One of the few Japanese noise albums to get a major release during the brief but exciting period in the mid-90�s when Relapse Records started signing bands like Masonna and Merzbow, Inner Mind Mystique is still one of the most extreme noise albums that the label ever released, a fucking punishing album that, like the sticker says on the front of the case, delivers "ultra barbaric Japanese Noise!". Originally released as a triple 7" set, Inner Mind Mystique was later issued on CD in 1996, and all of a sudden, a whole new audience of extreme music freaks was suddenly exposed to the brutal ear-scorching noise of Yamazaki Maso�s solo noise project. I remember just beginning to get into Japanese noise around this time, and when I hit play on Inner Mind, I was totally unprepared for the shrieking, howling metallic feedback holocaust that came blasting out of my speakers. Maso used a deceptively minimal set of tools to create this brutal sonic assault; it�s just his voice and a box of coins used to create the raw sounds, but his psychotic screaming is pumped through a thunderous Marshall stack at top volume, the shrieking and screaming and unintelligible gibberish distorted to the point where it becomes a blur of pure high end noise, and the tin box of coins he uses to create the rest of this unholy din is outfitted with contact mics that are connected to a shitload of effects pedals, creating a furiously violent assault of churning high-end frequencies and white-noise distortion. There's seven tracks of this extreme noise attack on Inner Mind Mystique, and just the first track would be enough to clear a room. But for those that have the fortitude to take it, Masonna's shrieking nuclear noise has an intense psychedelic quality as his spastic feedback-shock-attacks swirl out of your speakers, and builds into the same sort of mind-bending effect that Hanatarash and Incapacitants are capable of creating. Still, this is some of the most extreme noise ever, and definitely not for wimps. The Cd version also features an additional fifteen minute bonus track that wasn�t included in the vinyl set.