Having abstained from a new Merz release for almost two years, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when cracking this disc open. Well, I expected noise at least, for good reason, and I definitely got that. Thankfully, my hopes that the context of this album would make it stand out amongst the ones I have and haven’t heard were not dashed. Recorded live last year as part of a Kurt Schwitters exhibition, Masami Akita puts on a great show that meshes his older "home made electronic instrument noise" sound with his modern "laptop noise" aesthetic.
While sadly Akita has abandoned his early work with junk noise and tape loops in favor of harsher instrumentation, even that vibe is referenced in this 41 minute set, with competing phased sine wave loops and almost rhythmic cuts between them at the onset.The opening really proved how this was going to combine the best of Akita's styles, with the jerky, almost rhythmic looped noises and wonderfully corroded low bit rate blasts of digital squeal.
Although the early passages seem to take on almost a perverse sense of acid house techno via the analog squelches, Akita is more than happy to add in passages resembling helicopters overhead (a nod to Stockhausen perhaps?) and what could be loops of motorcycle engines, over which it sounds like he’s bashing tin cans and other random bits of garbage.For the purists, there’s also more than enough blasts of filtered white noise to keep them happy.
One of the biggest assets here, other than just the sonic variety, is the use of loops and rhythmic passages.Rather than sounding like the generic "wall of noise" Merzbow that some of his releases are, there is a lot of dynamic build and structure throughout here.While never quite getting to the tight, cut-up loops of Pain Jerk, the longer, repeating segments seem almost to pay homage to the early industrial chaos of SPK or the harshest Throbbing Gristle works.
The constant rhythmic throb also gives an almost hypnotic sense: like an overblown LaMonte Young composition, the repetitive passages locked my attention in, both hearing the rhythmic stuff and the other improvised sounds around it.That is, I feel, one of the characteristics of a great noise recording.While many decry it as just random distortion and feedback, a really good album will shape that into something that demands one’s focus.I’ve heard many a noise album that I find myself tuning out, but that didn’t happen once here.
It does seem fitting that Akita put on one of his best performances in recent memory in tribute to Schwitters, the Dada artist that not only inspired his approach to music, but also gave him his namesake, from the sculpture Merzbau.Even without any sort of thematic relevance though, I’d rank this among not only Merzbow's best work in recent years, but I would also place it on a short list of his best releases since the project’s inception.
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