This new release from Masami Akita, a.k.a. Merzbow, the Nabob of Japanese Noise, contains three tracks, simply entitled ‘Anicca parts 1-3’, adding up to nearly an hour of sonic severity. The first part of ‘Annica’ was recorded at the famous Tin Pan Alley studio in London on 20th April, 2008, the day after Merzbow’s live performance at ULU, supported by Satori and Sutcliffe Jugend. The second and third parts were recorded later at Munemi House in Tokyo.

The last couple of times I've seen Merzbow play live, at the ULU gig and then at the 2008 Supersonic festival in Birmingham, where he appeared with Keiji Haino as Kikuru, he’s played a homemade instrument consisting of a rectangular metal body slung on a guitar strap, with various metal springs and pickups mounted on it, and as the booklet of Anicca includes photos of this contraption and Merzbow playing it, I assume that this contributes towards the music on this release.

Another thing I learned from witnessing the Kikuru performance is that Merzbow is a pretty handy rock drummer, and this can be heard on ‘Anicca part 1’, as he plays improvised drums throughout the 18-minute track over the typical Merzbow maelstrom of cut-up noise and coruscating blasts of shrieking frequencies, giving the piece an almost free jazz-like feel, which is also reminiscent of the ‘Rocket Incantation’ track on last year’s Experience The Concreteness live album from Japanoise supergroup South Saturn Delta. I'm certainly not enough of a Merzbow buff to know whether drums feature on any of his other hundreds of releases, but I can’t recall having heard any Merzbow with drums before.

‘Anicca part 2’ is more conventional, at least by the extremely unconventional standards of Merzbow – there are no drums, and the track is dominated by vicious swarms of mid-frequency attacks overlaid with piercing feedback, the layers of tones swooping and whirling around each other in an endless vertiginous collapse. As with other noise releases, I find the trick to enjoying this is just to relax and let it rage around me. It’s like being trapped on a particularly queasy rollercoaster ride whilst simultaneously being flayed alive and electrocuted, true, but it’ll just hurt worse if you offer it any resistance.

‘Anicca part 3’ is arguably less painful, with babbling torrents of digital pulses coming in around the two-minute mark recalling Merzbow’s Partikel collaborations with Nordvargr, and a generally thinner, less overpowering sound than ‘Anicca part 2’ throughout. By the time the track settles into a looped, metallic rhythm at around 15 minutes, it sounds almost mellow by comparison with what has gone before.

Again, I'm not really enough of a noise aficionado to offer a very authoritative evaluation of Anicca, but it certainly seems to offer something new for Merzbow’s fans to engage with. Now if you’ll excuse me, I'm going to lie down in darkness and silence for a while.

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