Merzbow

Noise at full force, and the strange clarity inside it.

Since 1979, Masami Akita has released music as Merzbow: a boiling ocean of merciless textures and grating sound that never stops churning. The sheer scale of the output, with more than 500 releases, works against any attempt to summarise it, and that may be the point.

Akita’s sound draws on progressive rock, free jazz, modern classical and musique concrète, but also on BDSM and Japanese bondage aesthetics, moving between avant-garde, industrial and extreme music. More recently, his work has been shaped by a commitment to animal rights and environmentalism, reflected in the album series 13 Japanese Birds.

Once your ears attune to his frequencies, the dense walls of sound often reveal an unexpected beauty and clarity within the chaos. Noise this focused is also a kind of vision.

Want to know more?

• Merzbow takes its name from Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau, an architectural installation built from found objects that grew through the artist's Hanover home from the 1920s onwards: always expanding, never finished.
• Across more than 500 releases, Merzbow appears less as a catalogue than as an accumulation. Even the formats are part of the Merzbow-mythology, from massive box sets to the famous one-copy edition of Noisembryo from 1994, sealed inside a car.
• Norway has its own history with this sound world. Lasse Marhaug, who performs his 24-hour solo show Trash This Temple at Ultima this year, has collaborated with Merzbow and has been a central figure in the Norwegian noise scene since the early 1990s.
• Noise concerts are loud, and earplugs will be available. At extreme volume, sound becomes physical: you feel it in the chest, jaw and bones. As the ears adjust, what first seems like chaos can begin to reveal texture, rhythm and something close to calm.