Masami Akita has been making noise as Merzbow for long enough now that an entire generation of children don’t know of a world without his specialized blend of white noise and super-charged sonic eruptions. Akita, though, hasn’t just been churning out the same noise over and over (or so I’m told, his records can be a bit tough to get through in a single sitting); he’s been constantly punishing his hardware in an effort to find the extreme limits of its capabilities. Recently, Merzbow has gone 21st century, turning off the battered and smoking analog gear for a purely digital variety of noise. Brazil’s Essence Music sent him a couple of neglected South American psychedelic records and Akita’s response is Sha Mo 3000, a psyche-blasting hour of noise, loops, and deconstructed distortion.
While the opening two and a half minute “Suzunami” is a solid wall of shrieking metal, the epic “Sha Mo 3000” explores a wide gamut of sounds, splintering away from a monolithic wash of white noise into an array of echoing drums, staggered loops, and tiny, localized explosions of sound. There’s a strange prog-tinged psychedelia that runs through “Dreaming K-Dog” like a mutant offspring of Pink Floyd (and it may just be the juxtaposition of the samples which sends me off in that direction). “Dreaming K-Dog” loops with an ardent fervor like a building alarm system gone haywire while a single guitarist in a methadone-fueled haze of time dilation and feedback tones sets fire to his frets in the back stairwell. “Ghost Hide Your Eyes” howls like a wounded machine as its fuel pumps from severed lines and its pistons bang against dented casework. Blasts of white static cover the fading music-box whimper of dying clockwork mechanisms. The final twelve minute opus, “Hen’s Teeth,” mashes everything from the previous 50 minutes into a compressed whirlwind of sound before dissolving into a sub-sonic Scorn-esque rumble that flattens everything as it drains away.
Merzbow isn’t easy listening—that’s just the simple truth—and, while Akita’s prolific output may raise the eternal question of quality versus quantity, like Bryn Jones (and his gargantuan output as Muslimgauze), the body of work sums up the artist’s attempt to ascertain the true dynamic possibilities and structural foundations of his style. Merzbow isn’t about noise, really, it’s about Akita’s attempts to find music in chaos. Sha Mo 3000 will scour the inside of your skull like a flaming Brillo pad but once some of the oxidized build-up has been scraped off, you may find your receptors a bit more eager for adventure.
Sha Mo 3000 is out now on Essence Music. [Bandcamp]
