Review: Nazoranai - 'the most painful time happens only once has it arrived already..?'

To be trapped inside this record is a disconcerting sensation, because Nazoranai don’t know where to stop. At a certain point in each piece, the player-sound relationship flips into a hideous reverse; gigantic arcs of distortion and reverb start to shower from the ceiling, while drums are dragged along by the very momentum they helped generate. Those little spheres of exchanged idea become planetariums that swallow the trio whole – Nazoranai switch from instigators to puppets whose creations now govern their every movement, as they stagger amidst the hurricane thrall that surges out of amplifier walls and exacerbative room reverberation, Haino’s screams protruding above the surface like a body tossed upon an utterly dwindling tidal wave.

And in fact, that reverb – which places the band in a gigantic concrete dome, or maybe an empty subterranean car park – is absolutely key. The instruments overwhelm eachother like suns swallowing their surrounding planets, with cold echoes pushing all perimeters into flux. On “who is making the time rot”, cymbal wash and amp spew combine into an outward gasp, extending out of the vat of tom drums and ragged bass debris; Nazoranai become a fireball of noise and exhaustive action, not so much improvising as allowing themselves to be heaved around the room by their own enormous vibrations. The way the trio interact verges on dangerous – they are insularly fixated on the shape that expands between them and around them, oblivious to how it swells to a predatory scale. Even as Haino’s probing falsetto hangs alone in empty space at the end of the record, the monolithic outline of Nazoranai still lingers a sensation only recently vacated; a post-explosion smoke or emulated tinnitus ring, maintaining the band’s dwarfing scale in their absence.