Gold Blood

This live album, released on the now defunct Charnel Music imprint in 1998, was recorded live in San Francisco in November 1996 and broadcast on Bay Area college radio station KFJC. It consists of five tracks, most of which are brand-new improvisations bearing titles like “The Halation Born Between You And I Who Were Doomed To Appear In Form” and “If I Had Been Showered In Gold Blood, Wouldn’t My Prayer Have Been Answered?” Haino’s guitar is particularly cloudlike, whooshing and shimmering in endless waves of sculpted noise that rarely sound like anything so vulgar as a riff or a melody. Drummer Jun Kosugi plays in a free jazz-inspired style that emphasizes dancing cymbal patterns. That leaves bassist Yasushi Ozawa to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and he’s more than up to it, cutting a Jaco Pastorius-meets-Bill Laswell path through the storm.