Yoshimi "Two" (Ecstatic Peace)

My friend Timmy (not his real name -- I'm guessing he would not be particularly excited to have our association discussed publicly) bought me this record sometime around August 1994. The summer after our first year of college (at separate institutes) we lived in a tiny, awful apartment on Broadway and 123rd Street. It was infested with rats and cockroaches, had no A/C, and the only window looked out into the airshaft that collected the sounds of all of the music students who lived in adjoining buildings practicing at the same time. The apartment might have fit two comfortably, but there were four of us, plus a constant stream of guests (including two long-distance girlfriends). It was miserable. We also were living miserly (Timmy was working an unpaid internship, I was making minimum wage at a video store in Greenwich Village and was pretty miserly anyway), and sustained ourselves on rice, Malta Goya and a bunch of ice cream bars that I got to take home the day the freezer conked out at my video store.

I made a lot of noise about not getting anything for my birthday, being an insufferably sensitive type, and I think Timmy's girlfriend told him that he might want to get me something so I'd shut up.

I was pretty excited about this. The Boredoms were a huge deal for me and Timmy. We came across "Soul Discharge" during one of many fool's quests (this one: to acquire every record released on Kramer's Shimmy Disc label), and it knocked our socks off. It indirectly exposed us to noise music as well as we then started to try to acquire every available release by the Boredoms and affiliated acts (a difficult and costly task -- I recall paying over $20 for the disappointing Audio Sports CD), which lead to Hanatarash, which lead to Beast 666 Tapes, which lead to Merzbow, etc. etc. etc.

I couldn't really get into Yoshimi's previous project Free Kitten (never really got Kim Gordon -- Sonic Youth has yet to click with me) (Wikipedia says this was a Kim Gordon-Julia Cafritz project that Yoshimi joined later, which may be true but is not how I recall it). This record worked, though -- it was closer to the trash-garbage aesthetic of other Boredoms side projects (rather than the trash-raunch of Free Kitten). It's also an extremely short record, which I respect. The best thing about experimental/noise music is knowing when to call it a day.

Timmy got me another record that summer but I can't recall what it was.