Japanese sound artist Akifumi Nakajima has become well known in the avant-noise scene for his manipulated soundscapes created under the name Aube. Since the early 90's, Aube has focused it's aesthetic on taking a specific sound source, often recordings of water or electric lights and similiar mundane sources, and reshaping the sounds into an unrecognizeable ambient soundscape. Aube's more recent output has tended to lean towards calmer, more meditative realms of sculpted sound, but if you dig back into his earliest work, you'll find recordings of impossibly dense, chaotic noise that is just as brain-melting as what his peers in Masonna, Merzbow, C.C.C.C., Pain Jerk and Incapacitants were doing. The Purification To Numbness full length was recorded in 1994 and was released as part of the Pure series on RRRecords, and breaks away from the processed recordings of water that Aube was beginning to experiment with around this time. Instead, the three massive tracks that comprise the album ("Elementary Particle", "Purification To Numbness", "Ele-Mentally-Particle") are monolithic, twenty-plus minute meltdowns of psychedelic industrial noise. Some of this is comparable to the psych/space blastnoise of C.C.C.C. as Aube erects a similiarly massive wall of roaring distortion that is splattered with an endless onslaught of trippy electronic fx and weird almost musical loops spiralling into the mouth of the storm, but then there are the swarms of honking brass-like tones that descend like armies of free jazz players, frothing at the mouth and doing battle with an enemy armada of spaceships from Galaga. It's quite a trip. Admittedly, there are a bunch of Aube recordings that I haven't laid my ears on yet so my working knowledge of his output is somewhat limited, but geezus if this isn't the most brutal, coked-up galactic

noise assault that I've ever heard from Aube, and that third track especially is some kind of immolating jazz/electronic black hole. Fans of hard-edged Japanese noise gotta hear this. Packaged in a plastic sleeve with xerox-damaged paper covers in the messy RRRecords stylee.