An Instagram Reel that looks like an 80s coming-of-age movie pops up on your feed. It’s four teenage boys in an American-style basement – comfy sofas, guitars, ping pong table – jeering and laughing. But they aren’t secretly drinking beer or planning on sneaking out. They’re brandishing a vinyl copy of Pulse Demon, the most popular album from the cult Japanese noise artist Merzbow, and subjecting themselves to its brutally harsh sound in full, for fun. “I think this is the Book of Revelation: The Soundtrack,” one guy blurts out, a vague look of fear in his eyes.
Merzbow, real name Masami Akita, is the world’s most renowned noise artist. Since 1979, Akita has released more than 400 recordings, which range from a 10-hour long album misleadingly titled Merzbient (it’s anything but ambient) to a free-noise supergroup called Flying Testicle. Since February, Sam Andrews, the video’s 18-year-old creator, has been attempting to listen to every one, and is documenting his progress online each day. “I think of my day in album-size chunks,” he says, laughing. “It’s like, get up at seven, get breakfast and then headphones in: noise.”
Some of Andrews’ videos have garnered half a million views, and drawn attention from Akita himself. More than just a stunt, they are also prompting conversation about how listeners engage with challenging music in an age of streaming services, algorithms and short-form content always pushing us towards the next thing.
Aside from the penchant for harsh noise and a love for experimental bands such as Swans and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Andrews is a pretty regular teenager. His messy bedroom is blurred behind him on our video call. He lives in Georgia, wears a T-shirt from summer camp, is passionate about his Christian faith and tells me he works part-time at a cinema in between mainlining Merzbow and applying for college. “With Merzbow, I need to take breaks on Fridays,” he says. “I need time off.”
Like Akita, Andrews got into music through drumming, but began thinking critically about it after discovering YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano and using reviewing services such as Rate Your Music (RYM). He keeps a colour-coded spreadsheet documenting his Merzbow listening and rates every release on Instagram and RYM. His favourite so far is 1990’s Rainbow Electronics, which he gives an 8/10 for how intentional it feels. The worst: 1996’s Merzbow Loves Emil Beaulieau. “The whole second half of the album is 30 minutes of one frequency,” he says. “It’s like tinnitus. That was my breaking point. I was like, what am I getting here as the listener?”
Andrews’ videos are absurd in character, a testament to how music criticism is changing online and a nod towards Akita’s own unpredictable ethos: his commitment to animal rights and veganism, sparked after raising four pet bantam chickens in 2002; more recently, a strange and unpopular choice to use AI art in his onstage backdrops.
Despite his age, Andrews comes from an older school of music lovers that values full albums and discographies, rarely individual songs or playlists. “It’s almost like a medal of honour to say that I had actually sat through an impossibly long discography, one that no one would ever do in its entirety,” he says.
Merzbow’s music isn’t alien to younger listeners. Online, gen Z wield its shock factor to soundtrack everything from trolls telling older people to play the music on their Alexa, memes comparing noise and K-pop and cinematic shots of broken tech. Andrews sees this short-form content as more mind-numbing than noise music. Deep listening, he says, will “do wonders for your attention span: being able to sit down and see something as a 40-minute piece rather than a song that you’ll hear 30 seconds of and skip”.
Merzbow has about 23,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, but those numbers “do not accurately reflect his relevance”, argues Andrew. As Anohni says in Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, the fact that you might only ever want to listen to highly impactful music twice isn’t a comment on its value. Challenging music such as Merzbow forces listeners to think outside an economy where quality is often conflated with popularity, worth measured by consumption.
Andrews has been shocked to see how much people who don’t usually engage with experimental music have to say when they’re exposed to it. “I had a sleepover and convinced my friends to sit through Pulse Demon with me. What I expected was: ‘What is this? That’s just noise.’ But one friend said he could hear the silence afterwards. One hated it, but he still had more to say than I thought he would.” Even at church, his friends’ parents ask bemused questions about how he listens to such abrasive music. “I love explaining to them how I feel, and they do genuinely listen.”
Still, only 1.6% of Andrews’ audience are his age; most viewers are in their 30s and 40s. “I’ve had people comment things like: ‘I remember back in my college dorm listening to Merzbow in 1990.’ That’s an insane thing to hear. Not only are those people interested in my content, but he really did have a dedicated fanbase back when you had to know a guy who knows a guy to even get your hands on his music.”
Akita himself also found his way to Andrews’ page. “Strangely enough he followed me, liked a reel and collabbed on a post, only to remove himself from the post and unfollow me. The hothead probably saw a comment criticising his use of AI or just didn’t like a score I gave out, who’s to say?” Nevertheless, Andrews remains in awe. “It’s fun to take a mic and mash it into the floor and throw things around. But in terms of actually sticking with that and experimenting, making it something that people really want to listen to, that’s admirable. Fifty to 100 years in the future, people will still probably talk about Pulse Demon and Venereology.”
