Name: Sphere
Brand: Merzbow

Tax rate EU

Default:19

Supplier EU

Redeye

Total Cap

Format detail

Colour details

Discogs ID

Limited edition

Colour

Format Music EU

Extended format

Extended format: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Download code

Download code: No

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Release date

2005-04-26

Format multiplier

Catalogue number

TZACD7256

UPC / Barcode

702397725626

Artist

Merzbow

Label EU

Tzadik

Genre EU

Merzbow is an extreme experimental music project created in Tokyo in 1979 under the direction of musician Masami Akita. Recognized as one of the earliest projects in what has become known as "Japanese noise," Merzbow has released hundreds of recordings since its inception.

The name Merzbow is derived from Kurt Schwitters's "Merzbau" and is pronounced the same way. Originally formed as a duo, with Masami Akita and Kiyoshi Mizutani, Merzbow became a solo project for Akita when Mizutani left in 1989.

In 1991, Merzbow transformed into a trio with the addition of Reiko Azuma on electronics and voice, and Tetsuo Sakaibara (aka Bara) on voice and dance. However, since 1999, it has once again been solely led by Masami Akita.

Tzadik is a US record label based in New York City, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. Established in 1995 by composer and saxophonist John Zorn, Tzadik has become a prominent name in the industry. With Zorn as the executive producer of all Tzadik releases, the label operates as a not-for-profit cooperative.

With an extensive catalog numbering scheme, Tzadik offers a diverse range of musical experiences. From special editions to limited edition vinyls, their releases cater to various preferences. They also have dedicated series such as John Zorn's 50th Birthday Celebration Series and Radical Jewish Culture Series.

While CDs were initially manufactured at a Nimbus facility until 2000, later releases from 2000 onwards were produced by Failsafe Media. It's important to note that if a title was originally issued before 1999 but features Mould SID Code 41xx, it should be considered as a repress from 2000 or later.

Newest Listed Items

On their first official collaboration, Japanese noise pioneer Masami Akita aka Merzbow and Australian sound sculptor Lawrence English present a harrowing, surrealist portrait of nocturnal industrial activity, spawned by field recordings made in a sprawling factory complex seven hours north of English's home in Brisbane. He characterizes the area as "uneasy and unsettling," awash in the sickly glow of smelters and refinement machinery, somehow not of this world – a liminal quality vividly captured in Andrei Tarkovsky's sprawling purgatorial opus, Stalker, to which the title alludes. Akita, too, described early drafts of Eternal Stalker as feeling "like the soundtrack to a dystopian science fiction opera." A mood of mechanical dread and ruined futures permeates each of the album's seven potent compositions. Opener "The Long Dream" sets the stage with steady rain on sheet metal, punctured by thunder and metallic echoes, reverberating to the rafters in a collapsing warehouse. Quickly the tempest rises. "A Gate Of Light" and "Magnetic Traps" both convulse in churning furies of electric demolition and rattling chains, roaring and relentless. "The Visit" and "Black Thicket" operate more at a distance, surveying the topography of steam, rust, and liquid metal from above, their flickers of violence swallowed by blankets of darkness. This is noise at its most elemental and unknowable: brooding, bristling, and opaque, stalking forbidden peripheries of chaos and creation. Discussing Akita's music, English refers to its "intense substrata that is purely psychedelic; it consumes and confounds." The seasick swells of friction and fracture subsume the listener, forcing an auditory surrender: "this saturation of the senses can be a euphoria." Proof comes halfway through "The Golden Sphere," when the howling mayhem subtly recedes, revealing an eerie siren drone hovering in the void, like the resonance of a dead star galaxies away. Slowly a seething, venomous wall of volume returns, shredding the signal until its frequencies fray, whipping away into the eye of the storm. The combined effect merges obliteration and liberation, rapture and ravagement; it's the sound of dissolution as resolution, uprooted and unmoored, finally freed from form.

Sphere

Music EU