The notion of Masami Akita sitting behind a laptop is somehow disheartening; one would much rather see him wielding welding tools than clicking a mouse. And after a disappointing set during his last visit to North America, when Pansonic mixed his sonic assault into generic glitches at the 2002 Victo festival, one could be forgiven for being only so excited about the two nights he was to spend in New York.
But the fact of if is, Merzbow with a Powerbook (or two, as it happens) is still Merzbow. Far from adapting a blip stance, he is continuing to reach for - and attain - the same intensity of room-shaking (quite literally) noise that he has purveyed for some 15 years.
Which is both a relief and troubling. The ranks of laptop musicians are fairly well filled, and it's good to see that Merzbow hasn't watered his work down to follow fashion. But the question remains: do we need him to keep doing it?
His surprises are rare (the lovely two-volume Music for Bondage Performance on Extreme is one notable exception). Instead, he keeps doing what he does, knocking the same building down over and over when there are whole blocks to raze. Granted, most artists envision their oeuvres early and make careers of redefining it. The problem here is how much redefining Merzbow really does. Even having gone digital, his pieces sound much like the metal-shearing with which he made his name.
On the other hand, some people find great joy in watching Lord of the Rings over and over again, so to a degree Merzbow might be forgiven, or allowed, anyway, to continue to trot his warhorse. And he does top the list of artists proving that noise can be music (or at least that it isn't just, well, a bunch of noise). His work is structured, meticulous, crystalline. He introduces and repeats themes. And the sheer volume within which he works certainly makes it an eve nt - a sort of apocalyptic be-in. Like his high-decibel count ryman Keiji Haino (and unlike so many noise artists), beneath the volume lay ideas. The challenge is to be neither so seduced nor repulsed by having your ears split open that you walk away with nothing else.
Over two nights, Merzbow built true symphonies of noise: long pieces which introduced and resolved musical arguments. The works do require attention (a point lost on much of the shouting-over-the -squalor audience who no doubt was there because of generous write-ups in The Village Voice and Time Out. The performances contained different elements, but structurally mirrored each other. In that regard, Merzbow may be more a craftsman than an artist, a noise architect who's very good at his profession. It might not be a reason to buy his 50-cd box set, but it doesn't really feel like anything else you've done recently either.
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