Merzbow — 4th Anniversary

Merzbow, Japan’s world-renowned master of noise music, returns to Fukuoka for the first time in ten years.

To speak of experimental and noise music today is inevitably to encounter Merzbow. Emerging from Japan in the 1980s, noise became a global movement, and Merzbow has remained a pioneering force and singular symbol within its history.

Noise music often contains elements of violence and destruction, and invites many interpretations through both performance and musical expression. It resists a single definition. Merzbow continually reconsiders the present form of music through noise, and at the heart of his sound lies regeneration along the path of destruction.

Experience what lies beyond a formless music that rises like architecture, in which reason and instinct coexist.

Merzbow

Merzbow is the vegan straight edge noise project of Masami Akita. Since entering the noise and industrial scene in the early 1980s, he has continued to exert an influence as an emblematic figure of noise music, at times attaining an almost mythic status.

In the 1990s, he became the first noise artist to release through the renowned death metal label Relapse. In the 2000s, he adopted a laptop-based approach to live performance and explored glitch-like digital noise.

Since around 2003, he has practised veganism from an animal rights perspective. More recently, he has incorporated AI art into his work. Refusing to be confined by boundaries, he continues to question how we exist in the twenty-first century through sound.