Genesis P-Orridge, Merzbow

CD version. A Perfect Pain is the collaboration between Merzbow and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, a founding member of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. It was made for the British label Cold Spring and first issued in 1999. Across five tracks, P-Orridge's voice and words meet Masami Akita's electronics. The label reissued it on CD in 2003. In 2018 it brought the album back once more, newly remastered, as a twentieth anniversary edition.

Masami Akita is credited with electronics, drum machine and effects, while P-Orridge produced the record. The two never shared a studio. According to Musique Machine, P-Orridge recorded his parts in London and Merzbow his in Tokyo, and the results were edited together. The original sleeve combined commissioned artwork with photographs of P-Orridge. For this edition Martin Bowes remastered the audio at The Cage Studios. The artwork and layout were reworked for the new digipak.

The album opens with the short A Perfect Restraint and moves through the eleven-minute Flowering Pain Give Space to Source Are Rare, a single piece of more than 25 minutes. On Akita's side the sound recalls his junk-noise collages. There is crashing metal, crisp digital texture, shrieking feedback and waves of distortion, with looped drum breaks surfacing underneath. P-Orridge's lyrics deal with violence, death, industrial decay and sex. His spoken and sung lines sometimes stand clear of the noise and sometimes sink into it, garbled. After the shorter Kreeme Horne, the set closes with the twelve-minute All Beauty Is Our Enemy.

The Wire called it "easily the finest material Merzbow has made in some time". Brainwashed heard in it a modern take on "the simultaneous beauty/brutality aesthetic of Throbbing Gristle". In 2000 Nirav Soni of Ink 19 found it far stronger than such a meeting of names usually turns out. Other critics heard the joins. Reviewing the reissue for Musique Machine, Paul Casey described it as two separate recordings smashed together.

This edition is the CD in a digipak with an 8-page booklet containing all the lyrics, Cold Spring catalogue number CSR23CD, released in October 2018. It is the album's third CD edition and the first in a digipak.