Merzbow – Merzbient

November 1, 2010 • Soleilmoon Recordings

Masami Akita is nothing if not prolific. In addition to releasing dozens of albums every year, he has put out a few impressively-sized box sets, Merzbient being thus far the second-largest released (the thirty-disc Merzbox is a challenge I have yet to attempt). This particular collection is older works from Merzbow's analog days with a supposed "ambient" twist. I say "supposed" because the extent that any of this album is actually ambient is bascially just adding a lot of reverb to everything. But it's actually got a pretty diverse run of sounds going for it (one would hope, being twelve discs long), although I hesitate to judge whether the whole experience is actually worth it.

I spent two entire days at work listening exclusively to this album: the first six discs yesterday, and the second six today. It was a very difficult thing to do, and it was one of the most difficult albums I've listened to in general (bested so far, that I can think of, only by another twelve-disc musique concrète compilation). Now I don't think the intention is to listen to the whole thing all at once, and I certainly don't expect anyone to do so but, despite a lot of archival-compilation sort of albums I've heard coming off like a general mish-mash of random tracks, this thing actually holds together really nicely as one giant work. It's difficult to explain how since it's not your typical album and it's structured differently from how I'm used to, but for the most part all the discs go together pretty well.

Anyway, on to the content itself. Like I mentioned before, what we get here is Merzbow's take on ambient music, but it really isn't ambient at all. The majority of the tracks consist of light noise and junk metal sampling (a staple of early Merzbow) all drenched in a heavy reverb with the occasional background droning. Here and there Merzbow shakes it up with some more typical harsh noise (discs 8 and 9) and some improvisational messing-about (disc 5). That's basically it in a nutshell. Analogous to Merzbow's output in general, the quality of the album varies throughout. For me, the highlights are discs 1–3 (typical noise but with a lot of really interesting sampling that gives it a nice surreal atmosphere) and discs 7–9 (taking a turn for the harsh; slipping into more normal Merzbow territory, which is pretty refreshing after six discs of lighter stuff).

However, despite spanning twelve discs, there isn't quite as much variety overall as there ought to be. This means the album probably lends itself better to sampling snippets here and there rather than taking it in all at once or in disc-size chunks; for each track, the same particular section can go on for at least fifteen minutes, which isn't exactly exciting to listen to but would be good for random access. Also, the discs I didn't mention above (4–6, 10–12) I found to be pretty boring and not really worth listening to, which is part of what made the album so difficult. They are all pretty similar with uninteresting noise and samples with lots of reverb and little else to keep things fresh. These parts seem very amateurish to me; granted, they were recorded during Merzbow's early period but I know that he was cranking out better material at the time. Hearing these pieces is pretty unsatisfying; they definitely overstay their welcome and often repeat sounds heard on other discs (4, 6, and 7 are all very similar).

If this collection was cut down to just the six discs I liked the best, I could see this as being a pretty strong album (not as strong as I would have hoped, and it still wouldn't come close to my Merzfavorites), and anyone reading this review first has the opportunity to check out my recommended abridged version first (again, discs 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, and 9) if desired. I'm not going to recommend it to anyone but the more hardcore Merzbow fans, but for those looking for something a little different from what they're used to from Merzbow this isn't a bad place to look. In general, though, Masami Akita really hits his stride with his harsher creations and should leave the ambient material to others.

6