Editions Mego – EMEGO 025
This copy of Mer Mar begins after the record has disappeared. There is no stylus descending, no side break enforced by a groove, and no large silver-gray cover occupying the listener’s hands. What remains are two long MP3 files carrying Masami Akita and Lasse Marhaug’s collision into the portable world of folders, hard drives, music players and shared archives. That change of vessel does not merely make the album more convenient. It alters the psychological frame around the sound. The LP presents noise as an imposing physical object. The MP3 version allows the same material to arrive almost secretly, stored beside thousands of other recordings and capable of erupting from an ordinary computer without warning.
This portability suits a collaboration built around unstable identity. The title separates and recombines fragments of the artists’ names: Mer from Merzbow, Mar from Marhaug. The two pieces reverse that order, beginning with “Mar” and ending with “Mer.” Nobody receives permanent first position. The names fold into one another before the sound has even begun, preparing the listener for music in which authorship is similarly difficult to separate. A metallic scream cannot always be assigned confidently to Akita or Marhaug. A dense electronic field may contain one musician’s action, the other’s processing, and several generations of feedback produced by their combined system.
The two pieces are not dueling solo performances. Mer Mar gains its character from the disappearance of clean borders. Scrap metal, synthesizers and effect chains produce a turbulent common body whose components continually exchange functions. A struck object becomes an electronic cloud. A sustained tone acquires the grain and resistance of damaged metal. Repetition approaches rhythm but never accepts the obligations of a beat. The listener may begin by trying to identify individual sources, then gradually abandon that effort as the collaboration becomes a single organism with too many limbs.
“Mar” enters through movement rather than introduction. It does not politely establish a setting before becoming difficult. Activity is already underway, with harsh surfaces sliding across deeper electrical pressure. Yet the piece is less uniform than its force initially suggests. Sounds occupy different depths. Thin frequencies cut across heavier masses, metallic actions create temporary edges, and repeated events briefly suggest a machine discovering its own cycle. The density changes constantly enough that the ear can move inside it rather than merely standing in front of an immovable wall.
The physical sources are important because they leave traces of resistance even after distortion has obscured their identities. Metal does not behave like an infinitely obedient digital tone. It bends, vibrates, decays unevenly and responds differently according to where and how it is touched. That imperfect response survives inside the processing. The album’s electronics feel attached to objects that had to be handled, struck or forced into motion. Its aggression contains labor.
This is one reason the MP3 format creates an interesting contradiction. Compression is commonly imagined as reduction, a method of removing information so sound can occupy less space. Mer Mar is devoted to excess: excess vibration, excess amplification, excess interaction and more frequency activity than the listener can consciously follow. The smaller file carries an event dedicated to becoming enormous. A recording built from resistant matter becomes weightless data, easy to duplicate and capable of traveling around the world without the metal, pedals, studio or performers.
That transformation does not make the MP3 meaningless or automatically inferior. It creates another historical body for the work. The LP belongs to the economy of pressing plants, mastering, postage, physical ownership and finite copies. The MP3 belongs to an underground geography of blogs, trackers, folders and private collections. It may lose aspects of the record’s material presentation, but it gains mobility. Someone who would never find or purchase the original pressing can still encounter the collaboration as sound rather than reputation.
“Mer” begins without the ceremonial act of turning over a record. In a digital player, the second half may follow immediately, making the two sides feel like adjoining chambers of one long construction. Yet the piece still establishes a different climate. Broader fields of electronic sound coexist with abrasive interruptions, and reductions in density expose narrow tones that can feel more invasive than the louder sections. The duo understand that extremity cannot survive as a permanent maximum. Pressure requires variation. A partial withdrawal can make the next intrusion feel newly physical.
The album is especially effective when neither artist seems to be leading. Experienced collaborators sometimes protect their recognizable styles too carefully, producing music that resembles two signatures displayed beside one another. Akita and Marhaug permit their methods to become contaminated. Merzbow’s history of amplified material action and layered electronic saturation meets Marhaug’s studio intelligence, physical noise practice and attention to structure, but the result is not an alternating exhibition of trademarks. Their experience is revealed through the confidence to become temporarily anonymous.
This anonymity keeps Mer Mar from becoming a celebrity noise summit. The attraction may begin with two major names, but the recording becomes most rewarding when those names stop organizing perception. Once the listener no longer asks which artist is producing each sound, smaller relationships become audible: the way a repeated impact anchors a drifting field, the way high abrasion changes the apparent size of a low tone, or the way one layer seems to scrape an opening through another. The composition exists within these shifting proportions.
The short title also acquires new meaning as a digital filename. “Mer Mar” is compact, symmetrical and almost cryptic, well suited to an archive where long names are abbreviated and folder structures become private cataloguing systems. Removed from the LP sleeve, the words resemble data fragments whose original identities have been partially clipped. The abbreviation mirrors the MP3 itself: a reduced form that still carries enough information to reconstruct an experience larger than its container.
Noise listeners sometimes treat lossless audio as a moral category, as though devotion can be measured through file size. A well-preserved FLAC archive certainly retains more of the source data and has obvious archival value, particularly for music built from extreme frequency detail. But the MP3 has its own cultural truth. For decades it was the format through which enormous private libraries became possible, rare recordings escaped physical scarcity, and listeners discovered music they could not otherwise reach. Compression helped create abundance.
Mer Mar is particularly suited to exposing both sides of that history. Its crowded surfaces invite the highest possible fidelity, yet its underground life depends upon movement. The physical record emphasizes sound as engraved matter. The MP3 emphasizes sound as transmissible information. Neither version contains the entire release. Each reveals what the other must sacrifice.
This older post therefore deserves to remain even when a lossless copy exists elsewhere. It preserves a different stage in the album’s circulation and a different relationship between listener and object. The MP3 may have entered a large download batch, lived unheard on a hard drive, moved between computers or survived after an original link vanished. Those movements are part of its provenance. A digital duplicate can accumulate history even when every copy appears technically identical.
Heard through this version, Mer Mar becomes a compact machine for producing impossible scale. Two files open into forty minutes of metal, voltage, friction and unstable cooperation. The album no longer requires a turntable or shelf space. It needs only enough storage to remain dormant and a playback system through which it can suddenly reclaim physical force. The container has become smaller; the pressure inside it has not.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.