It is difficult to keep pace with Masami Akita. The 69-year-old Japanese noise artist, who since 1979 under the name Merzbow has helped shape the genre, released no fewer than a dozen albums in 2025 alone. On a rare mini-tour with stops in Helsinki, Stockholm and Aarhus, he showed that his energy remains intact. At Radar he gathered an audience that had travelled far to experience the godfather of noise – an artist who has consistently insisted on noise as a physical, almost tactile experience. Wearing a bucket hat, Akita constructed his trajectories with clear architectural precision. Layer upon layer of distortion and feedback took shape and struck like a brush of metal: hard, cutting, physical – uncompromising, yet at the same time remarkably nuanced.
Akita worked not only with electronics, but also with homemade metal instruments – first a banjo-shaped device, then a square musical saw – lending the sound a raw, tangible materiality. Everywhere, microscopic shifts in texture emerged, small fissures of tone within the massive pressure.
The opening set by frã (Francisco Moura) began the evening with a more fragile, yet persistent electronic texture, a precise counterpoint to Merzbow’s compact blocks of sound. Some might have wished for a gentler entry into the musical year 2026, but the concert underscored the ambitions Radar is currently pursuing.
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek
