Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Merzbow - Minazo Volume 2 (Important - IMPREC107)

Merzbow is Masami Akita. For most people in this world, his music would be referred to as noise. For those of know him, he produces music which is musically categorized as Noise. There you go. Sometimes music is not that hard to figure out.

Merzbow is one of the earliest of Japanese Noise projects and probably one of the most well known in the world of Noise music as well. Akita's project has been followed by many artists and Japan is now one of the leading grounds for the Noise scene.

The sheer number of works released by Akita reminds me of a fellow pioneer in experimental electronic music named Byron Jones. It is truly remarkable how many releases both these men have materialized in a short period of time with both over 10 albums per year.

The album takes it's name from a famous Southern Elephant Seal. Akita was a visitor of this seal who lived in the Tokyo zoo and would also allowed access to it. It seems that Akita has had a strong bond with the seal which I don't know the reason why, but right after his death (The elephant seal was a male), the pieces were produced.

The album is a two part release which this current one is the latter one. The use of samples and pedal effects are quite familiar with the other works of Akita. On the background of all the fuss, there is a soothing architecture even though isolating it from the upper chaotic structure is tough. The deeper structure feels more like an obituary while the face of it all is engulfed in systematic terror. It is not hard to guess that the feeling would be to envision the naive/captive animals living in a caged environment just for the amusement of people. Even though we are not different ourselves, we just don't have physical cages like the animals. We only have the social norms acting as invisible cages. For us, freedom is an idea mainly based on humans.

To buy this record:

@ Ebay
@ Discogs

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