Masami Akita

Masami Akita was born in Tokyo, Japan on December 19, 1956.

He listened to psychedelic music, progressive rock and later free jazz in his youth, all of which have influenced his noise.

In 1972, he became the drummer of various high school bands, which he left due to the other members being "grass-smoking Zappa freaks".

By this time, he and school friend Kiyoshi Mizutani had started playing improvised studio sessions that he described as "long jam sessions along the lines of Ash Ra Tempel or Can but we didn't have any psychedelic taste".

He later attended Tamagawa University to study fine art, at which he majored in painting and art theory.

While at university, he became interested in the ideas of dada and surrealism and also studied Butoh dance.

At Tamagawa, he learned of Kurt Schwitters' Merz, or art made from rubbish, including Schwitters' Merzbau (meaning Merz building, ), which is the source of the name Merzbow.

Merzbow began as the duo of Masami Akita and Kiyoshi Mizutani, who met Akita in junior high school.

Akita started releasing noise recordings on cassettes through his own record label, Lowest Music & Arts, which was founded in order to trade cassette tapes with other underground artists.

The earliest recording he made was Metal Acoustic Music.

Various other early releases included Remblandt Assemblage and Solonoise 1.

The Collection series consisted of ten cassettes, the first five were recorded in a studio for an independent label called Ylem, which went defunct before they could be released.

So, Akita released them himself, and recorded five more at home.

"I threw all my past music career in the garbage. There was no longer any need for concepts like 'career' and 'skill'. I stopped playing music and went in search of an alternative."

Early methods included what Akita referred to as "material action", made by making quiet sounds with household objects which were recorded with close miking or rubbing the microphone directly on things and overloading the recording levels.

This method was used on Material Action for 2 Microphones and Material Action 2 N.A.M..

This led to a technique he termed "environmental percussion", where instrumental sounds were made with non-instruments such as banging on the floor, gas stove, spring of a table lamp for percussion sounds.

As well as using a violin bow on objects like plastic cassette cases or cards, rubber bands as a guitar sound, blowing in a toilet paper tube as horns, scratching metal as electrical sounds, etc. At this time, Akita also made a homemade instrument consisting of a metal case strung with piano wires, guitar strings, and springs.

It was played by bowing or placing objects inside and shaking it.

This can be heard on albums like Crocidura Dsi Nezumi, Ecobondage and Storage.

Among early releases like the box set Pornoise/1kg, Merzbow created artwork using photocopies of collages made out of manga and porn magazines he found in trash cans in the Tokyo subway.

Akita explained this as trying to "create the same feeling as the secret porn customer for the people buying my cassettes in the early 80s".

Merzbow (メルツバウ) is a Japanese noise project started in 1979 by Masami Akita (秋田 昌美), best known for a style of harsh, confrontational noise.

Since 1980, Akita has released over 500 recordings and has collaborated with numerous artists.

The name Merzbow comes from the German dada artist Kurt Schwitters' artwork Merzbau, in which Schwitters transformed the interior of his house using found objects.

The name was chosen to reflect Akita's dada influence and junk art aesthetic.

In addition to this, Akita has cited a wide range of musical influences from progressive rock, heavy metal, free jazz, and early electronic music to non-musical influences like dadaism, surrealism and fetish culture.

ZSF Produkt (pronounced zusufu, from an ancient Japanese word meaning "magnetic") was founded in 1984 to release music by similar artists within the industrial movement but eventually became the successor to Lowest Music & Arts.

Numerous Merzbow releases were recorded at ZSF Produkt Studio, Masami Akita's home studio.

During this era, Merzbow found much wider recognition and began making recordings for various international labels.

Batztoutai with Memorial Gadgets was his first LP released outside of Japan.

Merzbow's first performances outside of Japan were at the Jazz-on-Amur festival in March 1988 in Khabarovsk, USSR.

Since the early 2000s, he has been inspired by animal rights and environmentalism, and began to follow a vegan, straight edge lifestyle.

In addition to being a prolific musician, he has been a writer and editor for several books and magazines in Japan, and has written several books of his own.

He has written about a variety of subjects, mostly about music, modern art, and underground culture.

His more renowned works were on the topics of BDSM and Japanese bondage.

Other art forms Akita has been interested in include painting, photography, filmmaking, and Butoh dance.

In 2000, Extreme Records released the 50 CD box set Merzbox.

Akita's work has been the subject of several remix albums and at least one tribute album.

This, among other achievements, has helped Merzbow to be regarded by some as the "most important artist in noise".