The favorite moniker of Japan's Masami Akita appears on hundreds of albums. The name comes from German artist Kurt Schwitters' famous work Merzbau, which he also called The Cathedral of Erotic Misery. Akita's choice reflects his fondness for junk art (through Schwitters' collage method) and his fascination with ritualized eroticism, namely in the form of fetishism and bondage. All these elements constitute the Merzbow persona.

Akita was born in Tokyo in 1956. He grew up with psychedelic rock and began to play the guitar in progressive rock cover bands, in particular with drummer Kiyoshi Mizutani, who would remain a frequent collaborator. After high school, Akita studied literature and visual arts in college. There he discovered free jazz and studied seriously the ideas of Dada and the surrealists (Salvador Dali remained a big influence). Akita gradually withdrew himself from the rock scene and began experimenting in his basement with broken tape recorders and feedback.

In 1979, Akita created his own cassette label, Lowest Arts & Music, and released the first of many albums, Metal Acoustic Music. Infiltrating the then-burgeoning network of underground industrial music, Merzbow lined up one cassette after another, packaged in Xeroxed collage art. His harsh noise eschewed the primitive anger found in this scene (Throbbing Gristle, Man Is the Bastard) to reach a Zen state, a calm inside the storm. Mizutani occasionally appeared on some of the raw material, as would other musicians (like Reiko.A), but in essence Merzbow is Akita. The artist made low-budget live appearances in Tokyo, but his main focus remained on his art production and his writing (he is erudite in 20th century art and the Japanese tradition of bondage).

In 1983, Akita's first LP, Material Action 2 (NAM), was released on Chaos/Eastern Works in Japan. Out of the mail-art network and into the specialty record shops, Merzbow began to attract some eyes and ears. Akita started a second label, ZSF Produkt, which put out dozens of 7"s, EPs, LPs, and more cassettes. By the late '80s, other record labels had begun to pay interest, namely the Australian Extreme. Collaborative (1988), an LP recorded with Achim Wollscheid, brought the Merzbow sound to more international listeners, and slowly Akita invaded other territories. By the mid-'90s, his reputation verged on the mythical. He toured Europe and the U.S., and had high(er)-profile releases on Extreme, RRR, and Alchemy.

In 1997, Extreme announced it was putting in production a 50-CD box set, Merzbox. It was finally released three years later. It includes 30 reissues dating as far back as 1979, and 20 discs' worth of unreleased material, and remains the biggest musical statement in the history of noise. More widely available albums for Alien8 Recordings (Aqua Necromancer, 1998) and Tzadik (1930, 1998), combined with constant worldwide touring, have taken the artist out of mythical status and propelled him into the legendary. In the late '90s, Akita started to collaborate with other artists outside the Merzbow moniker, namely with Mike Patton (as Maldoror) and Otomo Yoshihide. Both a prolific composer and performer, Akita continued his string of Merzbow releases into the next century, including Frog (2001), V (2003), Merzbird (2004), the two-volume set Minazo (2006), Merzbear and Synth Destruction (2007), Dolphin Sonar (2008), and the multi-volume 13 Japanese Birds series issued monthly between January 2009 and January 2010. He followed this massive undertaking with Another Merzbow Records, released by the U.K's Dirtier Promotions imprint in April of 2010. Ever prolific, and with a huge backlog of archival material, Akita released ten collections in 2011, as well as an additional four live sets, and four more albums appeared in 2012, along with the box sets Merzphysics and Merzmorphosis.

The following year saw Merzbow issue a number of important live and studio albums on his own and in collaboration with other artists -- a total of ten. Among them were Live at Molde International Jazz Festival on Smalltown Supersound, Katowice, a concert in Poland with Balázs Pándi, Cat's Squirrel with Oren Ambarchi, Partikel III with Nordvargr, and No Closure with Scott Miller and Lee Camfield, as well as the solo studio dates Tamayodo and Kookaburra. Uncharacteristically, 2014 saw the release of a lone recording, a self-titled split with Full of Hell on Profound Lore. (He spent most of the year writing and taking photographs.)

Merzbow was back to recording in earnest for a number of labels during 2015. In addition to solo offerings including Nezumimochi, Wildwood, and Konchuuki, there were notable collaborative offerings with Askew (Level), Akira Sakata, Jim O'Rourke, and Chikamorachi (Flying Basket), and Cuts of Guilt, Cuts Deeper with Mats Gustafsson, Thurston Moore, and Pandi that appeared on Rare Noise.

Merzbow also resumed his collaborative relationship with Boris when the two acts played together at Fever. In 2016, Gensho appeared on Relapse. The album's first disc featured drumless recordings by Boris, mostly re-recordings of earlier songs, as well as a cover of My Bloody Valentine's "Sometimes." The second disc was a new studio recording by Merzbow, intended to be played simultaneously with Boris' disc (the two are the same length). The Japanese issue of the album on Daymare included Gensho at Fever 11272015, a double-live album of their joint concert performance. In addition, as Masami Akita, he released the duo album Kouen Kyoudai with Japanese composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist Eiko Ishibashi on Thrill Jockey in spring of the following year, and An Untroublesome Defencelessness with drummer Pandi and guitarist Keiji Haino on Rare Noise during the summer. ~ François Couture