Merzbow
Masami Akita was born in 1956 in Tokyo, Japan. Akita is a graduate of Tamagawa University, Art Department, and majored in Painting & Art Theory. Akita formed the premier Japanese Noise group Merzbow in 1979. Merzbow have released over 300 recordings, on tape, LP and CD, to date, working with many different media such as video, film and CD-ROM, both in the directorial and soundtrack role.
Masami Akita was born in 1956 in Tokyo, Japan. Akita is a graduate of Tamagawa University, Art Department, and majored in Painting & Art Theory. Akita formed the premier Japanese Noise group Merzbow in 1979. Merzbow have released over 300 recordings, on tape, LP and CD, to date, working with many different media such as video, film and CD-ROM, both in the directorial and soundtrack role.
Collaberrations (2CD + 1DVD)
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 always worked in the opposite direction: material is passed over, altered, buried, returned, and what emerges belongs to nobody in particular. Paul Hegarty has described the process as one in which individuality gets swamped, the sound cut loose from a…
Viva Negativa! The New Blockaders: The Noise of Art and Nothing (Book)
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 the founding line of noise as an art of pure negation. From the outset TNB armed the music with a manifesto: blockade as resistance, an anti-music and anti-art set against every convention of composition, performance, and even personality, the sound…
Viva Negativa! The New Blockaders: The Noise of Art and Nothing
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 the founding line of noise as an art of pure negation. From the outset TNB armed the music with a manifesto: blockade as resistance, an anti-music and anti-art set against every convention of composition, performance, and even personality, the sound…
Electric Salad
*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 frequencies.The album pushes noise into a physical and immersive experience, where structure and chaos constantly collide. A powerful document of Merzbow's exploration of extreme sound as a raw and compositional material.
Avian Hydraulics
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 fluid mechanics into a gleaming, corrosive miniature of his vast oeuvre.
Nine Studies of Ephemeral Resonance Volume 1 - 9
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 contemplation, from one of the great figures of noise
Vapor Hoof
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 Friday, July 17, 2026.
Synthesis Post-Contact
Exclusive Merzbow tape release for his live-gig at XXI Congresso Post Industriale.
Cuts Cut
"As expected, the set began with some brain-blasting brutal noise [...] Although Merzbow is known for his extreme electronics, he is much more diverse and creative than most give him credit for. The best part of the set was when both Merzbow and Mats [Gustafsson] worked more carefully with their electronics while Mr. Pándi played some cerebral, shifting currents on his drums [...] which brought this set to a grand climax [...]". » Gallanter, Bruce. « Downtown Music Gallery », June 2018
"The fest…
Strange City
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]](https://cdn.soundohm.com/data/products/2026-05/metal-machine-music-power-to-consume-vol-2-jpg.jpg.500.jpg)
Metal Machine Music: Power To Consume [Vol. 2]
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.
Bardo Thödol
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 narrative framework but as a conceptual resonance: a passage, a suspension between states.
Where Inside Richard Serra Sculptures and The Wheel of Mani foregrounded a relatively defined dialectic between Vian’s environmental restraint and Masami Akita’s i…
Tsubute Mosaic
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 significant and recognizable figures. From his groundbreaking utilization of tape loops to craft expansive industrial landscapes in the late 1970s, to his transition to laptop-generated static noise at the turn of the century, Merzbow has consistently push…
Yoshinotsune
* 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 practice built around laptop, software processing, and a rigorously composed approach to harsh noise. Across releases such as Merzbeat (2002), Animal Magnetism (2003), and the present album, Masami Akita reorganised his vocabulary around dense, sculpted str…
The Human Race Was Restored To Life Repeatedly / Yoshinotsune / Hadayro (3LP Bundle)
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 transformation—where noise is not only pushed to its limits, but constantly redefined.
Beginning with Solmania and the 1985 cassette H·A·D·A·Y·R·O, we encounter a foundational moment: a fiercely physical and experimental approach where self-built instruments, t…
Ongaku Otaku - Complete Edition (Book, Hardcover)
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 Japan. With dozens of interviews and articles, and many hundreds of reviews, the magazine was an influential voice, sharing words about Aube, Cornelius, Yamamoto Seiichi (Boredoms, Rovo, Omoide Hatoba), Shizuka, Jojo Hiroshige (Hijokaidan, Alchemy Reco…
Aural Corrosion
*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, spring reverb, drone effects and more, then developed in different directions by two electronic/noise veterans. It’s a journey of pure sensation, destruction, and rebirth. A skull-vibrating sound decomposition to your face. For this very reason of se…
Double Beat Sequencer Vol.2
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 template - rigid sequencer patterns hammered into shape and then abused - this instalment feels even more single‑minded. A handful of cycling pulses become the spine for entire pieces, driven by a strict, mechanical insistence that Masami Akita trea…
Double Beat Sequencer Vol.1
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” sequences of the title - form blunt, looping structures that Masami Akita subjects to his typical barrage of distortion, feedback, metallic scree and feral electronics. The result is not noise suddenly tamed, but rhythm subjected to the same merciless tr…
TripleAkuma
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 across both spheres, the live experience of Merzbow is truly something that exists as profoundly physical and moreover, overtly performative.
Merzbow’s live methodologies draw not just from a saturation of frequency at all levels, but a recognition of …