'Japan Tour 2007’ by Sutcliffe Jugend / Satori [CSR83CD]

DESPITE the impression given by the title, this split CD is not actually a live recording at all but a release that was made available when these two dedicated purveyors of extreme Power Electronics visited Tokyo in May 2007. My experience of Sutcliffe Jugend had, thus far, been restricted to 1997’s ‘We Spit on Their Graves’ album, which was infamously ‘dedicated’ to the prostitutes murdered by namesake Peter Sutcliffe – The Yorkshire Ripper - and also released under the Cold Spring moniker. Between that and this present offering, Sutcliffe Jugend had released a further two albums, namely ‘When Pornography is No Longer Enough’ and ‘The Victim As Beauty’. What I like about Kevin Tomkins and Paul Taylor is their ability to think outside of the humanistic box presented to us on the daily news. There is a lot of hype surrounding the general public’s professed sympathy towards well-publicised icons of the victim industry like Princess Diana and Madelaine McCann and therefore it’s quite refreshing to see the duo reflect this mass hypocrisy right back at them. Their contribution to the CD is a single 28-eight minute track called ‘White Goods’. It certainly begins in an unassuming enough manner, as a gently shuddering blend of ambient drones and pitches. Softly spoken, menacing vocals (‘You know who I am …”) make nasty threats over a light piano melody. But don’t make the awful mistake of thinking this is more of a mellow SJ release like I did and whack up the volume, because on five minutes the listener is viciously shaken out of this drifting, contemplative mood by a loud burst of tortured screaming and a brutal misogynistic pleading: ‘Deface. Deface her. Deface. Deface her.” Things do quieten down a few minutes later, however, as a psychedelic buzzing helps to soothe the after-effects. But I’m a very fast learner and when the piano returns again around the 10-minute mark, I brace myself for what follows. At first, there is a vocal stream of consciousness in which sentences appear to be linked with a word from the preceding sentence. Rap for the psychotic. Sonnets for those about to snuff it. It’s quite effective, too, and the track continues to flap along like a punctured tyre until the beeps, creaks and whispers build up into a fiercely ejaculated frenzy: “Do you want to share the same bed!!?” Not the greatest chat-up line in the world, but somehow I don’t think the good lady has much choice in the matter. The lyrical violence sounds like a strangled cat trying to imitate Dani Filth; or a petrified Sooty being kicked off the summit of Toytown Mountain and then being stamped on for good measure. The piano pops in again above a litany of unsympathetic queries about the value of human life and continues in that vein until the end. But what Sutcliffe Jugend have done here is to demonstrate that controlled aggression is just as effective as the vitriolic outpourings that characterise their previous efforts. A stunning and well thought-out track. And so to Satori. Despite having known Justin Mitchell for almost ten years, I hadn’t heard the group’s work before and was keen to find out what he and Neil Chaney have been getting up to recently. Not that I’m jealous or anything. Satori had already produced two cassettes (‘Behold the Past’ and ‘Satori’) back in the 1980s and an album (‘Infect’) in 1995 on the Functional Organisation label, so there are clearly significant gaps of inactivity between the releases. But then Justin does have a successful label to run. Described as ‘Fortean Electronics’, Satori are part of the backbone of the UK’s relatively small Power Electronics scene and it’s good to see that they recently had a chance to export their wares to the Far East. There are three tracks on their 20-minute session on this CD and the first of these, ‘Convulse’, is almost militaristic in its constant rhythmic pounding. It’s the English answer to pure Japanese fury, containing both structure and direction. The victory of the Apollonian over the Dionysian. That which deviates from the acclimatized ‘norm’ is controlled, like a responsible dog-owner with three Dobermans straining at the leash. This is what Power Electronics should be. It’s ominous and foreboding, but the energy being generated is never allowed to get out of control despite the presence of an interesting psychedelic dimension. ‘Dead Channel Transmission’ hisses and spits like a drunken whore, but again, there is an underlying beat that – in this case – even verges on tribalism. Any discordance that breaks away from the frenetic centre is shaped and tempered until it compliments the whole. Impressive. ‘Eruption’ also contains this semblance of military precision, the driving meters of sound rinsed over with rumbling waves of machinery. But Satori’s accessible style is reminiscent of an old-school Industrial sound that has merely been influenced by Power Electronics, rather than something which has been cut from the same cloth as, say, a Masonna or Grey Wolves. And for that it’s all the better and simply proves that we English do things best! For more information, check out www.sutcliffejugend.com and wwww.myspace.com/satoriofficial