Drawing Close, Attuning – The Respective Signs Of Order And Chaos

This album was recorded in London in November 1996; Haino is in the left speaker/headphone, with Bailey is in the right. This could have been a Bambi-meets-Godzilla encounter, with Bailey’s scrapes and pings stomped into the earth by an 800-decibel Keiji riffsplosion, but in fact he meets the Englishman on equal ground, emitting delicate fingerpicked figures. Indeed, the repetitiveness of his contributions, relative to the older man’s scrabbling and squalling, clearly shows which one of them is “order” and which “chaos.” The music does get louder as the 75-minute disc progresses, and almost every track is longer than the one before, from one minute to two to four to nearly ten to two marathon closers, each running roughly a half hour.