*Limited Edition of 99 copies. Purple vinyl * Masami Akita has been making noise since before most people understood noise could be made on purpose, and Animal Magnetism is what happens when forty years of sonic terrorism suddenly decides to sit you down and explain itself without raising its voice. Originally released on CD in 2003, this double LP reissue—remastered by Lasse Marhaug and pressed on black or purple vinyl in a gatefold sleeve featuring Akita's own photographs—adds a previously unreleased bonus track and proves something that shouldn't need proving but apparently does: noise can have a sense of humor, noise can have structure, noise can even have something that looks like melody if you squint hard enough through the distortion. This is Merzbow at his most accessible, which is like saying a hurricane is accessible because you can see it coming, but the point stands. The opening title track builds gradually instead of detonating immediately, revealing layers, suggesting patterns, almost flirting with coherence before pulling back into beautiful wreckage. There's tension here—always tension in Merzbow's work—but it unfolds rather than assaults, and buried somewhere beneath the metallic clangs and fractured beats is something that might be a melody if melodies could survive being run through a trash compactor and reassembled by someone who'd forgotten what melodies were supposed to do.
What makes Animal Magnetism distinctive in Merzbow's massive catalog isn't that it abandons the core aesthetic—distortion, feedback, electronic debris, all present and accounted for—but that it balances harsh noise with something almost resembling composition. Tracks evolve. They flow into each other with warped continuity. The noise breathes, pulses, shifts form instead of just sitting there being a wall. "Quiet Man" is the album's secret weapon, high-pitched sounds bouncing around in cartoon patterns, vivid and bright and almost whimsical, like dance music refracted through a noise lens or maybe a satire of dance music that forgot it was joking and started believing its own hype. It's infectious in ways Merzbow shouldn't be infectious, which makes it more Merzbow than anything that plays it safe. "A Ptarmigan" stretches past twenty minutes and earns every second, shifting from movement and brightness into slow grinding dirges, celebratory one moment and meditative the next, a miniature sonic journey that contains the entire album's contrasts in one piece. "Super Sheep" picks up the pace with aggressive rhythmic drive, its bass line evoking breakcore structures before Merzbow twists them into something uniquely his, the distortion not just effect but compositional logic, controlled burn instead of chaos for chaos's sake. Then "Pier 39" dials everything back into ambient territory, gentle scraping textures and soft frequencies, minimal movement, showing that even within noise there's room for space and silence, for fragility and restraint.
The newly added "Quiet Comfort #2" fits seamlessly, extending themes while offering something fresh, and the Marhaug remaster brings out depth and weight that the CD couldn't quite capture, making this vinyl edition not just a reissue but a revelation. The gatefold sleeve replicates Akita's original photographs, giving them the scale and presence they deserve, turning the package into an object that matches the music's ambition. This is noise for people who think they don't like noise, noise for people who've been listening to noise so long they forgot it could surprise them, noise that rewards attention and repeated listening instead of just demanding endurance. After four decades, Masami Akita remains one of the most singular and uncompromising figures in experimental music, and Animal Magnetism is proof that uncompromising doesn't mean unapproachable. It's an essential document of an artist who continues to redefine the outer edges of sound, and this reissue is the version the album always deserved.
