CCCC

Live: Abrupt start—complete and total silence (neural flat line?) vs. head-to-toe splitting pain, sitting bolt-upright worrying over permanent organic brain damage or disruption of joint or organ structure (so loud nothing was audible). Two men at left and right stage with backs to the audience, attention buried in tall stacks of racks. Another facing off to the right playing bass with relative calm. Front & center, a sorceress with long black hair, long black dress, and long figure tempting the innermost from a theremin with aggressive seduction, hair all around her, violently conjuring and forcibly extracting long-forgottens through her personal electromagnetic interface with the unknown.

These changing only the shape of the room: quieter than a blizzard in the wilderness in a coma. One hour and fifteen minutes pass, bliss and pain.

SNAP! The power to all equipment cut at once. Utterly flattening, the contrast between palpable turbulence and lack thereof. Pause. Flood of posttraumatic ear relief! Cured of all concerns, could not hear anything over ears’ ringing; watching traffic pass in San Francisco, watching people conversing, hearing nothing, body so still.

Pure beauty.

Cccc were and are a refreshingly different take on harsh noise. I mean yes Merzbow with his trillion releases is so diverse as to that many Merzbow releases cover the same ground as cccc, but doesn't all harsh noise sound the same to all but connoisseurs? Despite this, cccc carve out their own message of noise that seems to have more to do with the cosmos than buckling metal structures, more to do with extended drone, pain/pleasure (with an emphasis on the pleasure) dynamics, and sparkling phase effects. I see cccc's antecedents more in the earlier Japanese psychedelic underground, in the high-pitched emotional scree of Fushitsusha and Les Rallizes Denudes, than in aggressive post-industrial brutism like Whitehouse, New Blockaders, Incapacitants, etc. I don't want to presume, but I think the involvement of a woman in the band, unusual with Japanese harsh noise, especially one who is so thoroughly focused on a sexual/emotional philosophy to her music brings a separate element, a sort of right hand Path to the basement sociopathy noise usually brings. Beats cock-rock pissing contests of "whose harshest" any day.