Masami Akita aka Merzbow’s ubiquity when it comes to Japanese noise is partly down to his steely, unflinching presence, partly down to his prodigious discography, but mostly due to the unrelenting drive of his noise, matched with the slow, careful development of his practice. It’s too easy to say all Merzbow sounds the same – I’ve said it before, and been proven very, very wrong – but there are definitely certain phases, from the junky, scrapyard blasts of his earliest music, to the rich, textural flooding of his analogue phase across the ‘80s and ‘90s, into the white-light excoriation of his digital phase, and his more recent music, which seems somehow to reconcile much of what he’s done up to now, often in consort with other musicians. A lot of the footage of Merzbow online is from the past decade – it’s great stuff, but finding earlier clips allows for something more revelatory to unspool in front of your eyes and ears, a more physical, tactile engagement with the various properties of noise making materials, as opposed to the steely resolve of ‘00s Merzbow, sat still in front of his laptop. This clip, of relatively unknown provenance, is especially worthwhile for the appearance of Reiko A, Akita’s collaborator of the time.