Dad and I always used the same things for different ends. When he bought a shortwave radio, he listened to the BBC World Service and whatever Turkish-language broadcasts he could pick up. I listened to the atmospherics and the numbers stations. When he bought a CD player, he played CDs on it. I also played CDs on it, and used the pause button and jog dial to create my own impromptu remixes. Small wonder I ended up a Merzbow fan; all of Masami Akita’s records have the feeling of snapping on a shortwave radio inside your head and tuning it to the sound of the atmospherics coming out of his head.
Door Open at 8 AM has that station-between-the-stations feeling throughout: it’s a mixture (Mixtur, ha ha) of jazz/prog-rock record samples and seething, shearing electronics plus live-action recordings. It’s roughly closest in spirit to Merzbeat, both in the nature of the material transformed and the way the transformations play out. It hasn’t yet grown on me the way Merzbuddha and Yoshinotsune have, but I know it will—Merzbow’s music requires that you approach with empty hands, or you never seize it for yourself. It’s music you listen into, not just music you listen to.
