CONSUMED BY NOISE from the August edition of The Wire magazine.

With the extraordinary 50 disc MERZBOX set, Masami Akita aka Merzbow has completed the analogue phase of a career that has saturated and sandblasted the CD market. Edwin Pouncey opens the noisegate and finds a music driven by Surrealism, bondage art, Heavy Metal and the drive to escape conformity; and hears why Akita is going digital.
Photos: Bunko Owatari.

"There is no difference between noise and music in my work," Masami Akita once replied to an e-zine interviewer who wanted to know if there was any such distinction in the various creations he releases under the name Merzbow. "I have no idea what you term ‘music’ and ‘noise’," he continued, "it’s different depending on each person. If noise means uncomfortable sound, then pop music is noise to me." For the majority of listeners who are slaves to rhythm and melody, and have never heard a Merzbow record before, the immediate reaction (like Akita’s response to pop) will probably be discomfort when confronted with the overpowering, apparently unstructured sandstorm blast of his brute, crushing noise Listening to Merzbow is an experience, however, (both on record and live) that goes way beyond the restricted barriers of regular rock or pop music.

"Masami’s music wants to swallow you up, not to eat you but absorb you. And it’s a really fantastic feeling," explains Roger Richards, director of the Melbourne based Extreme label. "if a Western musician is making music like that, they are open making it because they’re trying to get anger out. They think, ‘How loud can I go? I’m expelling something I don’t want by ridding myself of this negative energy’. The Eastern perspective is like Zen, a meditative moment When Masami s deep into making the music you can’t touch him, he’s just letting it all come out."

When the listener has attuned his or her hearing perspective, what comes out of the Merzbow ‘scream inside the machine’ sound is a thing of beauty that borders on bliss. "I felt as though I could have just laid on the floor and drifted off to sleep while it washed over me," a friend enthused after attending a live Merzbow concert And it is that feeling - after overcoming the initial shock of the sheer volume - which gradually takes over after prolonged listening, to allow a strange kind of calm to descend as another sound dimension aperture slowly opens up. Suddenly the abstract shapes of dimly recognisable musical forms begin to loom out of the maelstrom of static which, although never allowing themselves to become fully focused, still provide the occasional audile clue pointing to the source of energy and ideas into which Akita has chosen to plug his creative muse The knee-jerk response that ‘all Merzbow recordings/performances sound identical’ is a theory that only those with nether imagination or patience will adhere to. The fact is that to understand, enjoy and eventually reach noise nirvana through Masami Akita’s work, you have to listen to a hell of a lot of it. His staggeringly productive back catalogue of cassettes, LPs, EPs, and CDs is certainly an admirable achievement, but for the Merzbow newcomer such a mountain of releases assumes a daunting prospect Like Sun Ra’s Saturn label (prior to being expertly excavated and made public in the discographies by Geerken/Hefele and Campbe/Trent), the exact number of Merzbow recordings may never be known. "Initially I used to believe that Sun Ra released more than 500 albums," Akita once confessed. "So my goal was set at 500 releases. Later I learned it was not that many, around 120 something, or even 200. So now I aim for 1000."

Sun Ra’s homemade Saturn records were described by him as "cosmic newspapers", his way of showing the word the previously unheard musical galaxies he had discovered with his Arkestra, and suggesting the new cosmic frontiers of sound they planned to invade next. Since 1980, Merzbow has embarked on a similar relentless release programme (which kicked off with the Lowest Arts & Music cassette mail art label and evolved into ZSF Produkt), only his product has gradually evolved technologically to become more controlled, sleekly packaged and archivally aware Akita’s progression from self-producing music cassettes decorated with handmade junk art, to Extreme’s just- released MERZBOX - astonishing 50 CD celebration/examination of his work, complete with various accessories, enclosed in a matching set of fetishistic black latex zip-up cases signifies that after over 20 years of honing his art into shape, Merzbow is finally being taken seriously. Those who can find the high, but not exorbitant asking price for one of the 1000 copies available, however, will discover that they have bought into something which goes far deeper than simply an elaborate piece of packaging. Setting aside the accompanying T-shirt, poster, stickers, postcards and medallion, the heart of MERBOX is undoubtedly Brett Woodward’s fascinating MERZbook which, together with the 50 CDs, pulls together two decades of Merzbow music and offers the clearest picture to date of who Masami Akita is and where he wants to take us. MERZBOX is the direct mainline route into the metallic beating heart and mercurial artistic soul of
Merzbow and the man behind the machine.

"Merzbow is me." - Masami Akita

Masami Akita was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1956 He first became attracted to music in his early teens at a time when the psychedelic rock revolution had begun to spread across the world. Early record purchases included The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, The Doors Soft Parade and Cream’s studio/live double Wheels Of Fire. As was the norm for teenage kids at that time, Akita also listened to The Beatles, except that he preferred the supergroup’s more bizarre Apple/Zapple offshoot projects, such as George Harrison’s soundtrack for Wonderwall and his 1969 foray into electronic music, Electronic Sound, together with John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s infamous Unfinished Music No 1 - Two Virgins. "This was all completely different to kids but very influential in the late 60’s explains Akita "The hippy movement came to Japan and changed the mind of youth culture."

In the early 70s he was listening to Progressive rock, reading Rimbaud, Lautreamont and De Sade and playing drums in a high school group whose specialty was to crank out loud cover versions of songs by Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and The Stones. For Akita, however, the attraction of such rock posturings quickly palled and he left the group to search out something new. After teaming up with high school friend Kiyoshi Mizutani on guitar to perform their version of Prog rock and free jazz, the duo met up with another outfit who were into playing Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart covers.

"Kiyosh and I joined them and played weekly in a studio," he reveals, "but these guys were just grass-smoking Zappa freaks. It was fun but they weren’t trying anything new."

Finally Masami and Kiyoshi teamed up with a likeminded bass guitarist and began to work on a more improvised style of rock that owed much to Krautrock fathers Ash Ra Tempel and Can, together with overtones of European free jazz which Masami had picked up on by listening to such labels as FMP, ICP and Incus at a "jazz coffee shop" in Shinjuku called Dig.

"They had a weekly free jazz day in the mid-70s," he remembers "At that time the rule in coffee shops was, never conversation, concentrate on the sound. I found lots of great records there like Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz"

Although free jazz and free jazz drumming in particular - would, like Progressive rock, play an important part in the thought process behind Merzbow (as can be heard on his 1999 tribute to the genre, Door Open At 8pm), its reliance on conventional instrumentation meant that it would be excluded from the final basic
structure.

"I’m not interested in traditional techniques of using musical instruments," he admits, "because they’re always restricted by the limits of the player’s skill. I like to expand on techniques by using non-musical instruments."

After leaving high school, Akita attended art classes at Tamagawa University where he studied for a degree in painting and art theory. It was here that he began to seriously study the art of the major Surrealists and Dadaists, whose combined influence would subliminally sear into Akita’s embryonic project and provide him with the name he was searching for

"I named it after a great work [Merzbau] by the German collage artist Kurt Schwitters [1887-1948], which he alternatively called The Cathedral Of Erotic Misery. He made art from oddments he picked up from the street, just as I make sound from the scum that surrounds my life. This does not matter as much to me now. The name is only important to my early work, which I thought related to the concept of Merzbau. I was very inspired by Dada and Surrealism, I thought that my early works were a realisation of Surrealism in music. But in a very punk way and not like academic electroacoustic music. Probably the most influential Surrealist concept for me is: ‘Everything is erotic, everywhere erotic’. Noise is the most erotic form of sound, that’s why all of my works relate to the erotic "

The main figure of the Surrealist /Dada period whom Akita still reveres remains Salvador Dali who wrote in his Unspeakable Confessions: "A psychoanalyst, knowing that gold and excrement are akin in the subconscious, would not have been surprised. . . that I used my shit like the hen’s golden eggs, the droppings of the Golden Ass, or Danae’s divine diarrhoea - to perform a phenomenal transmutation through the application of my Paranoia-Critical method"

Dali’s psychoanalytical combination of materials that are considered by so-called civilised society to be the most precious and the most reviled and worthless would later become the unwritten manifesto behind Akita’s Lowest Arts & Music label, which he put into operation immediately after graduating from art school.

"I quit rock and oil painting in the 70’s and started making sound and visuals in a totally different way," he explains when asked about his early work. "The situation was totally boring when I started Lowest Music & Arts. 70s Progressive rock was dead, Black Sabbath had split and punk was already happening, but I thought they just looked like stupid rock ‘n’ rollers. So, my idea was to create something that was anti, but representing the brutal sound spirit of rock music It was totally isolated from the Japanese music scene and I had only found something similar in the Western Industrial music movement."

By going against the social grain and being true to his artistic self in preference to taking part in the public play-acting which -- according to writer lan Buruma in his book A Japanese Mirror - dominates Japanese society, Akita was bravely striking out alone down an uncharted path. This act of social/cultural defiance was his way of proving to himself that he had the courage (desire?) to face exclusion rather than play the public game. For Akita, the "living death" that Buruma describes would be a more acceptable fate than "Tatamae: the facade, the public posture, the way things ought to be "

By unshackling himself from the restrictions of Japanese society, Akita set out on a quest to create a new music that shunned conventional instrumentation, ignored the regulatory three minute sound barrier and banished melody. The results would combine his keen knowledge of Surrealism with his obsession for high energy and Progressive rock, the early Industrial music of such groups as Throbbing Gristle and SPK, and European/American avant garde/electronic composition

"Early on I used many tapes and loops but hadn’t made a decision on a sound generator. My early interest was in making an alternative sound from surrounding noise sources: television, my record collection, sound made by other people and electronically manipulated, cut-up tapes, tape loops, etc I hadn’t settled on any particular style. I still use many tapes in my studio works, but the difference is I now treat tapes as instruments. Prior to that I utilised tapes as an overdubbing concept but now the tapes crash into one another with no static overdubs "

From these humble beginnings, Akita constructed his Lowest Arts & Music mail art label, duplicating cassette copies of the music he was making and packaging them in a series of xeroxed collage images assembled from discarded porn magazines and manga scavenged from underground station rubbish bins.

"I was highly influenced by cheap porn advertisements in magazines," he shamelessly admits. "I appreciated the fact that they just sold cheap, useless porn or some junk fetish. It was similar to the ideas I had about my early music. I thought of presenting sound as a fetish which only a few strange minded people would pick up on.

"My earliest concept for Lowest Music & Arts was supposed to be very similar to the underground porno service I liked the idea that art/music is something representational of the perversion/unconsciousness of humanity. My art and music was distributed in much the same way, except not for money. Nonetheless I tried to create the same feeling as the secret porn customer for the people buying my cassettes. In the early 80s the medium of cassettes seemed very new and revolutionary. I thought I should have my own independent media so l could make everything with no censorship, interference or the interpretations of others. Cassettes were accessible through the mail order network so that’s how I came to distribute the activities of Lowest Music & Arts."
The first of these mail art cassette releases, entitled Metal Acoustic Music, was Merzbow’s debut, a slightly subdued, abstract electronic howl with a playing time of nearly 47 minutes that would be picked up by only a few listeners with their ears to thc ground. However, it did herald an awesome and formidable catalogue of future recording projects. Although at the time the original sting of punk had been antiseptically transformed into New Wave by the music industry, Akita’s approach to his own music was similar (albeit creatively far removed) to that of those early punk pioneers

"I threw all my past music career in the garbage," he declares "There was no longer any need for concepts like ‘career’ and ‘skill’. I stopped playing music and went in search of an alternative. Early Merzbow was a mix of improvised music with Kiyoshi [Mizutani] and my solo noise element."

Armed with an arsenal of battered electronic equipment, broken guitars and defective tape recorders, Akita began to explore the possibilities of using feedback instead of musical notation to create music - by tapping into the "secret voice, the unconscious libido" of the equipment and controlling it. This manipulative, automatistic, trancelike use of feedback would become the foundation on which Merzbow would build a towering Pleasuredome of Noise.

"I was able to control feedback," Akita claims proudly. "The feedback sounds of equipment is a central concept for Merzbow. Feedback automatically makes a storm of noise, and it’s very erotic, like Reichian Orgone energy or the magnetic expiation of electronics. I find pleasure in noise and I have tried to develop different variations on the pleasures of noise."

"Noise is the sound of the city" - Akifumi Nakadima (aka Aube)

Akita’s decision to use noise as the primary ingredient of his music allowed him to overcome the problem of communication by creating his own universal language, one that crossed all borders and awakened the emotions of all who came into contact with it. At the boiling centre of Merzbow’s noise churns a sound collage which is made up from a variety of different sources and ideas. To the knowingly aesthetic elements of Surrealism and Dada and the socially rejected eye-gouge of pornography, Akita added the subliminal roar of his own real environment into the mix. By interpreting the bleak ‘death factory’ Industrial soundscapes of Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse into a form which he could inject into his own version, Akita unconsciously combined the emotionless urban blast and drone of cars, buses, trains, aeroplanes and buildings to produce a noise that - regardless of which city they lived in would be picked up by his small but attentive audience.

"Industrial music was the first sound movement which dealt with the unconscious of society and human sexuality related to a very low art form. When we started playing our kind of music there was no recognition of noise music as a genre in Japan at all," he explains "Post-punk free improvisation was recognised there, but not noise. It was only in the late 80s when noise got due attention and was recognised."

By its very nature, noise is a musical beast which breaks down the usual barriers that exist between art and reality. Noise - at Merzbow level - refuses to be shut out or turned off in midstream Akita describes the relationship between his art and reality as being similar to observing clouds through the window of an aeroplane.

"Everything seems static, but in reality the plane is moving extremely fast. I like that kind of reality, apparently static but actually very fast-moving - like inside an atom. It’s a very high speed reality."

The first real example of Merzbow’s high speed reality was unleashed in 1983 as a vinyl LP on the Chaos/Eastern Works, Japan label called Material Action 2 (NAM) For the few curious Western Industrial music fans who had been somewhat suspiciously taking note of the growing pile of Lowest Arts & Music cassettes that Merzbow kept delivering, it would prove to be a landmark release, their gateway into the music and mind of Masami Akita

The reason I bought it was because I’d seen the name Merzbow on the international tape network," recalls Extreme’s Roger Richards. "I’d see all these cassettes listed and I’m thinking, ‘Oh fuck, this guy’s got 20 cassettes out! That’s way too many.’ I had the preconception about the whole Merzbow thing. You know, he must be hopeless, he must be churning them out for the sake of it. Then I saw this record that was about five dollars and I just grabbed it. I played it and thought, ‘This is amazing’. It was so rich, so powerful without being angry, just pure energy that came right out. It was so complicated as well. How could they get al this sound into one space? Then I started buying his cassettes"

Consisting of two extended tracks called "Nil Ad Mirai" and "Nimbus Alter Magneto Electricity", Material Action 2 (NAM) would be a giant step forward for Merzbow. A recording that crashed through the restrictions of the homemade cassette sound barrier and allowed Akita to extend his sonic range and take his music to the next level. An element of music concrete was also allowed to creep into the session

"I mixed raw material tapes for Material Action 2 with two microphones, a synthesizer and a percussion recording by Kiyoshi Mizutani," explains Masami in his "Merznote" to the album. "The sound of the percussion was made by recording a typesetting machine. Kiyoshi was working at a typesetting company during that period." Equally important and significant to a deeper understanding of Merzbow as performer was the source from which Masami took his title for the album. Material Action was the title of a performance piece by notorious 60s Vienna Aktionist Otto Much who, together with Hermann Nitsch, was ultimately responsible for pushing Aktionism beyond American Beat-style ’happenings’ to a new extreme that involved nudity, animal sacrifice and heavy symbolism reminiscent of an alternative Roman Catholic Church. Their mysterious approach to art was supposedly " centred on the examination of taboos, the ‘hidden’ secrets of the body, the aesthetics of destruction and the possibilities of regenerator", all of which have remained elusive and, until recently shrouded in secrecy. At the time they were fined, put in prison and generally abandoned by the art establishment of the day. They are today considered to be one of the most important post-War art groups in Europe.

"Muehl’s Material Action idea was interesting to use as a concept treatment of sound," recalls Akita. "Sound can be treated more physically, destructively in a psychoanalytical way "

In 1962 Muchl wrote, "The free admittance of the true creative drives is the ethical intention of my apparatus: sadism, aggression, perversity, craving for recognition, avarice, charlatanry, obscenity, the aesthetics of the dungheap are the moral means against conformism, materialism and stupidity. I am against laws and social rules no longer founded in reality" This declaration of unfettered freedom, anti-conformity and poetic cruelty provided further artistic ammunition which was transformed into raw electronic sound on the howitzer blast of Material Action 2 (NAM), and resurfaced in later Merzbow recordings like the Metalvelodrome: Exposition Of Electro-VivKection four CD box, Akita’s take on Nitsch’s Orgien Mysterien Theater, released in 1993 on Japanese independent label Alchemy as a limited edition of 700 copies. In the same year that Material Action 2 (NAM) was released, Akita decided to start another label which he named ZSF Produkt. "Lowest Music & Arts was a label founded for Merzbow releases only. My other label ZSF Produkt was intended for releases by different artists. When I stopped putting out other people’s work I kept the name. ZSF is pronounced ‘Zu Su Fu’, and is an ancient Japanese word meaning ‘magnetic’." Although he continued to release cassettes on this new label (Mechanization Takes Command and the monumental loop triptych Pornoise/1kg being two outstanding examples from this period, both of which resurface in MERZBOX), Akita’s approach and attitude towards reproducing his noise were becoming more advanced "To tell the truth," he admits, "I felt that when I switched to vinyl, the work was more final than it was on the almost temporary medium of tape."

But although the sound quality which vinyl offered was an improvement on the unwanted hiss and clatter that made tape such a flawed medium, the trouble with vinyl for Merzbow was the restricted playing time, and problems with volume levels.

This was finally resolved in 1990 with the release of the first Merzbow CD, Cloud Cock OO Grand (ZSF Produkt), which hit the streets in an edition of 500 copes funded by Akita himself.

"He had to get into the idea of CDs and therefore he had to buy a DAT machine," recalls Roger Richards. "He had to commit an incredible amount of money towards this recording project which changed the way he felt, again, about what he had to put down. They were charging a fortune for glass mastering, they were charging a fortune for manufacture. Everything was like gold! You could make three albums today for the cost of what that cost in those days. It was a bizarre, expensive thing to do " Recorded in September 1989 after returning from Merzbow’s first European tour, Cloud Cock OO Grand featured Akita on a variety of electronics and metals, together with partner Reiko A, who played bowed instruments on one track.

"It was my first DAT recording," he notes. "I found that digital recording was a good way to represent my sound during that period. My new noise composition was based on the speed manipulation of live tapes. The idea was to give a sensation of time."

Although Cloud Cock OO Grand turned out to be the only CD ZSF Produkt ever released, Akita had finally discovered the medium he had been searching for to unleash his music to the world. "When he went to digital, there’s another shift," explains Richards. "Once CDs were no longer precious, he was back in his element, he was back in his tape period, his halcyon days "

"Basically, writing is my job so enjoyment is minimal. Music on the other hand, is completely pleasurable: no pain whatsoever" - Masami Akita

In 1988 Merzbow confronted German noise artist Achim Wollscheid (aka SBOTHI) for a sound battle of short pieces which was released on vinyl by Richards’s fledgling Extreme label as Collaborative Merzbow + SBOTHI. After the decision was made to reissue it on CD to celebrate Extreme’s tenth anniversary, that recording eventually snowballed into the more ambitious MERZBOX project. Two years after the original release of Collaborative, Richards met Akita in Tokyo to persuade him to record again for Extreme. Akita agreed, giving Richards permission to reissue his 1982 tape loop construction "Lowest Music 2" (aka "NiI Vagina Loops") More important, however, was their idea to record an album which would reflect Akita’s ongoing interest (as a professional writer, musician and occasional video director) in the history of Japanese bondage technique and its place in modern day society. The result was Music For Bondage Performance, Merzbow’s debut CD for Extreme which was released in 1992, followed by a second volume in 1996.

"I got so many letters saying that Music For Bondage was really offensive to women, but that’s not actually true," offers Richards by way of defence "It’s a visual rather than a sexual erotica. It’s not a sex show in any way, it’s more of an installation. There’s a guy creating these beautiful sculptural objects with women involved in them. There is no sexual intercourse or anything like that, just this visual erotic form that’s created from the sculpture of the body and the rope. Masami has written two books specifically on this topic, The History Of Bondage Volume One and Volume Two, which are just coming out. So he’s very keen to document this artform."

Akita’s fascination with Japanese bondage apparently burrows far deeper than morbid perversion or sexual titillation, and to understand why and how it has become such a major part of his work, some kind of potted history on the subject is in order.

The history of bondage in Japan goes back many centuries. It was originally used as a medieval method of torture to punish those who had broken the rules of the restrictive system that governed the land in those days. While the torturers of medieval Europe were usingchains, manacles and the rack, the Japanese were achieving similar results using a single piece of rope. There was a highly ritualised, sophisticated and complex aspect to the procedure, with different types of rope and tying methods denoting various crimes, as well as the classes of people being punished. Around 1600, this era of unrest in Japan came to an end, giving way to the culturally rich Edo period. Artists rediscovered the old methods of torture and began using them in art. Because many artefacts from that period have survived, their work has been pivotal in creating the erotica/S&M/bondage underground scene that exists in Japan (and elsewhere) today.

Throughout the 20th century, rope bondage in Japan has become a high erotic art, with its own masters of the craft known as sensei. Although it is generally considered a male occupation, some rope mistresses also exist; but for a woman, being a bondage model in Japan holds a certain celebrity status as well. Japanese bondage (unlike its Western equivalent) is not about how tightly the knots are tied, but how the rope is wound around the model’s body to hold it in certain positions. This is a modified form of the original rope torture, the difference being that here the object is to immobilise your captive in a decorative way. The traditional rope used in Japanese bondage was made from coarse, unforgiving straw. Traditional straw rope is being used in bondage photography today, referring back to the torture tradition, and therefore denoting a more hardcore and sadistic practice.

"Sometimes cruelty is an expression of beauty," explains Akita when asked how these displays of (to easily shocked and mystified Western eyes) cruelty and erotic vulnerability fit into the overall pattern of his work "The sense of beauty is an important element of my composition.

"Bondage has its own beauty - porn too," he goes on, "but often the beauty of bondage is misunderstood. One simple reason for the difference is the focus of the photographer. A good photographer will focus on the rope and the model’s face, a bad photographer will
focus on the genitals, which is not the point. Most people think female bondage is a realisation of a sexist rape and violence obsession. Violence and rape - if we consider the police, military, schools and other forms of establishment power - are ‘normal’ human activities. Bondage is not a ‘normal’ human activity, it must be ‘abnormal’. Bondage is parody and an anti-form of authority. People don’t understand this point."

Akita is also impatient with those artists and musicians who use bondage imagery as a device to shock For him, bondage is a serious subject that he considers historicalIy, culturally, artistically and intellectually important. "Some noise performers use bondage pictures without knowledge of the context of these images," he chastises "When I use them I can explain the sociological context. These images in relation to my work are a result of research."

"I listen to lots of different music which affect me subliminally but do not directly influence my work" - Masami Akita

Ask Akita an innocent question like, ‘Heard any good records recently?’ and back comes a brain bursting list of Black/Death Metal/Grindcore groups with names like Burzum, Immorta, Gorgoroth, Enslaved, Satyricon, Ulver, Unholy, Emperor, Beherit, Soulgrind, Taake, Odhinn, Abruptum, Earth, Electric Wizard, Corrupted, Burning Witch and Boris - whose last recording was a collaboration with Keiji Haino.

"Basically I like listening to extreme Heavy Metal bands; probably Metal is the biggest influence on my work," he reveals. "In the late 80s l was very influenced by the drumming of Grindcore and Death Metal bands such as Napalm Death, Carcass, Morbid Angel, etc This seemed to be a microscope on rhythm or a hardcore Metal version of the pulse beat, as interpreted by Andrew Cyrille or Milford Graves, so I thought this idea useful"

Akita’s obsession with the dark side of rock will come as no surprise to those who have been plugged into Merzbow over the last few years. Releases such as Venereology (1996) and his Rectal Anarchy (1997) collaboration with Japanese Metal punk trio Gore Beyond Necropsy pay playful but respectful homage to what has to be the last bastion of underground rock - underground being where Merzbow considers home, and where he thrives.

"I’m currently working with Japanese heavy rock band Boris," he tells me. "We recorded Spooky Tooth’s version of the Beatles song "I Am The Walrus" and it’s my favourite recent collaboration project"

Although MERZBOX could be easily mistaken for a full stop at the end of his career, the reality is that Akita is continuing to make noise and push forward ever harder. His recent appearance at Barcelona’s Sonar Festival saw him take the stage with a choice gathering from Vienna’s Mego label, plus Portuguese sound artist Francisco Lopez, as part of The Laptop Orchestra’s impromptu glitch jam over a Metal loop. It would appear that the old, ‘analogue’ Merzbow is "asleep in the next room", and that the future of noise is currently being downloaded and processed in real time by Akita in the small, record- and book-lined ‘studio’ in his Tokyo town house; using the Mac G3 computer he acquired to design the CD label artwork for the MERZBOX project.

"With hindsight," shrugs Roger Richards, "I can say that MERZBOX represents his analogue days. We didn’t know it at the time, but it became the nexus of him using his computer. He bought his computer to design his images for the CD labels. The next minute he’s turned into a G3 composer. We should be just sitting back saying, ‘Let’s get ready’."

"It was difficult to scale up analogue instruments," replies Masami when asked why he made the switch to digital. "Finally I was using two EMS and a Moog with another noise set-up, but it was proving too cumbersome to stage. I found some good software to represent the Merzbow sound and was searching for more simple equipment for a live performance, so using a laptop seemed a logical solution I then became interested in composing with the computer. It’s given me a new sense and view because the computer can show me inside the sound itself, the complete opposite to analogue equipment. If I make a one-second Merzbow file I can transform it in real time to an hour long piece. It’s great! I think the computer is a good tool to represent my identity."

In the pipeline is a MERZBOX installation - which opens in Japan this August at the Simane Museum where Akita plans to "project my computer artworks with a sound installation All 50 CDs will be set up on six CD-changer machines so that the audience can listen to their choice in a darkened room. My new artworks return to my Lowest Arts period It’s exciting using new technology, it’s still fresh for me."
MERZBOX is out now on Extreme. Some Akita quotes in this article are taken from Brett Woodward’s Merzbook. Thanks to Tony Mitchell (Skin Two), Biba Kopf and Jill Tipping for their help with this feature.




10 Best Merzbow Albums
David Keenan picks ten of the best Merz moments from Akita’s vast back catalogue

There are inevitably two major gripes about the Merzbow back catalogue - that there are way too many, releases and that they all sound the same anyway. While it’s hard to dispute the first point, the second’s an absolute nonsense. Certainly on first exposure, like any new language, it all sounds like much of a muchness - ‘simply’ noise - to really immerse yourself in its forms and codec and you start to realise just how expressively precise and anticulate Akita’s sound aesthetic is. Listening through his back catalogue chronologicalIy,

Akita’s logic leaps come thick and fast progressing through primitive rock and jazz derived acoustic improvisations and aleatoric electronic collage to finally arrive at the minute skeletal architecture that underpins his current organically complex systems. Listed below are the essential building blocks, each one documenting a crucial stage in his development and an deal initiation into Akita’s ‘guitar-smashing’ soundworld.

Merzbow
Material Action 2
(NAM) CHAOS/EASTERN WORKS OOOO1 LP
The first Merzbow LP, released in 1983, isn’t quite the unprecedented blast you’d be led to believe. With a title like Material Action 2, this is obviously drawn from a period where the pioneering work of Hermann Nitsch, Otto Huehl and the rest of the Vienna Aktionists heavily influenced Akita. Both sides of the cover display the same deep fascination with the Rorschach-blot potential of exposed innards and hidden body secrets, while deep in the grooves lies the perfect soundtrack for peeling flesh. It’s one of many collaborations with Kiyosh Mizutani (whose own Akita-produced The Same Thing Always Makes Her Laugh LP on ZSF is also highly recommended), who always seems to bring out Akita’s slightly more ‘musical’ side, and as such this isn’t quite as bombastically harsh as so much Merzbow product. Indeed at points the bamboo sonorities of Mizutani’s violin recalI nothing so much as the longform psych of Japan’s Taj Mahal Travellers. In keeping with its Viennese inspiration, there’s a much more ritualistic feel to the A-side, with bursts of tortured screams and cacophonous electronics often drowned out by manic junkyard percussion hammered home with an eviscerating fury. While the B-side is more dense with electronics, it’s still a long way from the wide tonal and dynamic spectrum that Akita would come to master over the next decade.

Merzbow/Null
Produktion
NO LABEL CASSETTE
There are countless fantastically packaged cassettes from Merzbow throughout the 80s, all bizarre little pieces of folk-art. Most of these deal in both acoustic and electric space, with Akita’s aesthetic often more straightforwardly Improv than it would eventually become. Still, there are some real gems - the 1983 Kibbutz cassette which came wrapped in a bloodied handkerchief, is a great organ/electronics stand-off between Akita and Mizutani, and the many duels with Zeni Geva’s guitarist/vocalist KK Null are uniformly on the money. Although the packaging is nowhere near as art-piece perfect as their Deus Irae set from August 84, where the cassette came sealed in metal gauze by two six-inch nails, the more straight forwardly wrapped Produktion, recorded the same month, sees both men playing at full throttle. Here they seem obsessed by the speed of sound - the tracer-trails of expressway traffic, the choral shrieks of aggressively excited machinery, rebound sounds in enclosed acoustic space - and they both constantly wrestle with their electronics for pole position. Later Akita moves onto the drums, all sloppy rolls on the toms, and they start to sound like The Dead C tackling Throbbing Gristle’s Heathen Earth.

Merzbow
Artificial Invagination
VANILLA 20 3’CD
The front cover shot of an overturning car gives the game away; 1991’s Artificial Invagination is the sound of violence, with the sonic attack as a vain attempt at crowd control. Consisting of one track, "Wing Over", here Merzbow’s the duo of Akita on electronics and tape manipulation and Reiko A (also of ‘fellow terrorists Maher Shalal Hash Baz) on vocals. Akita throws in sounds of rioting - air-raid sirens, puncturing gunshots, crowd chants and suicide bombing - for one of his most extreme releases. Here, in glorious widescreen, shril plate-glass scraping goes up against blunt, a most tactile bottom end. It draws dynamic sense straight from rock’s teasing id-release strategies - short staccato bursts build in momentum before everything explodes gratuitously over the top, splatting like a paintbalI impact. At only 20 minutes it’s the idea quick fix.

Merzbow
Batzoutai With Memoria Gadgets
RRR RRRCD6 "XCD
Packaged in a shrunken, moulded video box, the 1993 release couples a ‘re-create’ of Akita’s previous Batzoutai... (RRR004) entitled "In To The Void Of Record Archeive" (sic) with the all-new "Loop Panic Limited. Despite Akita’s description of "In To The Void... " as "Fake Electro, Acoustic Music dedicated to GRH/lNA, WERG0, DEUTSCHE GRAHHOPHON, PHILIPS & ERAT0 recording artists", it’s much more than tongue-in-cheek pastiche. Rather it’s a set of inspired automatic compositions, fulI of little timebending jolts of sonic ellipsis with titles like "This Dying Toad Become Forth With Coal For Colour Black" While not as restlessly propulsive as most of his catalogue, it features an expanded selection of one-off sound sources (what sounds like prayer bowls, bells, even a soprano sax) and some bewitchingly self-regulating feedback systems.

Merzbow & Christoph Heemann
Sleeper Awakes On The Edge Of The Abyss
STREAMLINE 1003 CD
The best Merzbow release, from 1993, is also the least representative, a slow pan through a series of beautifully still environments. Heemann, previously of German arch-experimentalists Hirsche Nicht Aus Sofa, brings a strong narrative sense to Akita’s raw sonic scraps, creating a macabre landscape of almost Hieronymus Bosch proportions. The first movement, "Tunneling", is a creepily animated 3D space peopled by mutant moans, wolf-cries and choruses of bulIfrogs. Akita’s sound sources are so diffused that they seem to form a floating mist, cloaking huge footfalls "just beyond the horizon. It’s all so ethereal it feels like an astral projection, a somnambulant journey through the landscape of the other side. Elsewhere there are luxurious Ambient tone pieces, every bit as muzzily wasted as The Aphex Twin, and washes of electronics so heavenly and filled with white pulsing light that they sound like interstellar shortwave. Arguably both
participants’ best work to date.

Merzbow
Noisembryo
THE RELEASING ESKIMO GL00301 CD
From 1994, this is the quintessential Merzbow release, the one that confirms and lives up to everything you’ve ever read about him. The cover shot is of a piece of mangled 12" vinyl, oozing slime - this is the recording medium pushed til it pops, real speaker- bleeding chaos Indeed most of the frequencies that Akita’s post-80s output deals in would never have made it onto shellac, as the Fat Cat label found out when vainly attempting to squeeze his towering "Ab Hunter" onto the B-side of a split release with AMM. Noisembryo is the one to play when
someone asks to hear some Japanese noise, and maybe the title is a little bit of a knowing wink it’s a virtual blueprint, the sound that spawned a thousand noise copyists, though still unmistakably Merzbow Metal-on-metal friction shreds sparks over relentlessly drilling deep-end bass as the whole thing snowballs into orchestral Metal Machine Music. Truly unstoppable.

Masami Akita
The Prosperity Of Vice The Misfortune Of Virtue
l/CHE RE2022 CD
A real one-off in the Akita back catalogue and for that reason released under his own name, The Prosperity Of Vice... was commissioned by Makiko Hayashi’s Romantica theatre group in 1996 to accompany their staging of two plays based on the writings of the Marquis De Sade. 18 movements run the gamut of cutting violin, locust choruses and gothic keyboard runs. Combined with the stunning visuals showcased on the cover, this must have been a blast live - a hallucinogenic, pan-sensual assault on the scale of Antonin Artaud’s projected Theatre Of Cruelty.

Merzbow
Scumtron
BLAST FIRST BFFP138 CD
It had to happen - a Merzbow tribute album, filled to the brim with all the wannabe hard cases (and Jim 0’Rourke) Alongside some functionally fine tracks by O’Rourke, Pan Son c and Rehberg & Bauer, the highlights are Russell Haswell’s fantastic ‘megamix’ where six Merzbow tracks become a painful tonal symphony with sub-audible sounds sending little tremors around your skull - and Bernhard Gunter’s haunting "Untitled 2". It’s an ominous piece constructed from three Merzbow samples, sounding at points like the monstrous wheezing of a gigantic lung or the area- sonorities of long-abandoned engine rooms. If none of this whets your appetite there are also two uniformly staggering original Akita compositions which all but floor the brave fanboy efforts.

Merzbow
Aqua Necromancer
ALIEN8 ALIEN1O CD
In its blurb at the time, Alien8 described this release as "almost DJ-friendly". Yeah, almost - it’s rhythmic like a fleet of combine harvesters 1998’s Aqua Necromancer is the best of several Merzbow Prog rock ’tributes’ and features sampled drumming and riffing from the likes of Soft Machine beneath an onslaught of tape, noise, Moog, synth and "devices". Akita really seems to be having fun here (sure, he’s allowed), with cheesy theremin-like howls regularly turning the air purple. Metronomic melodies trundle into view before being pulverised by lifted bass solos and breaks of bad boogie that sound so incongruous it’s almost belly-laughable. "Soft Drums" is particularly invigorating - a manic multi-limbed drum solo that sounds like it’s being played by Animal from the Muppets is used for target practice, with Akita firing from close range, blowing gleeful chunks to the point of total obliteration. As the last crunch cuts to dead air you fee dizzy, like you’ve "just spent the last 50 minutes speed-dialling through 70s European radio.

Merzbow
1930
TZADIK TZ7214 CD
1998’s 1930 feels like a stocktaking; a look back over Akita’s career to date while fast forwarding to some of his most accomplished and texturally advanced explosives. There are glimpses of the torrential percussive extremes of earlier years coupled with his new found interest in bursts of rhythmic pulse, all pumped full of wailing bombast in a way that gives the piece a thrillingly epic air. The closing "Iron, Glass, Blocks & White Lights" is a panoramic Hell Screen, a dystopian vision of Judgment back-lit with torched electronics and hysterical moans. The year 1930 stood on the verge of an abyssal decade and this is the soundtrack for the descent.