assimo approaches sound as an artisan, a sculptor stepping up to a massive block of marble and chipping away at it until he’s revealed the very essence of what he wants to create. And on Hello Dirty, what he wants to create is a dark, shifting patchwork of noise, fuzztones approximating the sound of mangled guitars, hypnotic drones cased in machine-gun bursts of death-bringing static. It’s a completely enveloping record, each untitled track flowing naturally into the next, ebbing and flowing from periods of low droning to squalls of high-energy explosions.


This sense of dynamics -- as subtle as it can be to anyone not accustomed to noise music -- is what saves Hello Dirty from being just another sub-Merzbow collection of static and distortion. On the fourth (and best) track, what sounds like an upbeat rock song is desperately trying to break free of the static; the result sounds like a rubbery, distorted, but oddly still danceable tune, like listening to a radio between stations. Most of the rest of the album isn’t as amenable to analysis or classification. Seemingly random screeches arise from the chaos, eventually codifying briefly into discernable loops before again being disrupted and tossed off into the debris. This is music to scream to, to hear your own voice swallowed up in the unforgiving primal rage of Massimo’s noise.


But he knows when to cool things down, too, and the variations in patterns, sounds, and mood throughout this record keep it continually engaging. The second track is mostly slow and repetitive, with skeletal loops grinding along like a slinky, machine-shop Throbbing Gristle cover. This transitions smoothly into the next song, with abrasive circular-saw riffs and an undercurrent of locomotive rhythms. It’s fascinating to hear sounds submerged into the mix, only to re-emerge later as brief, strangled cries being crushed in the machinery. The fifth track provides a break from the chaos, layering languid, melodic drones over each other in an industrial facsimile of a ballad or a lullaby. The final two tracks sound like sputtering guitars and screaming fans, the sound of a mythic band winding down on its last encore, spitting out licks of hot-shit brilliance as casually as throwing darts.


Played loudly, this album is absolutely cathartic. The details are important at the micro-level, and Hello Dirty can certainly be enjoyed played softly with an ear for the micro-structures and shifts occurring under the music’s dark surface. But at high volumes -- preferably on an absolutely wretched stereo system -- these details are obscured, and all you’re presented with is a sheer, uncompromising wall of noise, as angry, propulsive, and therapeutic as heavy metal. It may get you weird looks, but it’s an album that invites head-banging, breaking stuff (Fred Durst eat your heart out), throwing things, getting trashed, driving fast, watching bad action movies, wrecking hotel rooms, fucking groupies (OK, so we’re all indie geeks, we don’t have groupies), moshing, and turning the amps up all the way to 11. Hell, it may even start a new trend: air-laptop.