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Sunday, January 2, 2022

Merzbow - (2012) Lowest Music & Arts 1980-1983 9xLP & 7''


Vinyl-On-Demand ‎– 108

Lowest Music & Arts 1980–1983 is a box set compilation by the Japanese noise musician Merzbow, it is composed of recordings from the earliest years of Merzbow.
Vinyl-on-demand deliver a knockout blow of formative, seminal Merzbow material; all of it appearing on vinyl for the first time, and all carefully selected and mastered by the notorious artist himself. It really is one of the handsomest, most alluring things we’ve ever stocked; proper, top shelf vinyl porn for the collectors, and arguably one of the most extraordinary collections of noise material to ever land on vinyl. So, maybe a little introduction is required: around 1979 Masami Akita appropriated the name Merzbow in homage to Kurt Schwitters ‘Merzbau’ artwork. It was clear indiction of his allegiance to radical avant-garde thought and practice, and came to encompass myriad influences from free jazz to musique concrète and psychedelia which would inspire a nebulous catalogue stretching to over 350 releases and an unparalleled reputation in the world of extreme music and art. This ten LP set charts the primordial genesis of this uncompromising gesamtkunstwerk: at one end we have his earliest material from 1980 – screeching, elemental Metal Acoustic Music – hypnotic rituals for ungodly praxis – thru to unique ecologies of clattering percussion, demented synth noise and cosmic/industrial cacophony, while digging deeper into the box reveals hitherto hidden sides of his oeuvre; culminating in the mindbending torque of his 1983 recordings – a decimated mixture of roiling garage rock, atonal industrialism, and, perhaps most surprisingly and enticingly of all, technoid drum patterns recalling Throbbing Gristle and MB which sound all too prescient and timely in 2012. It’d do us a mischief to describe the whole thing, but needless to say it’s a truly mind-melting collection, suitably presented with the highest attention to detail and aesthetic.

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