Testicle Hazard is a noise collaboration between Lasse Marhaug and Tommi Keränen. The name is a wilful mistranslation of a site near Keränen's home in Finland, in the spirit of the Grindcore groups which might have inspired the project. Beauty of Nature is a recording of the duo's 2005 live debut.
Oslo's Marhaug has an ever-extending list of credits and collaborators, including Merzbow, Pita, Francisco Lopez and Lee Ranaldo. Keranen made his recorded debut only recently and his initial live appearances were laptop based, but Beauty of Nature takes a very primitivist - almost anti-laptop - approach to noise creation. Employing feedback and contact-miked sheet metal, the performers roar instantly into life and set up a thick fudge of sandblasting sound with Marhaug's vocals fleetingly audible. At the times they seem to be wrestling with feedback systems that are barely controllable, so overloaded they have become self-determining. In Marhaug's words, Testicle Hazard are "a cathartic sound of pure freedom". The mock-pastoralism of the title is deceptive, but there is a celebratory drive to this mess of outré noise expressionism.
Beauty of Nature is not an innovative noise record, and it suffers from a difficulty common to the genre: how to maintain intensity after the initial gambit of all-out assault has worn thin? Remaining at the same pitch of intensity unavoidable becomes a static experience, and one that engages the listener less and less. Testicle Hazard do what they can, roaming through the bandwidths, but even if they don't quite succeed this is still a bracing listen. (Sam Davies)