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De​-​Soundtrack

by Merzbow

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about

This album contains several tracks that were contributed to foreign compilation cassettes.
Tracks 2 and 6 fall into that cassettes, which are quite valuable considering that the compilations they were contributed to are not easy to find nowadays.
The shuffle-like guitar and bass playing that appears as a theme at the beginning of the second track, and is used as a sample in many other tracks, is a fragment of a studio session with Kiyoshi Mizutani. As can be heard on several tracks, including the first 25 seconds of the first track, a drama record from the science fiction film "Earth Defense Force" (released by King Records in 1984) is sampled and scratched. The word "Soundtrack" was used in the title in reference to the fact that it was sampleded.
In the mid-80s, the period in which this album was produced, Merzbow established his own style of industrial noise through the use of a variety of tape based sources, the use of mechanical loops, and a thorough radicalization of distorted tones, all of which resonated with the industrial movement that had emerged around the world since the appearance of Throbbing Gristle. It can be said that this is the first achievement in his career.
In addition to the strong aspect of this album as a radical cut-up collage using various tape sources, what characterizes the songs on this album (as well as the studio session with Kiyoshi Mizutani mentioned earlier) is the high ratio of instrumental performances in the samples used, and the blinding speed with which they intervene in the flow of the performances with sound cuts and edits. Tracks 4 and 6, which use various instruments and sounds, including junk-like sounds, are particularly interesting, as they seem to reconstruct Merzbow's sound from his duo days with Kiyoshi Mizutani, when he repeatedly experimented with sounds in sessions using instruments, with the sensibility and touch of this time. The other tracks, especially the title track (No.2 and No.3), have the strongest sense of time fragmentation among Merzbow's works of the 80's, which made extensive use of collage techniques. This is an important group of tracks that shows that Masami Akita's senses were extremely radicalized at this point, especially in terms of sound transitions.

yorosz (aka Shuta Hiraki)

credits

released July 13, 2021

All Music by Masami Akita
Recorded & Mixed at ZSF Produkt Studio, Tokyo, 1986-87.
Remastered from Original Cassette Tape at Munemihouse, Tokyo, August 2018.
Yasuyuki Nakamura (slowdown records) : A&R

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Merzbow Tokyo, Japan

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