"A thirteen-year archive compressed into a single cassette. Live Materials 1980-1993 by Nord traces the arc of a project that stretches back to the earliest years of Japanese experimental electronics - years before Japanoise had a name, before Vanilla Records existed, before most of the artists who would define the scene in the late 1980s had begun recording.

The breadth of the timeline captured here is significant. 1980 is contemporaneous with the earliest industrial and experimental electronics coming out of the UK and Germany - Throbbing Gristle, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, Einstürzende Neubauten - and the live documents from that era carry a different charge: rougher, more provisional, less sure of what noise music was or could be. By 1993 the landscape was entirely transformed, the infrastructure of international noise exchange was in place, and Nord's recordings of that later period arrive already speaking a more established language. To hear both ends of that trajectory in a single cassette - and all the gradations between - is to hold the history of Japanese experimental sound in a concrete, tangible form."

Vanilla Records, 1994