - the rawer, the better.) Thanks.

Love,

FNN

​Pechuga, Hovering Sparks (Track 5)": These days, Houston's Carlos Pozo operates the Pitchphase label and performs as half of Endless Blinding Sunshine; until a few years ago, he unleashed considered, roving photo-scanner noise under the Pechuga name. The fifth track from Hovering Sparks - which, sadly, is out of print - quietly shifts in and out of phase, its micro-level malevolence throbbing so consistenly and balefully that it's easy to lose track of if an outside-world distraction arrives.

Remember Issac Asimov's various "Multivac" stories, about a humongoid underground artificial intelligence contructed by people in the future to govern humanity? When FNN listens to this, we imagine ourselves lost in Multivac's gleaming corridors, tripping out on the hum of millions of computer servers working overtime. But we're weird like that.

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