Marinos Koutsomichalis - Malfunctions (Agxivatein, 2010)

Marinos Koutsomichalis - Untitled 2


I'm thinking this new Agxivatein label might be on to something... They put out that user-manipulated album by Bozkurt, and now they got Marinos Koutsomichalis' Malfunctions, which also has a bit of a surprise element.

I don't make music. Never have, probably never will. But from what I'm told, it's not an easy process. Lots of shit can go wrong, equipment breaks, strange feedback coming from unknown places, the whole Murphy's Law thing. Koutsomichalis laughs in Murphy's face. Malfunctions is an album comprised entirely of those unwanted sounds. The mistakes that you seek to eliminate and destroy. Marinos purposefully manufactured those random artifacts and fine tuned them, resulting in a brilliant electronic noise album.

If I hadn't been told the sound sources on Malfunctions were "mistakes," I wouldn't know. I mean, come on, it is a noise record. That being said, this is some seriously fantastic noise. Huge harsh squalls of static folding over itself, hidden blips on the radar, power line hum, bug zappers, there's even an entire track that sounds like Airsoft machine guns blasting from single shot to full-auto.

Not all of the songs ramp up to full blown body crushing walls of sound, some are sparse glitchy skipping hard drives, but the ones that do are absolutely beautiful. So many fucking layers of astounding chaos. Honestly, my speakers can't go loud enough when I listen to Malfunctions. Cranked all the way up, I feel my bones vibrating to dust and I still want more. This album works great as a concept, but throw that idea out with your hearing, fucking turn it UP and you just have one of the best noise albums of the year.