Inside Richard Serra Sculptures begins as though the recording equipment has been dropped into the hollow center of an enormous machine. A deep vibration rises from somewhere below the audible surface while abrasive electronic matter tears across it: crushed static, whipping feedback, metallic friction and frequencies sharp enough to seem physically pointed. Yet this is not simply Merzbow imposing his familiar wall of noise upon a set of architectural field recordings. The album’s real subject is the struggle between mass and interior space—between the apparent solidity of Richard Serra’s steel sculptures and the unstable acoustic life discovered inside them.
Pedro Vian recorded his source material within Serra’s monumental installations at Dia Beacon in New York. Serra’s curved steel walls do not merely occupy a room; they reorganize the visitor’s movement through it. Their scale is understood through walking, changes in perspective and the uneasy sensation that tons of metal are leaning or bending around the body. Vian’s microphones convert that physical encounter into resonances, ghost voices and environmental sounds. Merzbow then processes and mixes this material until the sculptures appear to have acquired nervous systems. The steel is no longer silent or motionless. It hums, shudders, screams and seems to contract around the listener.
The album is divided into two side-long pieces, each lasting roughly twenty minutes, but it behaves more like a continuous investigation than two separate compositions. Part I arrives with extraordinary density. A distant low drone is almost immediately buried beneath coarse waves of distortion, as though an immense wind were being forced through a narrow metal passage. Layers scrape against one another without settling into a stable foreground or background. Merzbow’s noise dominates the immediate sensory field, yet Vian’s recordings remain audible underneath it as a darker pressure. Instead of disappearing, they give the electronic violence somewhere to occur. Noise becomes architecture rather than decoration.
This spatial quality separates the record from a routine harsh-noise collaboration. Merzbow’s frequencies do not form one flat wall. They bend, narrow, widen and suddenly reveal cavities. Certain passages feel claustrophobic, with sound pressing inward from both stereo channels, while others open into huge reverberant chambers. Small movements travel through these spaces: muted percussion, spectral voices, isolated impacts and brief electronic gestures that resemble machinery awakening behind a wall. When the heavier layers momentarily recede, the remaining drone does not offer relief. It produces a different kind of unease—the awareness of an enormous empty volume that had been concealed by the noise.
Vian and Merzbow make an effective pairing precisely because their musical languages are not naturally compatible. Vian’s work often allows melody, atmosphere and percussion to establish an emotional environment. Merzbow’s sound tends to corrode environments, filling them with unstable energy and refusing the listener a safe viewing distance. Inside Richard Serra Sculptures does not smooth over this difference. It lets the two methods collide. Vian supplies traces of human presence and acoustic depth; Merzbow subjects them to pressure, multiplication and rupture. The collaboration works because neither artist becomes merely background material for the other.
As Part I develops, its initial assault begins to fracture. Rapid electronic scratches and streaks of high-frequency sound appear and vanish, cutting across slower subterranean movement. Percussive details emerge without producing a conventional pulse. They operate more like knocks transmitted through steel—evidence that something is happening elsewhere in the structure. Murmured voices seem close enough to recognize as human but too obscured to understand. This refusal of clarity is essential. A plainly documented gallery ambience would reduce the sculptures to locations. By partially destroying the recordings, the artists preserve the mystery of being surrounded by objects too large to comprehend at once.
Part II introduces more exposed melodic material, including a simple ascending figure whose repetition becomes a fragile organizing force. Around it, Merzbow’s static snaps, sputters and accumulates. The contrast could easily have become sentimental—delicate melody surviving beneath brutal noise—but the record avoids that easy opposition. The melody is not innocent, and the noise is not merely an attacker. Both elements alter the perception of the other. Repetition makes the notes increasingly uncanny, while the sharper frequencies begin to resemble reflections thrown back by the surrounding metal. What initially sounds like conflict gradually becomes a shared acoustic system.
The second half also makes the human scale of Serra’s work more apparent. However overwhelming the sculptures may be, their meaning depends upon bodies passing through them. Footsteps, voices and changes in resonance reveal dimensions that photographs cannot fully communicate. The music recreates this relationship without attempting a literal sonic portrait. Vian’s restrained melodic and percussive elements suggest a moving observer, while Merzbow supplies the immeasurable weight surrounding that observer. The listener is placed neither outside the sculpture nor before it, but somewhere inside its curved boundaries, trying to determine distance through echoes and pressure.
Richard Serra died in March 2024, only months before the album appeared, lending the project an unintended memorial dimension. Thankfully, the music never turns solemn or reverential. It responds to Serra’s work by extending its procedures into another medium. His sculptures use weight, balance, curvature and site to make space perceptible; Vian and Merzbow use volume, frequency, resonance and duration to accomplish something comparable through sound. Both demand physical participation. Played loudly, this record is not simply heard. Its low frequencies occupy the chest, its higher tones tighten the nerves, and its changing density seems to alter the dimensions of the room.
Released by Vian’s Modern Obscure Music in a transparent-vinyl edition limited to 300 copies, Inside Richard Serra Sculptures is an unusually coherent meeting of ambient composition, field recording and harsh noise. Its concept is immediately legible, but the music never depends upon the concept for its power. Even without knowing where the recordings were made, the listener would recognize an intense preoccupation with enclosure, surface, weight and scale. Knowing the source deepens the experience because it explains why these sounds seem less like a performance than an environment being activated.
The record’s greatest achievement is its transformation of steel from an image of permanence into a source of uncertainty. Serra’s sculptures appear immovable, yet inside this music they become unstable acoustic bodies filled with pressure, memory and invisible motion. Vian finds the latent voices within their interiors; Merzbow magnifies those voices until the metal seems to answer. Inside Richard Serra Sculptures does not provide an audio tour of an artwork. It creates a new structure from the encounter—forty-one minutes of curved noise, buried melody and resonant darkness that the listener must enter and navigate.
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