On 'Someone Is Watching,' a re-release of a cassette originally released in 1998, Mikko Aspa utilizes the traditional pallette of Power Noise - rumbling static, vomitous vocals, haunted drones and tape loops - to construct a mental movie of paranoia and dread. Predicting the panopticon that has become the future, where every move and every motive is monitored by closed-system surveillance camera, and endlessly cataloged in neverending data-streams, Grunt's music sounds like the old avant garde's rage against the coming simulacrum. The barrages of white noise and hellacious howling has the carnal heft of circuitry and overblown speakers behind it, meat tearing at the blank screens of modernity, trying to pierce through the vile veil of data and figures to something primal and real. The id tearing through the machine.

At this stage, Grunt's music was composed mainly of loops made from live recordings, with scraping metal, howling feedback, and vocals added on top. Its got the ragged, live feel of a archetypal power noise performance - imagine thyself in a dank concrete bunker, with young men with closely cropped hair writhing like maggots in the pale light - to complete the picture. Mikko Aspa never had any intention of escaping the underground, this is noise music for noise fanatics, but it is not merely a bland genre study, either. Tracks like 'Information' has a digital sheen to it that predicts the MAX/MSP hackers soon to follow, and the synthetic chorus on album opener 'Watch Your Back' recalls Lustmord's earliest material. Grunt is bringing in outside influences, prying the lid off the hermetically sealed Power Noise genre. In short, he doesn't give a fuck. You can listen, or not.

This is not the most revelatory PN release out there, and may not be the best starting point if yr ears have not already become accustomed to listening to malfunctioning electronics and paranoid ranting, but the sonic pallette of the harsh noise world does lend itself well to the feel of industrial ruin and dystopian unease. Its like spirit of '77 punk rock taken to its logical, unfriendly conclusion.

Its cool to see underground, scene-only releases getting re-issued and re-evaluated. For most of its blighted life, Noise records were esoteric secrets, sold out of pulp paper magazines, at shows, out of basements and the boots of cars. Commercial pressures were irrelevant - no one was going to hear it, and no one was going to care. Its pure art, pure catharsis, pure release. Mikka Apsa, with his Freak Animal imprint, has released boatloads of gnarly crunchy noise, over the span of almost 20 years, and 'Someone Is Watching' is a chance to hear what the freaks were up to, before the simulacrum took over.