This bit was my Master's of Fine Arts thesis for Art Center College of Design, 2001.

"Merzbow is me" - Masami Akita [1]
"Space is the place" - Sun Ra.

"The path leads to the right and I follow it, yet it is a phantom path beyond what the painted image offers. To follow it is to trust myself to a 'blind path', yet it is precisely at this turn into blindness that Friedrich situates us in Early Snow . We know of such passages in real forests, roads that seem to lead somewhere but end in the unnavigable. These paths are paradoxes, since their existence means that someone was already there, yet their abrupt endings make us wonder where their first travelers have gone. In German such a path is called a Holzweg , which means both timber track and, figuratively, wrong track, as in being utterly at fault. Martin Heidegger saw in this double meaning a metaphor for thought and its itinerary. Every Holzweg leads off separately, but in the same forest, and 'it seems often as if one is like the other. But it is only apparently so'. Like the foresters, the philosophers 'know what it means to be on a Holzweg' . They know, that is, the geography of truth and error from within, and can bring us to the threshold of something never thought before. To pursue the Holzweg is to enter the new, although the new with obscure origins in the past." [2]

According to ancient Norse cosmology, the nine levels of the multiverse began as a magically charged void, Ginnungagap. At one end of the void, to the south, appeared Muspellsheimr, a world of fire. At the other, to the north, appeared Niflheimr, the mist-world, filled with icy waves that flooded Ginnungagap as Muspellsheimr threw out sparks. The center of Ginnungagap remained still until the two forces came in contact and the ice melted to form the first being, Ymir, an androgynous primal giant. Eventually, via a complex process not to be outlined here, the entire hierarchy of sentient beings came to exist, from the gods (Odin et al), to men and women, flora and fauna. All of these are made up of five forces, or elements: fire, air, water, ice and earth. Of interest to us here would be the primal combinant of mist, both of water and of air. The water element represents unmanifested form, darkness, unconsciousness. The air element represents omnipresence, formless space, motion and intellect. Thus, mist encompasses the unmanifested and the formless, darkness and intellect, unconsciousness and motion.

Sufficed to say, noise music is an acquired taste, or maybe, depending on how polemically one relates to one's own tastes, a non-taste, an anti-taste, an a-tasty predilection. Noise music, or simply "Noise", as its adherents prefer to call it [3] , is something that could only have happened in the post-punk, some might say misguided, avant-pop culture moment that emerged in the late 1970's. Taking off from the nascent Industrial music movement centered mostly in Britain in a brief but shining moment of pop vanguardism, Noise, at least as a pop phenomenon, is a relatively recent invention.

Japanese Noise, specifically (often considered a genre in and of itself ) [4], came to fruition under the influence of early Industrial as well as Prog Rock, Free Jazz, psychedelia, improvisation generally, and Post-War pioneers like Cage and Stockhausen. With a twenty-plus year history, and a gamut of "bands" (most of which have only one or two members), Japa-Noise is a full fledged institution (or, if you'd rather, anti-institution, non-institution...). Sporting monikers like Aube, Masonna (Mademoiselle Anne Sanglante Ou Notre Nymphomanie Auréolé), Incapacitants, K2, Gerogerigegege, Flying Testicle, C.C.C.C., Hijokaidon, Nord, and Govt. Alpha, Japa-Noisicians alternately instill admiration, bewilderment and oftentimes fear in listeners lucky enough to come across their work.

Dissidents in perhaps the world's premiere technophiliac capitalist culture, Japa-Noisicians almost always rely on lo-tech and/or analog equipment. Typical is the use of some general sound-production device (an oscillator, tone generator, theremin or Moog), hooked up to a phalanx of guitar effects pedals and mixer, cranked through massive amplification. Other favorite noise-generating devices include old drum machines, contact microphones, sheet metal, everyday consumer electronics (typically broken...blenders, electric mixers and their ilk tend to predominate...) and a variety of home-made "instruments", again, hooked up to a phalanx of guitar effects pedals (perhaps the key Noise implement), a mixer, and cranked through massive amplification (Marshall stacks being the distorto-stadium Rock favorite). Exempting the fact that Noise recording itself is generally within the digital realm (the CD being an excellent Noise document with its inherent clarity and sonic range), the use of computers and other digital technologies is nearly unheard-of in the actual production of Japanese Noise.

Masami Akita, recording mainly under the name Merzbow since 1979, can be considered a, if not the, founding father of the Japa-Noise scene. Akita was born in Tokyo in 1956. Early musical interests included the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Doors and the Beatles and then Progressive Rock, mainly in the form of King Crimson. By high school, he had begun actual music production, playing drums in a rock cover band. Tiring quickly of the formulas of rock music, Akita joined forces with his friend Kiyoshi Mizutani as a duo that soon began jamming their way through a sort of free jazz/Prog rock hybrid. Mizutani has remained a collaborator ever since, being the second half of Merzbow in its earliest incarnations and occasionally helping out on an number of projects to the present day.

After high school, Akita predictably trotted off to Tamagawa University to study painting and art theory. It was there that many of the other key ingredients for Merzbow came to light. The first objects of study were the works of Europe's Surrealists and Dadas. Of particular interest were Salvador Dalí and, of course, Kurt Schwitters, "He made art from oddments he picked up from the street, just as I make art from the scum that surrounds my life."[5] Other interests from those days that have inevitably surfaced in the meantime were the Vienna Aktionists, Lautréamont and the Marquis de Sade. [6]

And lie drunk
In Love's bosom.
Endless living
Wells up strongly in me,
I look from above
Down here after you.
At that mound
Your splendor pales ----
A shade brings
The cooling wreath.
O! Breathe me, Beloved,
Ravish me,
So I can pass on to sleep
And to love.
I feel death's
Rejuvenating tide
Transform my blood
To balm and ether-----
I live by day
Full of faith and courage
And perish by night
In holy fire. [7]

Akita's first project after graduation was the founding of his own Lowest Arts & Music label. Merzbow was born. Initially, Merzbow was conceived of as being a kind of Surrealist music in a punkish vein.[8] Recalling punk's impression/influence on him at the time, he states, "they just looked like stupid rock n' rollers. So, my idea was to create something that was anti, but representing the brutal sound spirit of rock music."[9] Disregarding all traditional instrumentation (considered by Akita to be too limited by a player's skill, or lack thereof), Merzbow made use of the history of European collage and put it to the service of constructing cut-up tape loops with static overdubbing to create Akita's first Noise.

Setting the aesthetic tone for nearly all of Merzbow's future work, the first releases on Lowest Arts & Music were basically home-made cassette recordings with photocopied artwork that was pasted together from found pornography. "I was highly influenced by cheap porn advertisements in magazines. I appreciated the fact that they just sold cheap, useless porn or some junk fetish. It was similar to the ideas I had about my early music. I thought of presenting sound as a fetish which only a few strange-minded people would pick up on." [10] Lowest Arts & Music extended this interest to model its distribution and production on that of pornography, that art which Akita continually refers to as "the libido of culture". Speaking of Surrealism, he outlines his entire life's work when he says, "the most influential Surrealist concept for me is: 'Everything is erotic, everywhere erotic'. Noise is the most erotic form of sound, that's why all of my works relate to the erotic." [11]

"My earliest concept for Lowest Arts & Music was supposed to be very similar to the underground porno service. I liked the idea that art/music is something representational of the perversion/unconsciousness of humanity. My art and music was distributed in much the same way, except not for money. Nonetheless I tried to create the same feeling as the secret porn customer for the people buying my cassettes. In the early 80's the medium of cassettes seemed very new and revolutionary. I thought I should have my own independent media so I could make everything with no censorship, interference or the interpretations of others. Cassettes were accessible through the mail order network, so that's how I came to distribute the activity of Lowest Arts & Music." [12]

Electronic feedback became Merzbow's primary raw material. As the sound of machinery turning in on itself, penetrating itself, feedback's onanism became the noise-pleasure that conventional musical instruments, necessarily limited by a concept of skill, were unable to produce. "I was able to control feedback. The feedback sounds of equipment is a central concept for Merzbow. Feedback automatically makes a storm of noise, and it's very erotic, like Reichian Orgone energy or the magnetic expiation of electronics. I find pleasure in noise and I have tried to develop different variations on the pleasures of noise." [13]

"Nothing is really destroyed or disappears, as recycling is part of the production. It's a natural and necessary part of post-capitalism. There should be no illusion of only production, as was the case with early industrialization. Present re-production systems point in the direction of a future hyper-dimension of physics. We no longer use a dialectical approach in our disposal/recycling system, only a forward movement to the reproduction of re-production."[14] Akita refers to his remix/recycling strategy as "decomposition", intentionally undermining the "make it new" logic of a pounding remixology era. Merzbow gives us rot in the face of innovation, the stink of the corpse hangs heavy in the marketplace of the continually tinkered product. Things fall apart.

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