Masami Akita
Japanese noise musician, founder of Merzbow in 1979, and prolific solo artist under his own name.
Masami Akita (b. 1956, Tokyo) began playing improvised rock with high-school friend Kiyoshi Mizutani before founding Merzbow with him in 1979, taking the project’s name from Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau to signal a junk-art, Dada-inflected approach to noise. That year he also founded the cassette label Lowest Music & Arts to trade tapes with other underground artists, releasing Merzbow’s earliest recordings, including the debut tape Metal Acoustic Music, through it. As Merzbow’s sole constant member since Mizutani’s 1989 departure, Akita has driven the project’s studio output past 300 full-length releases — a discography spanning early junk-percussion noise, harsh-noise LPs of the 1990s such as Pulse Demon (1996), and the fifty-disc Merzbox retrospective (2000) — while also recording extensively under his own name and in collaboration with musicians including drummer Balázs Pándi and saxophonist Mats Gustafsson from 2009 onward.
