Noise/Girl – Discopathology

November 1, 2005 • Killer Pimp

I'm not exactly sure how I stumbled across this album, but I'm rather glad I did. I've always enjoyed the noisier side of electronic music and Discopathology takes it to a bizarre extreme that I've never heard before. It's hard to believe one can make noise sound fun, but this album is a blast.

Despite its premise of "harsh-noise-meets-disco", which sounds gimmicky, on the whole it's put together very well. The disco tracks consist of very heavy beats and samples from famous disco tracks to create a very noisy yet incredibly danceable sound. On the surface it sounds like this combination would produce an abominable trainwreck of a song but surprisingly it works pretty well, despite using some very cliché samples (e.g. "Staying Alive"; it's the only time I've enjoyed the fact that the song exists). While the song structures of the two disco-laced tracks are probably typical of dance music, the added noisiness give them a nice twist that makes them a lot more listenable, especially since the noise is very well-produced.

Most of the tracks, however, are straight-up harsh noise, which means the disco-esque segments take a bit of a backseat, especially on the second half of the album. Again, the noise is very well done; it's highly layered and harsh but it doesn't ever get very boring or repetitive as it changes around often. It might help that the artist is from Japan, where almost all good noise comes from, and I might say the quality here rivals the more well-known Japanoise artists and it would be great to hear an all-noise album from him.

However I do wish there were more tracks of the power noise/disco style; of eight tracks on the album, only two actually have that sound to them, while the rest are almost all straight harsh noise. While, again, it's good, it is a little disappointing to hear the disco thing done on only two tracks. There is also a random drum and bass track thrown in near the end, and while the noisiness fits in with it again it feels a bit out of place.

Since Discopathology is such a weird album it's not too surprising that it's been so overlooked by fans of similar genres but I feel it deserves a bit more recognition, as Noise/Girl clearly isn't a one-trick pony and he has a lot of talent for good noise and it's really refreshing to hear it combined with a genre that could not be more different. I would love to hear more noise fusion like this from anyone, but this is definitely a quality example.

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