2<\/a><\/sup> for example, who conceived \u201cMeeting of Cars and Airplanes\u201d, which played in Milan in 1914 to a flabbergasted audience. At first, Merzbow was a duo. But Akita continues the project on his own, active today more than ever. A Merzbow record is not suitable dinner party music. It would be absurd, unless the guests were already fans of this unusual music. And Merzbow won\u2019t be found in the music collection of just any regular household\u2014of course, what is a regular household? That\u2019s another question\u2014it would only be tolerated for two to three minutes at a time, and otherwise eternally shelved, the turntable never having the honor of its presence. Why? Because every Merzbow record is an eruption of unbridled, grating sound. An assault that always elicits comments like: \u201cWhere is that insufferable drill or washing machine sound coming from?\u201d<\/p>\nWhat noise subtracts is the constraint. And here, Merzbow takes full liberty: he delivers the inaudible, and worse yet, he hardly makes his presence known, even though his name is in large letters on the album title, he draws on seemingly contradictory genres that travel in all directions (Industrial, Heavy Metal, Free Jazz, Pop, Electronica). He has made around 334 albums in his name, and over 50 additional singles, while his contributions to other projects are so numerous and discrete that they are practically impossible to count.<\/p>\n
At this very moment, in 2019, Merzbow has already released eight albums. Undoubtedly nine, maybe even ten! And it\u2019s just the beginning.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t matter whether they\u2019re bad or good. And this is why Merzbow is a true \u2018subtractor\u2019. His music equalizes, levels, cancels out the rough, all while continually incorporating new elements, as it has for 40 years.<\/p>\n
Contrary to the American group The Residents which, in 1997, pursued the curious project of compiling their most well-known albums\u2014versions of Concentrate<\/em> appearing in Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses<\/em>, an entire album \u201cconcentrated\u201d to last about ten minutes\u2014, Merzbow never tires from expanding his noise: everything starts as small as a handkerchief and unfolds to the dimensions of a parachute. And incidentally, Masami Akita also has a spotless record of involvement in the ALF (Animal Liberation Front) and as an environmental activist. For him it is of utmost importance that he participates in certain debates solely as a musician, and that is why he\u2019s included in this Chronicle.<\/p>\nOther noise artists could have been mentioned here. Merzbow\u2019s cousins to a certain degree. For example, American musician William Basinski. Or the project The Caretaker<\/em>, a front for James Kirby, an Anglo-Saxon musician we know relatively little about. Both work on the slow destruction of sound; the former in order to create an image of the end of the world (Basinski with The Disintegration Loops<\/em>, 2002), the latter to evoke the memory loss provoked by various pathologies (The Caretaker<\/em>, with the series Everywhere At The End Of Time<\/em> initiated in 2016).<\/p>\nPierre Boeswillwald, another musician extreme in his own way, says this about his piece Nuisances<\/em>: \u201cStarting from microphone recordings of numerous sounds, the author chose not to systematically use the \u2018best ones’. Therefore this construction always tried to refine itself whilst constantly being polluted by interferences, which are nuisances. As in nature, man seeks to refine his environment but destroys it through his mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\nA good description of what noise music can be.<\/p>\n
When it comes to noise, you can speak in terms of pollution\u2014in the good sense. The image might make you laugh. Some people hear in the roughness of a sound what others find in peaceful music. It\u2019s somewhere between making up for what\u2019s missing and developing a friendship. And this goes for the noise music fan with regard to abrasive sound. Once he\u2019s tasted it, it\u2019s hard to like anything else.<\/p>\n
If Merzbow\u2019s music is a representation of our world, taking shape across several hundred albums, then it is a perfect image. Dirty, painful and joyful. Always on the brink of disaster, but avoiding it by a hair. Until which album?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
THIS WAS: Noise considered as music as subtraction.<\/strong><\/p>\nTranslation by Maya Dalinsky<\/strong><\/p>\nCover : \u00a9 Ana\u00efs Enjalbert<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[wptpa id=”14″] To start this chronicle, let\u2019s define what is known as noise music. According to Wikipedia: \u201cNoise music includes a wide range of musical styles and sound-based creative practices that feature noise as a primary aspect. (…) It may incorporate live machine sounds, non-musical vocal techniques, physically manipulated audio media, processed sound recordings,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101027,"featured_media":15374,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1847],"tags":[1854],"corpus":[1179],"post_types":[1329],"associate_editors":[],"authors":[1627],"class_list":["post-14494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","tag-counterculture","corpus-subtraction-chronicles","post_types-chronique-en","authors-jean-baptiste-farkas-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14494"},{"taxonomy":"corpus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/corpus?post=14494"},{"taxonomy":"post_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_types?post=14494"},{"taxonomy":"associate_editors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/associate_editors?post=14494"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=14494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}