There is a sense of physical enormity to the 1994 album Glass Giant, by Speculum Fight, that I’m not quite sure how to account for. I don’t mean it’s an endurance test: the runtime is a perfectly normal, even slightly modest, 43 minutes. This is a noise album from the mid-1990s, and it sounds like it, by which I mean its basic sonic palette and compositional logic would be immediately recognizable, immediately familiar to anyone immersed in the scene at the time. Especially the scene in Japan, where Speculum Fight is not from (it’s the project of one Damion Romero, based in LA), but with which it has strong ties – Glass Giant itself, to name the example closest at hand, was originally released on G.R.O.S.S., a label run by scene legend Akifumi Nakajima (better known as Aube) out of Kyoto. Despite this album being, again, hardly unprecedented in its basic approach, hardly unfamiliar in its component parts, there is something about the cumulative effect which is extremely outside the normal scope of things, which is generative of a sense of genuine grandeur, a sense of coming upon some great monolith, one which, one imagines, must be capable of blotting out the sun itself. Or, perhaps that isn’t quite right, perhaps that is what is so unusual about its effect: if we are to take the album’s title seriously, then this supports these claims about its scale, certainly, but not about it blotting out the sun. It can’t blot anything out. It’s made of glass. The sun must shine right through it – its rays changed, one must assume, maybe warped, dimmed, but not occluded, really, and certainly not eclipsed. A glass giant would not so much cast a shadow as change the nature of the light.

Another, related observation: this is a very patient album. By this, I don’t mean that it’s a “slow build,” really; it’s true that the opener (called “Boy on the Moon,” a title which articulates it as curiously separate from the other three tracks on the album, which are all designated simply as “Glass Giant” parts one, two, and three) doesn’t begin all at once, the way noise albums more than sometimes do, but it does accumulate its layers of roar and rumble and distortion at a steady clip. It does not, at any point, pretend to be something it is not, does not try to lull the listener into a false sense of security, does not ambush them with sudden escalations of volume, sudden screeches of static. Rather, what I mean is that the album has a strange way of making you not notice how harsh, how intense, how psychedelically cacophonous it has become until you are already deep within its cascading sandpaper sheets of sound – listening to it, not just the first time but many times over, long after you know what to expect, feels rather like being the proverbial frog in the pot of slowly boiling water, or like awakening suddenly from an idle daydream to find the world around you has, without explanation, split open at the seams, ash raining from the sky, cars burning in the streets, a scene not of apocalypse, but something more elemental than that, something without a purpose, a meaning, something without revelation.

I think this probably has something to do with the fact that Glass Giant is a drone album as much as a noise album. Its runtime, as mentioned above, is not abnormally long, but like all good drone artists, Romero is serious about the presence of his sounds. He understands that certain textured washes, certain motifs which may initially register as unremarkable, may not even consciously register at all, can take on more significance the longer they are sustained, the longer they are insisted upon, until they acquire an enormous sense of materiality, of consequentiality, become like a great, alien voice from the sky, or possibly from the abyss, communicating, in any case, from somewhere beyond language. This is not possible with just any sort of sound, of course, but Glass Giant is full of the right kinds of sounds, the sounds which are already, from the beginning, imbued with something like the weight of the world, and which only become heavier the longer they go on, the more waves of roaring feedback break themselves against their edifice, an edifice etched from top to bottom with strange, corroded runes. I also think, secondarily, that the album achieves what it does because it is a confident album – it is confident in its presence, its intensity, its immediacy, it is not concerned that you will grow tired of it, that your attention will wane, that you will write it off as bland and monotonous (which, let’s be honest, a great deal of drone/noise fusions end up being). It is not concerned about these because, quite simply, it knows what it is. It knows what it’s doing, it knows what it has. It knows.

Let me think a little more closely now about the structure of Glass Giant. As mentioned above, the album is split into four tracks, a kind of “Glass Giant” suite preceded by a single track called “Boy on the Moon.” First of all, it should be noted there are definite breaks between all these tracks, so they can’t be taken purely as arbitrary divisions of a single composition, although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they’re all derived from the same recording session. It makes for an odd tracklisting, not intensely so but enough to warrant some consideration. Generally, especially in noise and related genres, an album with a multi-part sequence of tracks sharing its title will consist of only that sequence, plus maybe a distinct intro or outro. But “Boy on the Moon” can’t be considered a straightforward intro in this sense – at over ten minutes, it’s functionally tied for second longest track on the album, constituting nearly a quarter of the album’s overall runtime. Clearly, it plays a more important role than a mere setting of the stage. But what? Well, this is what I’ve come up with: it’s a very particular kind of miniature, almost like a scale model. The track doesn’t really mirror the compositional developments of the central “Glass Giant” triptych, but it has the same basic palette, the same washes of feedback, the same slabs of rumbling grit, and they move through and against one another in the same ways. It’s not noticeable on first listen, but the longer one spends with the album, the more the track begins to feel like a compressed version of the whole, a kind of overview of what is to come. I think the track title more than supports this reading: to be a “boy on the moon” is to occupy a position of profound isolation, but also (with the moon’s lack of atmosphere) a cosmic vantage point of staggering clarity, one from which the Earth, famously, and everything we have ever known appears in miniature, no larger than a pale blue marble, a child’s toy. So, maybe it’s not quite right, exactly, to say that the track is a “scale model” of the rest of the album. It might appear that way, yes, but only because we’re observing it at such a great remove – in reality, it must be overwhelmingly, cosmically large. This is, then, the function of this first track: it’s a first detection of something still very distant, enough so that it’s still possible to get some sense of its overall shape. After this, of course, this is no longer possible: what we hear in the “Glass Giant” suite is what it is to be standing on its surface, to be falling within it, to be engulfed by it, passing beyond the point of no return. There’s something of the pedagogical here – “Boy on the Moon” gives us some sense of the scope of the thing, so as to nudge us towards accepting the scope of the thing is too much for us to really grasp in its totality. There are some things, it almost whispers to us, which we’re not meant to comprehend.

Finally, a more mundane admission of incomprehension: I don’t know what techniques were used to create these sounds. Maybe there’s an interview out there somewhere where Romero explains it; if so, I didn’t find it. It’s not uncommon, of course, for it to be exceedingly non-obvious how, exactly, the noise of a noise album was produced, but it’s worth noting this cluelessness in the case of an artist like Romero, because, in his work, these techniques are sometimes elaborate and imaginative enough to constitute something like installation or performance art in their own right. And this is an important aspect of his practice, the central aspect, even. It’s certainly more important than his recorded output: if you go to his website you’ll find a meticulous list of live shows stretching all the way back through the ‘90s, which I think says a lot. But then, this is part of it, of course, part of the experience of the work, isn’t it? The mystery, the obscurity. That I do not really know how it is these sounds were created only heightens their grandeur, their inhuman power. It makes it feel almost as though they weren’t “created” at all, that nothing brought them into being, that they are simply there, they simply exist, a ceaselessness beneath the surface of all things, an old, enormous, groaning wheel slowly turning at the edge of time. But they’re not, of course. Not really. Glass Giant is the product of human hands and human thoughts. And really, it’s this which is truly most remarkable about it, the miracle and eternal mystery of art – that people, worldly, mortal people, can create such great and pitiless things.