The Erotic Cathedral of Misery: Sound, Beauty and Pain in the Work of Merzbow

By Ralph Lipp…
 

Emerging in Tokyo at the beginning of the 1980s, Masami Akita

has widely been credited as the inventor of Noise. Kicking off

the now-infamous Merzbow project in 1981, after starting as a

drummer in the Japanese free jazz scene, Akita could no longer

be contained by the strictures of the movement, abandoning first

musicians and then instruments to pursue the endless “Merz”

concept of sound. After endless releases and productions, pulver-

ising and polarising live performances, more critical acclaim than

perhaps any other contemporary avant-garde musician still around,

Merzbow continues relentlessly pushing forward, destroying all

traditional concepts of music and sound.

Tokyo in the early 1980s was becoming one of the most corporate

places around. Post-war re-construction had been completed and

the country was now a fully-fledged consumer society with the second

biggest economy in the world. For an iconoclastic avant-garde music

artist, these were difficult times.  

“Japanese society is a television community,” Akita once said.

“The most important thing for most people is doing the same things

most other people do. No individuality exists in this society with

music, fashion and language. The Japanese Government thinks

Japan is one nation of one race. But that is a lie.”    

Akita had been a painter studying at Tamagawa University but be-

came frustrated by the curriculum as the school refused to teach

art theory beyond 19th century Impressionism.

In an early interview, Akita recalled his independent entry into

the avant-garde. “My fist influence was George Dechirico and Dali.

Then I read a book by Marcel Duchamp. This book talks a lot

about Dada and Surrealism. I found out why Dadaists destroyed

all conventional art forms – I decided to destroy all conventional

music.” 

The key discovery for initiating the Merzbow project was the work

of early 20th century German artist Kurt Schwitters and, in particular,

his famous Hanover Merzbau building/collage, also known as The

Cathedral of Erotic Misery. The Merzbau has been called perhaps the

most mysterious artwork of the 20th Century other than Marcel

Duchamp’s Large Glass. Only photos and fragments of the work

remain after it was destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II.

Schwitters had years earlier fled into exile after being branded a sub-

versive by the Nazis, his work prominently included in the notorious

1937 Nazi exhibition of “degenerate art” in Munich, entartete Kunst.

Schwitters had begun the Merzbau in his home studio collaging to-

gether fragments and debris or the refuse of culture to create new

forms from wasted materials, from what he called “spoils and relics”.

The work began spreading out of the studio, involving countless nooks

and grottos, some of them obstructed by later additions, and objects

brought into the building from the outside world. The sprawling unfin-

ished work grew to occupy as many as eight rooms in the building

before Schwitters’sudden evacuation to temporary safe-haven Norway

where he would begin another unfinished Merz project.    

Inspired by Schwitters, Akita began applying the “Merz approach”

to sound, coining the phrase “noise composition”. He once described

the process: “Just as Dadaist Kurt Schwitters made art from objects,

picked up off the street, I made sound from the scum that surrounds

my life.”

He began making music in his basement using broken tape decks to

collage manipulated feedback and found sound. In 1982 Akita started

up the first-ever Noise music label, Lowest Music and Art, to release

his ever-proliferating number of recordings. At this time there was an

international movement of experimental artists operating through the

exchange of cassette tapes, bypassing commercial routes of distribution

and production. Akita began sending a flood of self-produced tapes,

wrapped in pornography, and was able to infiltrate the then burgeoning

Industrial movement.

Merzbow’s first album was called Metal Acoustic Music – perhaps in

reference to Lou Reed’s hated but seminal proto Noise album Metal

Machine Music – but it was the 1983 vinyl release Material Action 2

(NAM), on Japanese label Chaos / Eastern Works, that brought it to

a larger international audience. By the late 1980s Akita was releasing

material on Austalian label Extreme. By the mid 1990s, after conquering

the US and European undergrounds, he had become a mythical cult figure

with several high profile releases on international labels – including

Extreme, Rrr, Jojo Hiroshige’s Alchemy and Important Music – culmin-

ating in the staggering 2000 Extreme anthology release of 50 CD box set Merzbox.    

But the new decade saw Merzbow continuing to move forward, moving away

from its former analogue approach to enter into the realm of digital composition

and performance. Akita talked about the transition to Wire in 2000 when

Merzbox was released.

“It was difficult to scale-up analogue instruments. 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…” 

The move has seen Merzbow branching out into new genres, much to the

disgruntlement of Noise purists and many of its former fans. In 2002 Merzbow

released Merzbeat, kicking off a new series of beat-oriented albums. Fourth in the

series, 2005’s Merzbuta, continues the exploration, dissecting and decon-

structing ideas more commonly found in Techno, exploding Techno’s codes

while recharging what had been a once vital genre.

2006 release Merzdub sees Akita supplying New York jack-of-all trades producer

and musician Jamie Saft with Noise materials resulting in one of the most surprising-

ever albums of Dub – moving the Merzbow project into a deep mix of distorted bass-

heavy Dub amidst a storm of crackling static, shattering the genre’s now formulaic

echoes into an abyss of polymorphic meaning.     

Another important development in the evolution of Merzbow’s music has been

a continued and explicit focus on animal rights. Increasingly Merzbow productions

incorporate sound recordings of animals, including samples of a number of birds the

artist lives with in Tokyo. A donation from each of these animal-inspired albums goes

to UK animal rights organisation PETA. Akita has been an outspoken critic of Whaling,

in 2006 releasing Bloody Sea, an album dedicated to anti-whaling activities.

Merzbow’s 2006 twin albums Minazo 1 and 2, were inspired by Minazo, an elephant

seal that died in captivity in Tokyo Zoo, long before its life expectancy. Akita had been

granted special visiting rights to spend time with Minazo and got to know the animal

well before it died.

In a 2004 radio interview in Ljubljana, Akita talked about animal rights and their role

in his music:

“I’ve been vegan for several years now. So…animal rights is one of the biggest

topics for me. This is like if the human have rights, the animals should have rights

as well. However, if you try to do this sort of thing in Japan – being vegan, not

eating meat and fish – people will think of you as an unsocial person. In addition,

eating culture is sometimes itself traditional thing, part of the social system and it

holds a lot in economic world. So if you try to fulfill this, you’ll feel isolated from

normal social nature. However…this sort of feeling, outsider from society, and stance

helps me a lot at making music. I can say that the music which I am making at the

moment is all based on this concept of animal rights.”