GARY PANTER BLOG

A few nights, ago my superhero friend, JM, mind thrumming bassplayer for a great metropolitan combo, suggested I meet him at Issue Project Room to capture Masami Akita, also known as mad, noise scientist, Merzbow– who years ago, disguised as a sincere and sensitive young man, took the name of the mutated kitchen of Kurt Schwitters, ancient master of destruction and reassembly, and began a thirty year rampage of audio and sonic assault, which juts, unabatedly, further and further, into our new century.

When I arrived, JM was already in the vast hall with an assembled throng of witting Eloi. Assuming that Akita would unleash some perplexing new sound weapon, the multitude steeled themselves by long exposure to MV CArbon and Philip White, a two person team, manning and womanning a transparent cello and a facebook. The transparent axe was bowed into turbid sense-blocking tin-shearing ossicle flack, while the ack ack of the facebook issued soundwaves insensate to hominid noise capacities, yet, for all that wondermint, a bracing sea chantey, compared to what followed.

The slim man in black approached his table of sonic kill devices casually, almost innocently, but we were not fooled, having quite a number of representations of his psychotropic sprees on cd and vinyl, from Material Action to Frog. Masami has been rumored to keep a living chicken in his madlab which he is coddling into unpreparedness against the day. And it was Masami, his belt length black tresses sweeping the kill-switch, resolute before us. Before JM or me or the throng could bleat, the wall of sound he freed was moving through us and ever proceeding in our direction, turning us to oatmeal with sugar and butter and milk, like cold air rushing under hot air, turning the mental inlight to green for GO and ripping chunks out of the sky inside IPR. I was writhing and squirming, as I had dropped one ear plug, then two, at my feet in the dark, lost and unretrievable in the maze of folding chair legs. Luckily, I had two more Pink Ladies in my watch pocket and I stuffed them into my elephantine ears for all I was worth, as Akita Masami reached for his metallic Jack Kirby earth destroying belt with its glinting and horrifying laser etched decal of a star system imploding on front. He detached the electric weasel. The fun was just beginning.