Jason Köhnen is one of the great eccentrics of experimental heavy music. Over the last few decades, he has released an absurd amount of music under various shadowy and unhinged guises, ranging from the mind-bending, surrealist jazz of THE MOUNT FUJI DOOMJAZZ CORPORATION and THE KILIMANJARO DARKJAZZ ENSEMBLE, and the esoteric electronica of THE THING WITH FIVE EYES and VOODOOM, to the arcane, gothic doom of CELESTIAL SEASON, and the lysergic industrial horror of SERVANTS OF THE APOCALYPTIC GOAT RAVE. But in terms of sheer obnoxiousness, Köhnen‘s crowning glory has long been his adventures in breakcore, industrial and extreme metal, primarily under the BONG-RA banner.
Across multiple, speaker-levelling releases, BONG-RA has come to represent many things, from avalanches of skull-cudgeling breakbeats and harrowing sub-bass, to whacked-out ambient experiments and blacker-than-black warped humor. With vicious, sampled guitars and drums that sound like robots imploding, BONG-RA has frequently been metal-adjacent, but “Black Noise” is the first time that Köhnen‘s vision has mutated sufficiently to allow the sound of real guitars into the room. The result is an album that goes deeper and darker than most previous BONG-RA releases, and that abandons willful obnoxiousness in favor of authentic, underground metal vibes. A gritty and punishing industrial metal colossus, “Black Noise” has genuine crossover potential.
But not that much crossover potential. Let’s not get carried away. BONG-RA still makes music that turns hi-fi equipment into mincemeat, and “Black Noise” is, first and foremost, disgustingly heavy. Leaning more heavily into metallic textures with monstrous riffs at the center of almost every track, Köhnen (who is responsible for every note) has created yet another new way to cave people’s heads in. And despite an occasional, passing resemblance to GODFLESH, “Black Noise” still feels fiercely original and not entirely of this world.
The opening “Dystopic” is a holistic introduction to this new world of beats and bass. Powered by a grubby, two-note riff and shards of electro-static, Köhnen paints a bleak, Dystopian picture, made from concrete, steel and unstoppable violence. When feral breakbeats erupt halfway through, it sounds like all our mortal demons coming home to roost. Programmed drums stutter, sludgy riffs expand and contract, and barbarous, vocals pierce the cacophony-like orders from some unseen overlord. It’s loud, abrasive, utterly uncompromising and laudably grim. “Black Noise” is about right.
The rest of this horrible racket freewheels between icy industrial metal and something blacker and more chilling. “Death#2” and “Ruins” come closest to mimicking the old school, and if GODFLESH were genuine psychopaths then that comparison would particularly apply here, but there is nothing minimalist or hypnotic about BONG-RA‘s new sonic model. Riffs aside, this is Köhnen‘s world and he makes the rules. Rule one is that more is more, and skulls will be flattened one way or another. When he does demonstrate restraint, the results are no less visceral. “Nothing Virus” is a woozy, blank-eyed affair that becomes increasingly oppressive as it rumbles along; “Bloodclot” swaps all-out war for simmering tension, primitive percussion clashing antlers with obsidian bass drones and the distant sound of lost souls in torment; and the closing “Blissful Ignorance” adds a disorienting, psychedelic dimension to BONG-RA‘s newly metallic wall of sound, with erratic drums that are wading through treacle, and pervasive swathes of feedback and post-metal discord that seem to encircle the computerized drums like vultures around a corpse. It’s enough to make a man feel slightly nauseous, but only in a good way. If that’s possible.
A musical rebel who has never allowed himself to be pushed into some restrictive pigeonhole, Köhnen has been shattering expectations for many years. “Black Noise” is by no means his most radical statement, but by dismantling and reconstructing industrial metal into his own crazed sonic vehicle, this grand master of mischief may yet conquer the metal world, with breakbeats ablaze and enough bass to make Satan disintegrate.
Source: blabbermouth.net
