Pitchfork

Having heard 15 Merzbow releases give or take, which is probably on the order of 7% of his output, I'm probably not qualified to make any pronouncements about Masami Akita's body of work. But I have heard enough to say that few of the early assumptions I had about his music are true. At first I figured that all his records must essentially sound the same, but it turned out he's probably more eclectic than your average artist. And while I initially had it in my head that noise music is foremost an expression of rage, Merzbow's work runs the emotional gamut. Much of the time, in fact, I would describe it as essentially neutral in terms of affect. As Dominique Leone pointed out in his review of A Taste of Merzbow, "if any musical fabric binds [his records], it is that of total determination to assault the listener's senses." Merzbow is essentially a psychedelic artist, attempting to create shifts in consciousness through extreme sound.

Using the Merzbow records I know as a barometer, Merzbuddha is a comparatively stable and measured work. Three long tracks all bear the title "Mantra", and the recurring element through each is an ungodly deep and loud three-note bass pulse, around which is wrapped all sorts of whooshing and buzzing noises. I'd heard the whole record via ripped mp3s several times without grasping the full extent of this bottom end; once I finally played the CD on a stereo with a subwoofer as loud as seemed responsible in my apartment building, I developed a completely different understanding of the record. Akita has indicated that he was listening to a great deal of dub around the time he recorded Merzbuddha, and if that's true this record is another example him taking the core elements of a beloved genre (he's toyed in the past with free jazz and prog samples) and smashing them to barely recognizable pieces in the Merzbow style.

Which is not to say that Merzbuddha could ever have you feeling anywhere close to Irie, and god help the person who finds "Mantra 1" on the stereo with a head full of THC. Though there are few unpredictable blasts of noise, Merzbuddha suggests more of a simmering paranoia, the ceaseless march of bass suggesting the B-movie monster that manages to keep pace with a fleeing victim despite moving almost in slow motion. There is a lot of steam and hiss throughout, like steam escaping from a coal-belching machine, and the crackles around the bass bring to mind a record stuck in a run-out groove.

Only in the last five minutes of this almost hour-long composition does Akita finally remove the governor, letting chaotic sheets of static and ear-splitting metallic scrapes overwhelm the carefully constructed rhythm. Given the title of the album and the series of three "mantras," and given the inside cover photo that shows Akita in a darkened temple kneeling in supplication, we're left to wonder: Is this final assault the sound of enlightenment? Don't know about that, but an hour of good Merzbow, which this is, certainly has a transformative effect.