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 MERZBOW
Live at Radio 100
2000
ERS
42:32
Ably assisted by Bara and Reiko A, the great Masami
Akita here declares war upon his record collection. The offending
vinyl is duly pummeled, manipulated, cut-up, scratched, shattered and
generally obliterated amidst a white storm of noise electronics. As the
title suggests, this performance was recorded live for the illegal Dutch
Radio 100 station, for a show called Earbitten. Even allowing for
the fact that Merzbow/Akita have been around a while as recording artists
(twenty years or so now) their output is staggering. At the last count
I was the proud possessor of some forty or so Merzbow recordings, and
that's nowhere near the complete set - some of which it is now unhappily
impossible to get hold of. Quantity is not necessarily the enemy of quality,
or of diversity for that matter: certainly this release does not resemble
any other Merzbow recording I've ever heard. Snatches of music, some recognisable,
others madly distorted and scrambled, battle against the thunder of an
electronic battery of sound. Fragments of jazz recordings, set against
these howls of noise, conjure images of Jack Nicholson's flashbacks in
The Shining. Bursts of rock and roll, pop, heavy metal and grunge
seethe on their heels, each new selection a step forward, a step closer
to the inevitable black sludge of noise in which it all will end. A sort
of history of popular music in forty minutes, Akita's comments - "Noise
is the unconsciousness of music...I want to make silence by my noise"
are peculiarly poignant to the context. Although not quite in the same
exalted league as Merzbow's recent studio releases (the outstanding Tentacle,
for example) this is still a worthy, and unique, addition to their ever-expanding
catalogue of fascinating, challenging and exceptional 'music'.
STEWART GOTT - 2 November 2000
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