The New Blockaders - Live At Hinoeuma

To see TNB, Emil Beaulieau and Merzbow in the same venue in one night is a thrill that will take a while to leave me. The undisputed Kings Of Noise together for the first time on English soil... TNB take the stage, one hooded, one wearing a black, face-covering balaclava and bowler hat sat stage front, drinking from a bottle of wine and apparently doing little else. Tonight they go for the jugular and from the off it's nothing less than a personal assault on everyone's hearing. It's a huge monolithic wave of never subsiding, relentless barrage of... noise, of course. You can't describe it as anything else because it isn't anything else. All you get is what you hear - full frontal, naked as it gets, pure noise assault. It lasts forty or so minutes which I couldn't take in one sitting. I'm not afraid to admit that I found it a painful experience. After twenty-minutes of having my flares flapped round my legs and my ears assaulted by a barrage noise not heard since the Soviet invasion of Germany at Seelow Heights, I had no choice but to seek refuge in that corridor of uncertainty that is the Red Rose toilet. They were without doubt the loudest Noise act I've ever witnessed. Just crank it up to whatever pitiful volume it is your system can generate and revel in the fact that unless you have a weighty P.A. for a stereo you will still be nowhere near the levels created that night. Expect harshness, bluntness and unremitting aural violence in plentitude. Idwal Fisher

For about five all too short years the Red Rose in London was the best Noise venue in the country. One of the most memorable events there was the night TNB headlined. It was also the night Emil Beaulieau played his UK debut. Merzbow, Putrefier and various Shimpfluch members also found their way on to the bill, an impressive line up by anybody's standard and one not likely to be repeated. On that night TNB were so loud they drove me from the venue. Two or three times I sought the sanctuary of the front bar only to return moments later to be met with … silence. It was so loud TNB kept blowing the fuses and all the owner did was dig out some new ones, run up a ladder and replace them ... only for them to blow again. I think they blew two or three times and each time the two Blockaders sat stock still and waited for the power to return and for the onslaught to begin. TNB delivered their set at a murderous level of sound. It was unyielding and unforgiving and its still the loudest thing I’ve yet to experience in a live environment. To stand in that room when it was in full sway was like having someone take a swing at the back of the your knees with a billy club. It was a volume you could actually feel.
Listening back now I’m met with the same predicament I had when listening to the original vinyl release on RRR; is that what they really played? The passing of years and no doubt the amount of beer I consumed that night have played tricks with my decaying brain cells. For me it was wall noise before the term was coined, an unrelenting barrage of sonic distortion designed to engulf, destabilize and overwhelm the listener to such an extent that it drove out any kind of thought process or rational engagement. And on the disc? Two 17 minute tracks of slowly unfurling, instantly recognizable TNB motifs … but no wall noise. There’s slow hums, creaking leather straps, ball bearings being dumped into a galvanized dustbin, chains, rattles and plenty of what I like to call noise churn, that lovely low end rumble that seems to fit snugly somewhere between your biorhythms and and a recess somewhere deep in your brain. Some elements I detect from previous TNB releases, what appears to be a primitive machine gun and then there's the slime slurpers, the release the bats experience and the bit that sounds like all the windows just blew in in the midst of a force ten hurricane.
My abiding memory of that night is seeing Phil Todd's anti-performance. Sat stage front at a table with his face covering balaclava he drank from a bottle of wine. It was performance art and anti art rolled into one but above all it was nihilistic and destructive - words with which TNB have become synonymous. Idwal Fisher

A slightly less 'all-out assault' exemplar of their work, this has a vaguely gentler surface than usual, and yet its soothing hoover-noise and metallic bric-a-brac conceals depths of evil, mind-shattering intent. The harshness, in other words, has simply been wrapped in cotton wool. Loops, electronics, swishing and banging methods are all used. The understated power gathers and grows, without any urgency, as the efficient team of demolition men go about their job. The familiar TNB 'inertness' factor is much in evidence; there is no sense of forward motion or dynamic, and instead one is trapped in a stagnant bath full of foul, cloudy, excrescence... oil, detergent, sewage and the like, with rusty junkyard debris swimming about. - The Sound Projector

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