The Prosperity of Vice, The Misfortune of Virtue may carry a 2025 release date, but its nineteen untitled pieces come from a very different point in Merzbow’s history. Masami Akita recorded the music in 1996 as the soundtrack to Akutoku no Sakae/Bitoku no Fuko, a theater production by the Japanese company Romantica based on writings by the Marquis de Sade. Room40’s remastered edition retrieves that material from its limited original circulation, adds another piece from the same sessions and reveals a side of Merzbow that can disappear beneath the reputation for uninterrupted extremity.
This is not a conventional Merzbow album organized around two or three extended assaults. Its nineteen tracks resemble scenes, transitions, sudden entrances and isolated actions. Some last only a minute or two. Others have enough room to establish denser environments, but even these retain the feeling of music designed to accompany shifting bodies, lighting and dramatic situations. The brevity repeatedly interrupts immersion. A texture appears, establishes its own temperature and disappears before the listener can treat it as a permanent landscape.
The theatrical origin changes the function of the noise. Instead of behaving as the entire event, the music often leaves space for an event that is no longer visible. Certain tracks resemble cues waiting for an actor to enter. Others sound like the aftermath of an action occurring beyond the microphone. Without the original stage production, these absences become part of the album. The listener receives the architecture of a performance after the performers, costumes and scenery have been removed.
Akita’s sound during this period was capable of extraordinary density, but The Prosperity of Vice does not apply maximum pressure continuously. Heavy electronic masses appear beside thinner pieces built from scraping, metallic vibration, low mechanical movement and isolated bursts of feedback. The contrast is essential. One track may spread into a broad field of rumbling distortion, while the next exposes a handful of dry sounds separated by uncomfortable space. The album keeps changing its physical dimensions.
The shorter pieces are particularly effective. They do not have time to develop according to ordinary musical expectations, so they function as abrupt states. A grinding movement may begin as though it has already been running for hours. A shrill electronic tone enters, cuts across the room and stops. A cluster of impacts briefly suggests machinery, ritual percussion or objects being dragged across a stage. These fragments feel less composed toward conclusions than activated and then withdrawn.
That structure suits the source material. The title combines the ideas behind de Sade’s Juliette, often associated with the prosperity of vice, and Justine, associated with the misfortunes suffered by virtue. The pairing presents a world in which cruelty, manipulation and corruption are rewarded while innocence becomes a mechanism for producing further suffering. Merzbow does not illustrate that philosophy with recognizable narrative scenes. Instead, the music constructs an unstable moral atmosphere in which force dominates and no sound remains safely outside contamination.
The most violent passages do not necessarily feel triumphant. Distortion may arrive with enormous weight, but it frequently sounds diseased, unstable or close to collapsing under its own pressure. High frequencies tear across thicker layers rather than sitting cleanly above them. Low rumbles suggest a foundation that is moving rather than supporting anything. Vice may prosper, but the world it produces is not orderly. It is swollen, abrasive and structurally unsound.
The quieter sections can be even more disturbing. When the walls of noise withdraw, smaller details become exposed: a scrape, a pulse, a distant electronic vibration or a thin sustained frequency. These sounds create anticipation without promising a recognizable event. Because the music originated in theater, the empty space seems occupied by invisible movement. Something may be approaching, but the recording never identifies it.
This attention to isolated detail distinguishes the album from the popular caricature of Merzbow as a producer of undifferentiated volume. Akita repeatedly breaks large sonic masses into smaller components. Feedback, metal, rhythm and electronic debris are allowed to exist separately before being forced together again. The album demonstrates that his harshness depends upon arrangement. An explosion has greater force when surrounded by restraint; a high tone becomes more painful after the lower frequencies have been removed.
Rhythm appears in incomplete forms. Pulses rise beneath the distortion, but they rarely stabilize into grooves. Repeated impacts may suggest industrial machinery before slipping out of alignment. Elsewhere, movement is produced through editing rather than percussion, with abrupt changes generating their own jagged momentum. The theater soundtrack did not require a consistent beat. It required sound capable of altering the pressure inside a scene.
The nineteen-track sequence prevents any one technique from becoming definitive. Dense harsh noise, electroacoustic scraping, empty stage-like intervals and compact eruptions keep replacing one another. The album behaves like a cabinet of related devices rather than a single machine. Each device produces a different form of unease, but all belong to the same damaged environment.
Lawrence English’s remaster gives the material considerable depth without polishing away its abrasion. The low end has physical weight, while the sharper frequencies retain their capacity to wound. More importantly, the remaster preserves the distance between sounds. Quiet elements do not merely become pauses between loud sections; they occupy their own dimensional spaces. This makes the recording’s theatrical character easier to hear. The stage may be invisible, but its size can be sensed.
The additional track does not feel like a modern attachment placed onto an old album. It extends the collection’s fragmented logic, adding one more surviving room to an already incomplete building. Because every piece is untitled, there is no authoritative narrative sequence beyond the order of the recording. The listener cannot match a cue to a named character or action. The absence of titles forces the sound to remain open, severed from the precise theatrical moments it once accompanied.
That separation is one reason the album works outside its original context. The music does not require knowledge of the production to remain compelling. Its dramatic function has become abstract. Sudden density can still feel like violence entering a scene. A nearly empty track can still create suspense. A repeated mechanical sound can still imply submission, punishment or ritual without depicting any one of them.
The Prosperity of Vice also captures Merzbow during the middle of the 1990s, a period often represented by huge, brightly saturated works of harsh electronic overload. This soundtrack complicates that picture. It contains the expected brutality, but it also shows Akita working with timing, interruption and spatial restraint. The format required him to think not only about sound itself but about where sound could sit beside another medium.
The result is a Merzbow album defined by absence as much as excess. The original actors are absent. The theatrical images are absent. The specific meanings of the untitled cues are absent. What remains is the pressure those missing elements once required: nineteen chambers of distortion, scraping metal, unstable rhythm and charged emptiness.
Nearly three decades after its recording, The Prosperity of Vice, The Misfortune of Virtue no longer functions primarily as accompaniment. It has become a fractured standalone work whose dramatic world must be reconstructed entirely through sound. The stage has vanished, but the atmosphere survived.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.