Four years ago, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote an article in The New Yorker called “Merzbiebs” where he conflated the music and process of Japanese noise icon Masami Akita (aka Merzbow) with the then-nascent tabloid pop machine of Justin Bieber. Frere-Jones made a very compelling case that the two, while incommensurably disparate musically speaking, were enviably talented and more similar than we’d like to realize, ultimately deciding that they were “both worth hearing.” But that same argument could not be made in 2016. At this point, Bieber is shifting rapidly, releasing vibrant pop songs carved from strange and infectious sounds, while Akita is mired in some very old tropes.
Akita’s latest record, Kouen Kyoudai, is a collaboration with Eiko Ishibashi, a Japanese singer and multi-instrumentalist who has released two Jim O’Rourke-produced albums of languorous J-pop over the last few years. According to the artists, the two tracks that compose this album, “Slide” and “Junglegym,” can be read as “contemporary takes on the avant-garde”—an increasingly meaningless marker often used by artists who want to paint themselves as utterly tasteful outsiders. They also stress that the tension of the music comes from “the human use of the tool” which is “made explicit as these works unfold in a storm of ecstatic human/instrument/interaction.” These pretentious statements create an air of importance, suggesting the album only gains weight from its textural presentation. As for the music itself, it fails to live up to the way it’s offered.
Kouen Kyoudai’s two tracks both run more than 18 minutes, and there is very little that distinguishes them other than the main analog instrument accompanying the field of noise. For “Slide” it's a drum set; for “Junglegym” a piano. But both are generally diminished by Akita’s noodling drone sounds, which hog up too much space, making it seem like Eiko’s contributions were little more than an afterthought. In this case, the forceful drone is like the sonic equivalent of manspreading between subway seats. As the album wears on unchanged through almost 40 minutes, it sounds more like an amorphous chunk of noises than an exploration of contemporary avant-garde.
It’s a shame too. For decades, Akita’s music has been chipping away at an allusive and important thesis: That music created with his array of noise-making tools can be life-affirming and express sublimity from such raw and uncontrollable forces. But a lofty presentation can create lofty expectations from a consumer of art. As such, the entire apparatus revolving around Kouen Kyoudai did it in. The album expects to be taken seriously. It demands to be evaluated under a different aesthetic criteria by pure virtue of its gravity. These demands could be met and accepted if the music here was more than a tired retread of endless philosophical dead-ends alongside a smattering of flashy noises.
