Masami Akita has been the name most people reach for when they say "Japanese noise". He started Merzbow in Tokyo in 1979, taking the name from Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau, the collage that slowly filled his house, and treated sound the same way: layers of feedback, tape, junk metal and later laptops piled up until only density is left. Since then he has released well over four hundred records, including the fifty CD Merzbox of 2000.
A new Merzbow album, not a reissue: modular analog synthesizer passages and electroacoustic pieces that recall the early cassette years, recorded at Munemihouse in 2021-2022. 2LP on hand-poured Wax Mage vinyl, 300 copies.
Merzbow at pocket size: two two-minute parts of harsh noise recorded at Munemihouse in March 2026, cut into a 5" lathe disc in a folded cover sealed with a hand-numbered sticker. Fifty copies, a goat on the sleeve.
Number 4 in Fat Cat's "Split Series" with a 1998 live piece for the seminal free-improvisation group backed with a harsh studio piece by the Japanese king of noise. Edition with plain white cover.
*300 copies limited edition* "Silver Tendril" like his recent work, it focuses on the nuances of the sound's "physicality." The intensity of the '90s returns in a refined form, withadded nuance and subtlety. Where "Pulse Demon" emphasized that raw di…
The Merzbow 108 CD Box turns Merzbow’s vast archive into a monument of productive excess: 108 discs spanning lost albums, alternate mixes, outtakes, rehearsals and recent work, assembled by Slowdown Records across nearly a decade. Its Buddhist number…
For a group founded on refusal, The New Blockaders have collaborated a great deal. It is less a contradiction than it looks. Where most collaborations in music amount to two recognisable personalities meeting and reinforcing each other, TNB's have al…
Few gestures in the history of recorded sound have been as absolute as the one Richard and Philip Rupenus made in a garden shed in rural Newcastle in 1982, when – as The New Blockaders – they committed Changez Les Blockeurs to tape and, with it, drew…
Few gestures in the history of recorded sound have been as absolute as the one Richard and Philip Rupenus made in a garden shed in rural Newcastle in 1982, when – as The New Blockaders – they committed Changez Les Blockeurs to tape and, with it, drew…
*Lucky restock* Originally released in 1996, Electric Salad captures Merzbow at one of his most intense and uncompromising moments. Masami Akita builds a dense sonic landscape from layers of distortion, feedback, electronic noise and shifting frequen…
On Avian Hydraulics, Merzbow compresses four decades of noise praxis into a rarefied 10". A liquid-filled, rainbow-variant disc mirrors the music’s churning pressure: Masami Akita’s latest Munemihouse recording converts imagined bird-machines and flu…
Urashima gathers Merzbow's complete nine-volume cycle in a single box, in an edition of 199: 26 tracks filtering noise through the Japan of haiku and ukiyo-e. Nine vinyl-replica CDs and two Leporello inserts on fine Japanese paper. Noise as contempla…
Etherworld is proud to announce a new Merzbow album, "Vapor Hoof" on CD. Our previous Merzbow album, "Electric Salad" came out on the Etherworld label in 1996. This pulse-warping, mind-smashing new release by Masami Akita is coming to stores on Frida…
Merzbow, Mats Gustafsson and Balázs Pándi, recorded at Victoriaville in 2018 and completed with new recordings in 2025: electronics, bass and baritone saxophones and drums in brutal noise and free jazz.
On Strange City, Merzbow drags Sun Ra’s archival fire through a bank of howling electronics, turning rare Saturnian jazz fragments into towering, cosmic noise storms where horn blasts, rhythms and feedback fuse into a single, irradiated signal.
Metal Machine Music: Power To Consume Vol. 2 pushes Lou Reed’s feedback inferno into a new era, unleashing Merzbow, Masonna, Lydia Lunch, Blixa Bargeld, Martin Rev and more in a maximalist, Record Store Day 2026 hallucination of infinite noise.
In their third collaboration, the shared project between Merzbow and Pedro Vian shifts towards less confrontational and more introspective terrain. Bardo Thödol, released as an LP, draws on The Tibetan Book of the Dead not so much as an explicit narr…
Merzbow (aka Masami Akita), animal rights activist, writer, and musician, an Iconic figure in International noise scene. Renowned for his pioneering contributions to the noise music genre, Merzbow has solidified his position as one of its most signif…
* Edition of 199 copies * Between 1999 and 2000. By the early 2000s, Merzbow had entered a markedly new phase. The tape collages, junk electronics, and analogue chains that had defined his work across the 1980s and 1990s gave way to a digital practic…
Across three decades of uncompromising sound, this series of vinyl reissues traces a raw and evolving lineage within Japanese noise. From the mid-1980s underground to the turn of the millennium, these works capture a continuous process of transformat…
Hardcover, 527 pages, 21×27 cm! In the mid-1990s, four thick, annual issues of Ongaku Otaku magazine were published. Operating from San Francisco, California, the goal was to spread the word about the compelling independent music being produced in Ja…
*2026 stock* 2 years after their debut album on Utech Records, P/O Massacre goes deeper in their immersive noise experimentation in this collaboration album with Alex Buess, and Merzbow (Masami Akita). An architecture of distortion, Moog processors, …
Double Beat Sequencer Vol.2 continues Merzbow’s deep dive into a particularly vicious corner of his archive: mid‑2010s sessions built around a relentless “double beat” framework, then buried under signature torrents of noise. Where Vol.1 sketched the…
Double Beat Sequencer Vol.1 finds Merzbow threading a hard, skeletal pulse through the heart of his noise, treating rhythm less as a scaffold for genre than as another engine of excess. Across these tracks, fixed and cycling beats - the “double” sequ…
TripleAkuma is the third in a series of essential live documents from Merzbow. The stage and the studio are not the same place, and Merzbow has an acute understanding of this juxtaposition. Whilst the sheer density of the music might be maintained ac…
One of the most essential early documents of Japanese noise, originally recorded and mixed at home in 1980 and released in 1981 on cassette by Lowest Music & Arts, now given the physical treatment it always deserved: a 2LP set housed in a natural bir…
** 2026 Stock ** If Laptop Noise looks forward into the blinding glare of the digital, Tapestry of Noise looks outward and backward, unspooling an expansive grid of analogue and hybrid recordings that show how Merzbow’s classic language was woven to…
** 2026 Stock ** Laptop Noise zeroes in on the period where Merzbow’s long‑running practice of junk‑metal abuse, feedback and tape saturation is rechannelled through the seemingly modest frame of a computer. Across six discs, this edition amplifies t…
On Kachouzu, Merzbow compresses his late‑period harshness into four short movements, a 2×6″ lathe‑cut blast where metallic textures, searing feedback and dense midrange roar behave less like tracks than like successive cross‑sections of the same nois…
**200 copies, sold out at the label** New single from the undisputed god of Japanese noise. Masami Akita - the man behind Merzbow - returns with two tracks recorded in February 2024 at Munemihouse, his legendary home studio in Tokyo. Two sides of pur…
Gman+ gathers some of the most elusive material from Merzbow’s 2011–2012 period and welds it into a single, punishing disc, four tracks that function as both archival rescue and self‑contained statement. The collection pulls together work originally …
Kotorhizome catches Merzbow in a phase where noise stops behaving like a vertical wall and starts acting more like an underground network. Recorded between 2011 and 2012 and released later as part of the Slowdown archive cycle, the album is built fro…
Bit Blues sits in the middle of Merzbow’s Horizon cycle like a scorched signpost, three tracks cut from performances recorded at Munemihouse in 2011 and 2012 and later remastered in 2021. All the music is by Masami Akita, working with a small, intens…
Sugamo Flower compresses a particular 2011 moment in Merzbow’s practice into two long tracks that feel like one continuous, mutating organism. Both pieces are sourced from performances recorded that year, later repurposed as material for “Sugamo Flow…
On Kumo No Zettaichi, Merzbow trades drum violence for a hall of hovering machines, two 2011 pieces where small drone boxes, oscillators, and minikoto threads knot into a dense but strangely weightless sky of electric weather. It is harsh ambient as …
On Arijigoku, Merzbow drags live drums and high-saturation electronics into the same pit, a 2008 vortex where blast-beat turbulence and molten noise spiral together like a ritual gone feral. It is harsh music with a striking sense of propulsion, less…
Yono's Journey invites listeners to travel through Akita's sonic landscapes, perhaps following an animal guide. Merzbow turns a 2007 home-recorded session into a three-part storm, where hyper-saturated feedback and low-end throb fold into each other …
The ominous title evokes fallen empires, decadent excess, historical weight. Rome - eternal city, center of classical and Catholic civilization - becomes "Black," suggesting inversion, corruption, death. Perhaps this is Rome during plague, Rome in as…
Electronic Union suggests synthesis, merger, coalition - multiple electronic elements combining into unified sonic statements. These mid-2000s recordings demonstrate Akita's mature integration of diverse digital techniques, creating hybrid approaches…