ABSTRACT
By definition, it ought to be impossible to produce literally unlistenable music, unless it were produced at frequencies that were audible only to dogs or aliens, in which case it would be listenable at least to them. At a certain point fairly early in his career, Masami Akita, the “Godfather” of Japanese noise-music otherwise known as Merzbow, consciously set out to produce a music that was accessible, designed to be heard, and yet was unlistenable in the sense of unmasterable, uncompletable, too formidable to encompass. (Akita, in Woodward, 1999, p. 40). It would be affirmed as music, but of such a degree of dissonance and discordance as to be unlistenable even to the avant-garde cognoscenti familiar with Varese, Cage, musique concrète, Stockhausen, free jazz, or, indeed, fans of the extremes of rock, Hendrix at his wildest, the Who at their most auto-destructive, heavy metal, industrial metal, grindcore, death metal … By reputation and critical reception, Merzbow exceeds them all.
