Merzbow

A vanguard figure in Japanese music, Masami Akita has done more than any other artist to demonstrate the most thrilling and liberating properties of noise. Born in Tokyo in 1956, Akita was inspired by his interests in art movements like dada and surrealism and his love of free jazz and psychedelic rock to devise his own musical experiments using tape loops, distortion and feedback. Initially the name of a duo with Kiyoshi Mizutani, Merzbow became Akita’s main handle for the abrasive music he began releasing on cassettes in 1979. Over the course of the hundreds of releases that followed—some of which Akita compiled for an instantly infamous 50-CD set named Merzbox in 2000—Akita gradually incorporated synthesisers and computers alongside his more analogue means of creating maelstroms of sound. Meanwhile, his collaborations with artists like Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and the Japanese band Boris expanded his harsh palette to include discernible shards of electronic music, jazz, industrial and metal, too.