Remblandt Assemblage by Merzbow
Recorded and mixed at home in 1980 and originally released in 1981 on cassette by Lowest Music & Arts, Remblandt Assemblage captures Merzbow at a pivotal early moment, when Japanese noise was still tangled with free improvisation, tape work and industrial atmospheres rather than full-scale harsh noise. Imagine Masami Akita in a small Tokyo room, surrounded by scavenged electronics, cheap radios spitting static, and strung-out guitars waiting to be tortured—everything feeding into a tangle of wires and tape decks. This wasn’t yet the impenetrable noise walls that would define his legend; it was something rawer, more tactile, a sound world still breathing and searching for its shape.
Across the four vinyl sides, the sound unfolds as a shifting collage of machine-like drones, metallic friction, detuned radio signals, junk percussion, tape manipulations and warped string sonorities from prepared guitar, electric guitar and bass, with enough air and space to let small details surface and disappear rather than collapsing into a single wall of sound. You hear the physicality of it all: eggshell cutters scraping against amplified surfaces, tabla hits swallowed by feedback swells, radio broadcasts from 1980s Japan flickering like distant memory fragments. There’s a humanity here—Akita’s breath, the creak of chair against floorboards, the hiss of tape—that makes even the harshest moments feel intimate rather than assaultive. It’s noise with room to wander, where your ear becomes complicit, picking its own path through the density.
Like Kurt Schwitters building his Merzbau from found objects, Akita assembles sound from the refuse of modern life—discarded circuits, thrift-store instruments, broadcast detritus—creating something greater than the sum of its broken parts. This isn’t destruction for its own sake; it’s construction through collision, where every metallic scrape, warped pluck, and sudden percussive burst becomes another fragment slotting into a structure that’s always on the verge of collapse, yet somehow holds. The genius lies in that tension: what could be overwhelming becomes hypnotic, a machine shop trance where chaos reveals its own hidden patterns.
Remblandt Assemblage is an essential early Merzbow work, not only historically but as a listening experience: a vivid snapshot of Akita’s first experiments with noise as assemblage, where every scrape, pluck and burst of interference feels like another fragment added to a constantly mutating structure. Drop the needle anywhere and you’re inside that 1980 room—the air heavy with possibility, every sound a decision about what noise could become. Play it loud and it fills space like smoke; play it quiet and it’s a private ritual. Either way, it demands attention not through volume but through invention, proving that Merzbow’s mastery was always more than decibels—it was architecture.
Transferred from the original source and prepared to retain its raw, abrasive grain while preserving depth and spatial presence, this edition frames Remblandt Assemblage at the exact moment Merzbow’s language begins to crystallise. What was once a fuzzy cassette artifact now reveals microscopic details: the exact decay of a string’s vibration, the spatial placement of microphones capturing roomtone and movement, the subtle phasing between left and right channels as tape heads wear against source material. A document of a real room in action, now given lasting physical form—it’s as if you can smell the solder burns and feel the warmth of vacuum tubes through the speakers.
Credits
All music by Masami Akita
Masami Akita plays: electric guitar, bass, tapes, electronics, material action
(uncredited: prepared acoustic guitar, tabla, junk percussion, microphone, radio, egg cutter & noise)
