Merzbow

* 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 structures in which violence and architecture became inseparable.

Recorded at home in Tokyo over August and September 2003, and originally issued on CD by C3R in 2004, Yoshinotsune stands as one of the most evocative works of this period. Its three pieces, Ushiwaka Kurama Iri, Hachiman Taro No Uta, and Yoshino No Yamazakura, take their titles from the life of Minamoto no Yoshitsune, the twelfth-century samurai general whose biography, half-historical and half-legendary, has long inhabited Japanese theatre, poetry and song. The album frames Akita's noise within a Japanese mythopoetic register without ever declaring it programmatically.

From the outset, bird calls, radio interference, and electronic signals open out into an enigmatic atmosphere suspended between nature and technology. The music continually transforms, alternating between ominous beats, unearthly moans, and ritualistic pulses, tribal rhythms filtered through circuitry and digital distortion. The first piece in particular wracks up a steady 4/4 figure that gradually drifts toward something more ancestral, its 25 minutes built on an intoxicating mixture of rhythm and noise. Across the album the sound drives forward with relentless force while holding a constant tension between motion and stillness, inviting the listener into the detail rather than simply overwhelming it.

What makes Yoshinotsune so compelling is its balance between technical precision and creative instinct. Though meticulously constructed, its structures retain a raw and immediate vitality. Akita's hand can always be felt, shaping the sound with intensity and sensitivity. It remains one of the richer and more spacious chapters of his digital era.

This Urashima double-vinyl edition, mastered by Lasse Marhaug and limited to 199 copies, considerably expands the original. The three pieces from the CD are spread across four sides and joined by two previously unreleased compositions, allowing the depth of the low end, the nuance of the digital processing, and even the acoustic guitar passages, all otherwise compressed in the original CD layout, to register with new physical presence.