Pilgrimage to Amoeba

This weekend I made my second trip to the San Francisco Amoeba Music since moving out here.  The first time I went there, I was basically just combing the entire metal section looking for nothing in particular, and ended up with a pretty nice haul.  It was Satyricon - Dark Medieval Times, Phlebotomized - Immense, Intense, Suspense and Mitochondrion - Archaeaeon.  I was mainly excited about Phlebotomized, since it's pretty hard to come by and I found it for about 5 bucks.  Yet here it is a few months later, and I haven't listened to any of the three all that much.  This always seems to happen to me when I just go to browse.  I really want to stop buying music so I can catch up, but it's probably hopeless.  I'm pretty sure that the Mitochondrion and Phlebotomized albums will be cool once I get around to listening to them properly.  The Satyricon seems kind of generic though.


There was one gem that I bought that day though; Einsturzende Neubauten's Halber Mensch.  I had downloaded it and found it somewhat interesting but it was a new style of music for me and I wasn't totally sold. Good choice I guess, because it's easily one of the best albums I've bought in 2010, and lead to me buying Funf auf der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala, Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T., and Alles Wieder Offen in the couple months since then.  I'm pretty sure I'll have all their full lengths by this time next year, because I love all four of those.  A lot.


This Amoeba trip, I headed straight to the experimental section to feed my current Merzbow and Nurse with Wound fascination.  There was a lot of agonizing to follow, because I found a big stack of albums from both artists.  For Nurse with Wound I ended up with An Awkward Pause.  For Merzbow I got Merzbear and Fukurou: 13 Japanese Birds Pt. 2.  I also got the Venetian Snares album Doll Doll Doll.


There must have been 7 other Merzbow albums that I could have chosen, for about $7 each, and the decision ended up weighing fairly heavily on the condition of the case since a lot of them were cardboard digipaks.


Along with Kokuchou: 13 Japanese Birds Pt. 8, this means I've bought 3 Merzbow albums in the span of about 10 days.  I have this irrational attraction to his stuff right now - I'm already tempted to buy a cheap copy of Venereology on Amazon even though I haven't even come close to absorbing the three I have.  All of it sounds good to me aesthetically, but the fact is that I'm completely ignorant of noise music.  I doubt I could even tell a bad Merzbow album from a good one at this point, which is kind of the risk of getting so much of it in a short time.  Well, I never claimed my buying habits were rational...