Nerve Net Noise is the synthesizer duo of Tsuyoshi Nakamaru and Hiroshi Kumakiri, who confused and irritated just about everyone with their 160/240 CD, published by the Meme label several years ago.  Each Nerve Net Noise album is an astoundingly thorough exploration of one aspect of what their rough and barely controllable homemade synthesizers can do.

Meteor Circuit explores rhythms and beats, but it's no minimal glitch album, and neither is NNNa "noise" band; they are after something much more elusive and beautiful than mere obvious full-bore screech. With a strange new angle on electronic improvisation, they twisted knobs until their machines produced rhythmic pulses, then hit record and let the instruments decide what would happen next. The "natural" imperfections of the synthesizers' circuitry determined how each piece would evolve with little or no interaction from the artists. they then edited the works into a coherent, intense and (it must be said bluntly immensely bizarre album.

There isn't anyone else doing quite what Nerve Net Noise is doing, and no convenient genre or style that they fit into, which is why they are one of Intransitive's very favorite groups.  Following two albums on Kazunao Nagata's cult Zero Gravity label and last year's stunning Various Amusements CD on Hronir (and, of course, the infamous 160/240 on Meme), Meteor Circuit is the first Nerve Net Noise album to be published in the US.

Nakamura records more accessible techno-pop under the alias Tagomago. He also records using the alias Toki-Meki Science for Nobukazu Takemura's Childisc label. The band describes their sound as "electric noise music, but not academic, not mere noisy sound. We think that our music is not so much noise music as new kind of pop music".

Nerve Net Noise "#1"

Howard Stelzer (b. 1974, New York) is a composer of electro-acoustic music. Almost all of his sounds are generated by, processed by, recorded onto and played back out of cassette tapes and consumer-grade tape players. He isn’t sure how most of these things work. Stelzer operated the Intransitive Recordings label from 1997 until 2012.