���� A rare 2005 release from one of Japan's most respected experimental sound artists, Aube's Metalive showcases a pair of complete live sets along with a shorter excerpt from a third performance, packing this disc out with over sixty-five minutes of evocative, expressionistic noise. Using the amplified and mutated sounds of banal, everyday objects, Aube creates massive, often terrifying noisescapes that become incredibly dense and overpowering. Visceral and textural, his stuff is some of the best stuff to come out of the Japanese noise underground.

���� The first full live set on this disc is from a 1997 performance in Germany that finds Aube slowly building a vast dronescape, starting off with the barest of peripheral hum, but then stretching and layering this minimalist pulse with streaks of flinty feedback and soft electronic tones. He gradually incorporates clusters of clattering metallic noise and high-pitched sinewaves into the soundfield, allowing mesmeric, almost subliminal rhythms to form from the feedback process, rumbling rattling loops materializing from within roiling waves of black static, building to a tense, almost threatening atmosphere that charges the air across the second half of the track as ghostly thumps and sinister distorted throb continues to slip in and out of focus. Impressive and ominous work.

���� The other full set comes from a 1998 performance at Yamamura Salon in Ashiya, Japan; much like the previous track, Nakajima starts this off with a soft, minimal hum that becomes the springboard for a larger and more layered noisescape. Rhythmic fluttering and soft pulses of muted feedback slowly spread out across the set, rising and falling in intensity as it gives way to a series of bathyspheric sonar-like pings and luminous drones. More minimal and mesmerizing, the set is flecked with lots of interesting tonal artifacts and hushed rhythmic movement, even slipping into sections of spare, almost technoid throb and miniature symphonies of clanging metal.

���� That looping, rhythmic feel carries over to the final eight minute track, recorded in Germany in 1998; fragile, vaguely sinister sounding loops whirr in the darkness beneath gently wavering feedback drones on this one, finishing off the disc with it's eeriest piece of music, a somewhat spooky dronescape that's further layered with more forceful metallic rattlings and a prayer-bowl like resonance that in the end graces the performance with a strange, vaguely ritualistic atmosphere.

���� Issued in a limited edition of one thousand copies, Metalive comes in a clamshell case with full color artwork.