…What can, after all, be said about Masami Akita’s ultra-strident tessellations of sound — where total control masquerades as abject chaos, where extreme volume is a dare to lean in a little closer — that hasn’t already been uttered? Across the last half-century, he has become the metonym of harsh noise while also existing far beyond it, with frequent forays into grindcore bedlam and doom marches, ambient hum and free jazz eruptions. Box sets of 35 and 50 CDs, multiple series of albums that run for years, a collaborative zeal that seems boundless: Merzbow is so prolific that browsing his discography is like autoscrolling an abyss, revealing a catalogue so daunting that many people understandably stand only near its edges. Depending on how you tally them,…

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