For a couple of years 12 Floors was one of my most listened-to Merzbow discs, but I had a hard time pinning down what I could say about it that wasn’t simply a rundown of what spewed out of the speakers. Then I read Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, newly translated into English, and felt like I had seen and smelled and tasted a little of the moment in time that was also being evoked on this record. The book drops you into the middle of the post-quake hurly-burly of Tokyo’s Asakusa district, with language so rich in allusions that it gave translators headaches for decades. Both the book and the album are impressionistic in their own ways; with 12 Floors, I thought something of the same thing as Yoshinotsune. This isn’t an attempt to recreate that time or evoke it, exactly, but something that Merzbow might have created had he lived during that time.

It doesn’t seem that way at first, though: “Wa 30.25”, the opening track, sounds a great deal like an outtake from the same sessions that produced 1930—noise loops subjected to a good deal of phase shifting and equalization, starting and ending as if it were in the middle of something. “Kareha” (“Dead Leaves”) is where the album ties in most closely with its subject and period, as it blends, skips, switches and interleaves cut-ups from various Japanese jazz-age 78s. When there’s noise, it’s mostly subdued rumbling and chittering, more environmental than assaultive. The effect is weirdly nostalgic, like flipping quickly through a sheaf of ephemera from the period—newspapers, magazines, handbills, or the votive stickers (plastered in improbable locations) that Kawabata describes in the opening chapters of his novel.

Gradually the noise steps to the fore, and the third track (“Collapse…”) features the wah-wah / phased noise loops from the first section, but with a few more environmental effects and more of the choppy granular synthesis we heard applied in the second track. After some time you start to realize you’re hearing many of the same basic sounds over and over again, just heavily transformed and processed. It’s less like experiencing the earthquake itself as it is picking through the rubble afterwards, where everything that was once familiar has now become a pulverized wreck.

Collapse was put out by the Norwegian [OHM] Records label, also the distributors of what seems to be another Japanese-culture-inspired Merzbow release, New Takamagahara. In the same vein is Merzbo’s collaboration with The New Blockaders, The Ten Feet Square Hut (so named for Kamo-Chomei’s philosophical tract of the same name). The connections between the titles and the albums themselves may be tenuous, but that doesn’t make me any the less interested in exploring what connections do exist.