MERZBOW – Akashaplexia (2025)
Some records you listen to. Some records you endure. A few rare ones quietly rewire how listening itself works.
Akashaplexia belongs to the third species.
Merzbow has always treated sound less like music and more like matter - something to cut, compress, melt, stack. But here the noise feels strangely lucid, almost anatomical. Not the usual total demolition, not the ecstatic overload of the classic harsh walls. This is pressure with intelligence behind it. A sculpted violence.
There’s a difference.
If an older stereotype used to state: Merzbow = chaos. Reality says: Merzbow = microscopic control disguised as collapse.
While composing, you can imagine Akita operating like a lab technician: gain calibrated, distortions layered, frequencies filtered with surgical care. Decisions everywhere. Craft everywhere. It’s closer to experimental chemistry than to rock mythology.
Then the sound hits you - and all that careful structure disappears.
Sheets of abrasive highs. Low-end tremors like distant trains. Sudden openings that feel like oxygen leaks. You don’t follow “tracks”; you drift through climates. The body reacts first, interpretation limps behind.
Two musics coexist:
- the one he builds,
- and the one your nervous system survives.
They barely resemble each other. And yet, mysteriously, they match. That mismatch is the whole game.
Akashaplexia feels tighter, more focused than many past releases. Less sprawl, more density. Instead of flooding the room, it compresses the air. Listening with headphones feels almost claustrophobic, like the sound is inside your skull rather than outside. Not spectacular. Not theatrical. More internal, more psycho-logical.
Noise as inner weather, just to stress on a metaphor.
There’s something oddly meditative about it. After ten minutes, your brain stops asking for melody. After twenty, you stop expecting anything at all. What remains is raw perception: texture, fatigue, attention flickering on and off. The album turns into a mirror. You end up observing yourself listening.
Few genres dare to do that. Noise doesn’t entertain; it exposes.
In the end, Merzbow still performs the same quiet miracle he always has: transforming cables and circuits into an experience that feels existentially bigger than the machinery that produced it. Pure hardware, mere metaphysics.
No riffs. No hooks. Just electricity thinking out loud.
And somehow, against all common sense, it works.