Trash 004

	Album Title: Trash 004
	Record Label: Sweep Records
	Catalog No.: SRES-0004
	Release Date: August 14, 2003
	Purchase: Buy Used Copy

Overview

For some pocket change, I got this strange little disc from VGM World that makes me a little uncomfortable. It’s… well, it’s bizarre, to put it bluntly. Trash 004 is what happens when a few members of the sample-happy Supersweep sound team overdose on helium and sugar in the basement of a Manhattan hard-house dance club. It’s also what happens when very talented people purposely write songs that absolutely make no sense whatsoever. The cohesion of this album is that there is no cohesion; deep, I know. Don’t think about it too hard.

Body

Before I typed the above paragraph, I was sitting in my chair with my mouth half-open making a face that looks the way that “Bah?!” sounds. Give the album ten seconds and you’ll probably be making that same face. Right from the get-go the odd vocal samples, strange song progression and overdriven techno beat behind the first track (“Is it meat?”) tell it how it is for the rest of the album. It says, “I’m gonna give you a ten-minute long headache,” and boy does it ever. What is really strange about the oddities of the album is that I actually dig the music, a lot, despite its shortcomings and overall inaccessibility due to its random and abrasive compositions that collectively form the closest thing to a compact disc panic attack that you can get.

Shinji Hosoe, the composer of “Is it meat?”, takes the pie for being the wackiest contributor to the album. His second track, “dies good”, sounds like the soundtrack to a forty-second movie of a drum machine falling down a flight of stairs in fast-forward. I can’t even count the beats in this song. What are those, 64th notes? 256th notes? Before you can even wrap your brain around what’s happening to your poor ears, the track is over and Hosoe is already two steps ahead of you, relentlessly driving the haunting and mesmerizing “Crazy mansion” through your speakers. Welcome to the most uncomfortable three-and-a-half minutes of my entire CD collection.

Ayako Saso’s up next with “Rapture Bargain”, a surprisingly sane assembly of an incredibly catchy intro, repetitive vocal samples (a staple of this CD), and a steady, fast techno beat. It’s noisy, but quite good and is the most “normal” tune off the whole album; talk about a relative term. Yousuke Yasui’s sole contribution, “cannon” is a beautiful mess of beat-backed breathing sound effects and a synthesizer in sixth gear that drive alongside one another until the song explodes into a serene and peaceful stringed interlude. Lastly, there’s Masashi Yano’s “Goliath’ Feast” that features some killer rhythm guitar and has a more solid structure than the other tracks. Still, it closes the album the same way it was opened; incomprehensibly.

Summary

Trash 004 is confusing. Needless to say, this bite-sized piece of interesting Supersweep history isn’t going to appeal to everyone, but for those of you with an open ear and a high tolerance for stuff that is weird simply for the sake of being weird, go scoop some loose change from under your couch cushions and pick this CD up. It’s equally awesome and annoying; enjoyable and obnoxious; brilliant and stupid. Trash 004 is at least, if anything, a solid testament to both the ups and downs of Supersweep’s collective atypical creativity.

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