Kikù Hibino on the Curious Nature of Noise Music, Working with Merzbow and Learning from His Hair Stylist
Noise can swallow you. Noise can destroy you. And, at the same time, harsh noise can soothe you. It can manifest love and connect people, the way it connected legendary noise magician Merzbow and Kikù Hibino, a Chicago-based sound artist and the director of Signal Noise, an independent platform for avant-garde sound and video art.
db.XYZ, the first single from their upcoming collaborative album, caught our attention from the first seconds. Why and how? Read our interview with Kikù Hibino and learn.
db.XYZ, the first single from their upcoming collaborative album, caught our attention from the first seconds. Why and how? Read our interview with Kikù Hibino and learn.
— I listened to your track “db.XYZ,” and if I reach for the usual clichés, it defies easy categorization. On the one hand, it’s clearly noise in a very pure, undiluted sense — all the knobs turned to the right, emotions at the limit, the whole thing operating on the assumption that there’s no such thing as “too much.”
On the other hand, my body immediately relaxed. My thoughts somehow gathered themselves and untangled. I even caught myself thinking — why the hell not — that you could put this on the way people put on lo-fi hip-hop, and just sit there doing layouts in InDesign or fixing Excel tables while it runs in the background.
So on one side I can perfectly imagine being at a show where all five senses are stretched tight and I’m completely giving myself over to the wave of it. And on the other side I see in the same piece this total relaxation, almost music reduced to a function.
From the highest manifestation of music — where it pulls you into a flow state — down to the lowest manifestation, where it’s basically a utilitarian thing, the kind of role now easily handled by apps that just generate background music… it doesn’t even feel like a step between those states. It almost feels like they’re the same thing.
I’ve been writing about music for a long time, but I honestly can’t explain that paradox. Could you maybe shed a bit of light on it?
On the other hand, my body immediately relaxed. My thoughts somehow gathered themselves and untangled. I even caught myself thinking — why the hell not — that you could put this on the way people put on lo-fi hip-hop, and just sit there doing layouts in InDesign or fixing Excel tables while it runs in the background.
So on one side I can perfectly imagine being at a show where all five senses are stretched tight and I’m completely giving myself over to the wave of it. And on the other side I see in the same piece this total relaxation, almost music reduced to a function.
From the highest manifestation of music — where it pulls you into a flow state — down to the lowest manifestation, where it’s basically a utilitarian thing, the kind of role now easily handled by apps that just generate background music… it doesn’t even feel like a step between those states. It almost feels like they’re the same thing.
I’ve been writing about music for a long time, but I honestly can’t explain that paradox. Could you maybe shed a bit of light on it?
— That’s a great question. The idea that something extremely loud can also feel relaxing may seem contradictory at first, but I think it has a lot to do with how the brain responds to stability in sound.
For example, when I work, I often listen to pink noise. At a moderate volume it masks surrounding environmental sounds and reduces the overall variation in what I hear. Because the sound remains stable and continuous, my attention is less likely to be pulled away by sudden changes. What emerges is a kind of relaxed concentration.
A similar effect appears in certain forms of techno. Even at club volume, a strong repetitive structure can produce both focus and relaxation. Once the brain recognizes that the underlying pattern will continue, the sound stops demanding constant interpretation. It becomes a stable environment you can inhabit.
At first listen, “dB.XYZ” might seem like a chaotic field of noise. But structurally, it’s built very much like techno. Merzbow’s noise sits mainly in the mid-to-high frequency range — extremely loud, yet surprisingly delicate in its movement. To reinforce those subtle shifts, I manually programmed the kick and sub-bass with millisecond precision. When the musical foundation is this stable, the listener naturally feels more at ease, regardless of the volume.
The voice is the final crucial element. Alexandra reads an abstract text; she doesn’t sing in a way that triggers a conventional emotional reaction. However, her voice redirects what would otherwise be a very muscular sound made only from noise, kick, and sub-bass. Her voice neither disappears into the noise nor floats above it as a vocal line. Instead, it collides with the noise and meets it on equal terms. Sometimes it redirects the flow; sometimes it stops it entirely.
If language were stripped completely of meaning and reduced to pure phonemes, the voice would become no different from an electronic sound. But by leaving small fragments of meaning in the text, the listener senses — almost unconsciously — that someone is trying to communicate something. That faint human presence changes the way we listen.
I explored something related to this in my previous work Sky Trajectories, but here I wanted to push it further. The words in Alexandra’s voice are stripped of clear meaning, yet they never become pure sound. They remain suspended at the threshold of meaning — a place where language almost becomes sense, but never fully arrives there. Holding that edge without falling to either side is the real difficulty.
My hair stylist once told me something that stuck with me: “It’s easy to go crazy. The real skill is producing a sophisticated crazy.” That idea stayed with me. With Alexandra’s voice, I wanted to remove the literal meaning while still preserving a trace of human presence — pushing the sound right to the edge without letting it collapse.
In that space — between noise and voice, structure and instability, meaning and pure sound — tension and relaxation begin to coexist. And once that balance appears, the sound simply starts to move.
For example, when I work, I often listen to pink noise. At a moderate volume it masks surrounding environmental sounds and reduces the overall variation in what I hear. Because the sound remains stable and continuous, my attention is less likely to be pulled away by sudden changes. What emerges is a kind of relaxed concentration.
A similar effect appears in certain forms of techno. Even at club volume, a strong repetitive structure can produce both focus and relaxation. Once the brain recognizes that the underlying pattern will continue, the sound stops demanding constant interpretation. It becomes a stable environment you can inhabit.
At first listen, “dB.XYZ” might seem like a chaotic field of noise. But structurally, it’s built very much like techno. Merzbow’s noise sits mainly in the mid-to-high frequency range — extremely loud, yet surprisingly delicate in its movement. To reinforce those subtle shifts, I manually programmed the kick and sub-bass with millisecond precision. When the musical foundation is this stable, the listener naturally feels more at ease, regardless of the volume.
The voice is the final crucial element. Alexandra reads an abstract text; she doesn’t sing in a way that triggers a conventional emotional reaction. However, her voice redirects what would otherwise be a very muscular sound made only from noise, kick, and sub-bass. Her voice neither disappears into the noise nor floats above it as a vocal line. Instead, it collides with the noise and meets it on equal terms. Sometimes it redirects the flow; sometimes it stops it entirely.
If language were stripped completely of meaning and reduced to pure phonemes, the voice would become no different from an electronic sound. But by leaving small fragments of meaning in the text, the listener senses — almost unconsciously — that someone is trying to communicate something. That faint human presence changes the way we listen.
I explored something related to this in my previous work Sky Trajectories, but here I wanted to push it further. The words in Alexandra’s voice are stripped of clear meaning, yet they never become pure sound. They remain suspended at the threshold of meaning — a place where language almost becomes sense, but never fully arrives there. Holding that edge without falling to either side is the real difficulty.
My hair stylist once told me something that stuck with me: “It’s easy to go crazy. The real skill is producing a sophisticated crazy.” That idea stayed with me. With Alexandra’s voice, I wanted to remove the literal meaning while still preserving a trace of human presence — pushing the sound right to the edge without letting it collapse.
In that space — between noise and voice, structure and instability, meaning and pure sound — tension and relaxation begin to coexist. And once that balance appears, the sound simply starts to move.
— What was the process of creating this track? Did it start from improvisation, or from some clearly formulated vision you already had before touching a single sound? Maybe you even have a kind of code — a set of principles you always approach composition with — or maybe it’s the opposite, more of a search process where you figure things out as you go?
In this sense I’m interested in both sides of it. Philosophically speaking: where are you moving toward and where are you starting from when you write a piece of music — both in general and in the case of this particular track.
And the second thing I’m curious about is the whole technical process: how it actually came together in practice: techniques, gear, even mixing and mastering.
And yes, just to note — I’m asking about this specific song, of course, but also how much this process resembles or differs from the way things usually happen when you work on other compositions.
In this sense I’m interested in both sides of it. Philosophically speaking: where are you moving toward and where are you starting from when you write a piece of music — both in general and in the case of this particular track.
And the second thing I’m curious about is the whole technical process: how it actually came together in practice: techniques, gear, even mixing and mastering.
And yes, just to note — I’m asking about this specific song, of course, but also how much this process resembles or differs from the way things usually happen when you work on other compositions.
— I don’t design everything from the beginning. My method is to listen repeatedly to the sounds I produce and record, layering them over time, and then build a structure afterward that can support them. In a sense, my compositional process is a search for a balance point between the instability of sound and the stability of structure — or sometimes the opposite: stable sounds within an unstable structure.
For the album as a whole, however, I had a fairly clear image long before I touched any sound. While looking at the ceiling decorations in the Vatican in Italy, I was struck by their excessive expansion, and the title “Rococo ∞” suddenly came to mind. At the same time, the idea of “Echomatter” — the voice appearing almost like a physical substance — overlapped with it. By the time I began exchanging files with Merzbow, the overall direction the album should take was already visible.
I write about this thought process in more detail in two texts on my website:
https://kiku-hibino.org/texts/2025/12/10/rococo-infinity
https://kiku-hibino.org/texts/2025/12/18/echomatter
“dB.XYZ” did not begin as an improvisation. One thing Merzbow (Akita-san) and I share is that neither of us works through improvisation. Both of us approach music from an editorial standpoint — shaping how materials are handled rather than performing them spontaneously. I believe this shared attitude is what made the collaboration possible.
In the first stage of production, I created a three-minute beatless foundation. It consisted only of Alexandra’s voice and noise generated by modular synthesizers, including Three Body by Schlappi Engineering and Just Friends by Whimsical Raps.
After I sent that to Akita-san, he layered intense noise over it and sent it back, matching the same length. But the energy was so overwhelming that the entire piece almost became Merzbow’s sound.
In fact, I anticipated this might happen, so I wrote to him in advance that I would take the lead in editing. I wanted to apply something similar to the jump cuts seen in Jean-Luc Godard’s films, but within music.
To begin with, I removed all the Just Friends sounds I had originally placed, in order to control the density of the noise. Then I listened to Akita-san’s material over and over, searching within the constantly advancing flow of noise for tiny moments where the sound slightly thinned out or shifted direction — small openings in the texture. Into those openings I inserted Alexandra’s voice.
The process felt tense, almost like cutting into someone else’s long hair with scissors. But that kind of editing was necessary to avoid chaos and build a new structure. In that sense, the making of this track was less like traditional composition and more like a very deliberate editorial intervention.
During this process I also discovered something fascinating. Merzbow’s sound is massive, but at the same time it contains remarkably delicate movements — almost like the breathing of a living organism.
When I placed Merzbow’s noise inside the DAW, it felt as if I had invited an unfamiliar sonic creature into my own house. The real challenge was how to stabilize that intense vitality within a structure without destroying it.
To support the bold yet extremely subtle movement of the noise, I edited the kick and sub-bass with millisecond precision. For this I used a prototype drum machine called Antilope, sent from the Manifold Research Centre in Poland. It triggered the Assimil8or sampler, whose audio I recorded into Ableton Live and then adjusted manually, one timing detail at a time. On the surface the noise sounds wild and turbulent, but underneath it there is an absolutely stable rhythmic floor.
The mixing took place at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, through an old Neotek analog console. Working together with engineer Alex Inglizian, passing the sound through hardware such as Distressors, was almost magical. Through that process, the sub-bass and kick suddenly blended with the noise in a way that really surprised me. In a sense, without that mixing stage, this record would not have come together.
Mastering was done by Stephan Mathieu, whom I trust completely. I asked him to push the low end as far as possible — to the level of contemporary techno and hip-hop — and after several rounds of remote revisions, the final sound was completed.
For the album as a whole, however, I had a fairly clear image long before I touched any sound. While looking at the ceiling decorations in the Vatican in Italy, I was struck by their excessive expansion, and the title “Rococo ∞” suddenly came to mind. At the same time, the idea of “Echomatter” — the voice appearing almost like a physical substance — overlapped with it. By the time I began exchanging files with Merzbow, the overall direction the album should take was already visible.
I write about this thought process in more detail in two texts on my website:
https://kiku-hibino.org/texts/2025/12/10/rococo-infinity
https://kiku-hibino.org/texts/2025/12/18/echomatter
“dB.XYZ” did not begin as an improvisation. One thing Merzbow (Akita-san) and I share is that neither of us works through improvisation. Both of us approach music from an editorial standpoint — shaping how materials are handled rather than performing them spontaneously. I believe this shared attitude is what made the collaboration possible.
In the first stage of production, I created a three-minute beatless foundation. It consisted only of Alexandra’s voice and noise generated by modular synthesizers, including Three Body by Schlappi Engineering and Just Friends by Whimsical Raps.
After I sent that to Akita-san, he layered intense noise over it and sent it back, matching the same length. But the energy was so overwhelming that the entire piece almost became Merzbow’s sound.
In fact, I anticipated this might happen, so I wrote to him in advance that I would take the lead in editing. I wanted to apply something similar to the jump cuts seen in Jean-Luc Godard’s films, but within music.
To begin with, I removed all the Just Friends sounds I had originally placed, in order to control the density of the noise. Then I listened to Akita-san’s material over and over, searching within the constantly advancing flow of noise for tiny moments where the sound slightly thinned out or shifted direction — small openings in the texture. Into those openings I inserted Alexandra’s voice.
The process felt tense, almost like cutting into someone else’s long hair with scissors. But that kind of editing was necessary to avoid chaos and build a new structure. In that sense, the making of this track was less like traditional composition and more like a very deliberate editorial intervention.
During this process I also discovered something fascinating. Merzbow’s sound is massive, but at the same time it contains remarkably delicate movements — almost like the breathing of a living organism.
When I placed Merzbow’s noise inside the DAW, it felt as if I had invited an unfamiliar sonic creature into my own house. The real challenge was how to stabilize that intense vitality within a structure without destroying it.
To support the bold yet extremely subtle movement of the noise, I edited the kick and sub-bass with millisecond precision. For this I used a prototype drum machine called Antilope, sent from the Manifold Research Centre in Poland. It triggered the Assimil8or sampler, whose audio I recorded into Ableton Live and then adjusted manually, one timing detail at a time. On the surface the noise sounds wild and turbulent, but underneath it there is an absolutely stable rhythmic floor.
The mixing took place at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, through an old Neotek analog console. Working together with engineer Alex Inglizian, passing the sound through hardware such as Distressors, was almost magical. Through that process, the sub-bass and kick suddenly blended with the noise in a way that really surprised me. In a sense, without that mixing stage, this record would not have come together.
Mastering was done by Stephan Mathieu, whom I trust completely. I asked him to push the low end as far as possible — to the level of contemporary techno and hip-hop — and after several rounds of remote revisions, the final sound was completed.
— How were the roles divided between you and Merzbow during the work on this track? And more broadly, how did this collaboration even come about in the first place? What were the points of contact that made you feel it made sense to do something together?
Or maybe it works the other way around — maybe you actually complement each other, and through the collaboration something new appears: either you discover something in your own approach, or something in the other person suddenly gets highlighted.
So I’m curious about the chemistry between you. What is it like and what was the magnet that pulled you toward working together?
Or maybe it works the other way around — maybe you actually complement each other, and through the collaboration something new appears: either you discover something in your own approach, or something in the other person suddenly gets highlighted.
So I’m curious about the chemistry between you. What is it like and what was the magnet that pulled you toward working together?
— On this track “dB.XYZ”— and really throughout the entire album — there wasn’t a fixed division of roles between us. We only had one simple rule: I would create a track first and send it to Akita-san, and he would then add noise to it. Rather than two musicians working together in the same studio, the collaboration unfolded through exchanging sound materials and shaping them through editing.
My relationship with Merzbow goes back quite a long way. The first time I heard his music was around 1998. Someone had left a copy of Pulse Demon in my university research lab, and when I played it, I instinctively pressed the stop button halfway through. It wasn’t rejection or fear — it was a feeling that I wasn’t ready yet to face a sonic extreme of that magnitude. Years later, after I started the label Signal Noise and released Merzbow’s Sedonis, a working relationship gradually developed between us, and eventually the moment felt right to propose a collaboration.
As for musical chemistry, while I've described the technical process, what truly changed was how working with Akita-san’s material shifted my own methodology.
In my usual process, structure comes first, and sound develops inside it. This time it was the opposite. I had already built a foundation, but once Akita-san's noise was layered over it, that original structure was almost entirely submerged. Structure had to be rediscovered from within his sound. That reversal was genuinely new for me. It forced a level of precision in my editing that I hadn't reached before, and I think it pushed my own method forward. That precision doesn't necessarily mean polishing the sound. It also includes treating editing itself almost like an instrument — sometimes working in a rough, jump-cut style.
At the same time, I began to notice a shift in the other direction. Akita-san’s noise already carries its own internal structure. When that structure was reinforced by elements like kick, sub-bass, voice, and harmonic layers, new details of the sound began to emerge. It didn’t reduce the noise — it simply brought certain aspects of it into focus. I never actually discussed this with Akita-san, so this is only speculation, but perhaps this is also why his sound lends itself so naturally to collaboration.
I was also surprised when he sent piano recordings. I had been thinking only about noise, so it reminded me of the musical depth that has always been part of Merzbow’s work.
I believe this chemistry was possible because we worked through exchanging files rather than performing together in live sessions. The distance that editing provides allowed me to work carefully with Akita-san’s material.
Our email exchanges during production were very concise. Perhaps because of that, the time we spent together in person left a different kind of impression. Last December we did a photo shoot in Tokyo for this album. We photographed in Ikebukuro and Ginza, and the four of us — the photographer Ivana Micic, her assistant, Akita-san, and myself — had a really enjoyable time together. In the back seat of the car between locations, we talked about Boris, the United States, Italy, and the goats he loves. We even took a selfie. Being able to spend that time with him — and seeing him smile — remains a very special memory for me.
My relationship with Merzbow goes back quite a long way. The first time I heard his music was around 1998. Someone had left a copy of Pulse Demon in my university research lab, and when I played it, I instinctively pressed the stop button halfway through. It wasn’t rejection or fear — it was a feeling that I wasn’t ready yet to face a sonic extreme of that magnitude. Years later, after I started the label Signal Noise and released Merzbow’s Sedonis, a working relationship gradually developed between us, and eventually the moment felt right to propose a collaboration.
As for musical chemistry, while I've described the technical process, what truly changed was how working with Akita-san’s material shifted my own methodology.
In my usual process, structure comes first, and sound develops inside it. This time it was the opposite. I had already built a foundation, but once Akita-san's noise was layered over it, that original structure was almost entirely submerged. Structure had to be rediscovered from within his sound. That reversal was genuinely new for me. It forced a level of precision in my editing that I hadn't reached before, and I think it pushed my own method forward. That precision doesn't necessarily mean polishing the sound. It also includes treating editing itself almost like an instrument — sometimes working in a rough, jump-cut style.
At the same time, I began to notice a shift in the other direction. Akita-san’s noise already carries its own internal structure. When that structure was reinforced by elements like kick, sub-bass, voice, and harmonic layers, new details of the sound began to emerge. It didn’t reduce the noise — it simply brought certain aspects of it into focus. I never actually discussed this with Akita-san, so this is only speculation, but perhaps this is also why his sound lends itself so naturally to collaboration.
I was also surprised when he sent piano recordings. I had been thinking only about noise, so it reminded me of the musical depth that has always been part of Merzbow’s work.
I believe this chemistry was possible because we worked through exchanging files rather than performing together in live sessions. The distance that editing provides allowed me to work carefully with Akita-san’s material.
Our email exchanges during production were very concise. Perhaps because of that, the time we spent together in person left a different kind of impression. Last December we did a photo shoot in Tokyo for this album. We photographed in Ikebukuro and Ginza, and the four of us — the photographer Ivana Micic, her assistant, Akita-san, and myself — had a really enjoyable time together. In the back seat of the car between locations, we talked about Boris, the United States, Italy, and the goats he loves. We even took a selfie. Being able to spend that time with him — and seeing him smile — remains a very special memory for me.
— For example, can someone who doesn’t understand the language still receive the same emotional impact from the track, or is it important to actually know and understand what’s being said?
And from there I’d like to make a bit of an unexpected turn. So that this doesn’t stay just a technical question, I want to dig slightly deeper and explain why this interests me at all. It seems to me that one possible future line of development lies in the merging of fairly distant genres — say, music closer to pop in the broad sense (actual pop, or rock, or even folk) with noise and ambient. That feels like a field where some interesting things might still grow.
So how do you see the prospects of that kind of convergence? Earlier I mentioned the feeling that in this track all the colors are pushed to the limit, all the knobs turned to the right. But the voice is an instrument that usually carries nuance and fine detail. Those two things don’t always coexist easily.
Is that tension itself a kind of challenge? How do you reconcile them? And what new edges open up in the interaction between the human voice and pure noise?
And from there I’d like to make a bit of an unexpected turn. So that this doesn’t stay just a technical question, I want to dig slightly deeper and explain why this interests me at all. It seems to me that one possible future line of development lies in the merging of fairly distant genres — say, music closer to pop in the broad sense (actual pop, or rock, or even folk) with noise and ambient. That feels like a field where some interesting things might still grow.
So how do you see the prospects of that kind of convergence? Earlier I mentioned the feeling that in this track all the colors are pushed to the limit, all the knobs turned to the right. But the voice is an instrument that usually carries nuance and fine detail. Those two things don’t always coexist easily.
Is that tension itself a kind of challenge? How do you reconcile them? And what new edges open up in the interaction between the human voice and pure noise?
— On the role of the voice, I'll start with a small story. When I was in eighth grade, I traveled to Australia with my father. He had a Canon film camera, and I borrowed it to take photographs — but only of landscapes and buildings. At some point, he said, "A photograph without a person has no meaning." I still think it's a very him thing to say — a little absurd. But I understand what he meant.
In a similar way, noise becomes more compelling once a voice enters it. While working on my previous album, Sky Trajectories, I began to sense a particular relationship between noise and voice. The moment a voice appears, the entire soundscape shifts. The voice acts as a catalyst — it doesn't simply sit on top, it redefines the space.
The title dB.XYZ comes from the idea of loudness — dB — occupying spatial coordinates, XYZ: a space of extreme noise with no body, no human presence. I wanted to see what would happen if a voice entered such a space. This track is that experiment. Once it worked, the overall logic of the album became clear.
In terms of palette, I worked with two voices — Alexandra Cupsa and Matchess. In dB.XYZ, Alexandra's voice functions almost like an edit point, redirecting the momentum of the noise. In ƒƒƒ fraa filum flammm, Matchess's voice works differently — it emerges from within the noise, supporting it as another internal layer.
I don't think noise and singing voices have a natural compatibility. The more theatrical the voice becomes — singing or shouting — the more it loses its presence, as if the noise simply doesn't respond to it.
What interests me is the opposite. The less the voice carries those exaggerated or theatrical qualities within itself, the more the surrounding noise begins to respond and reorganize around it.
Alexandra is a graphic designer, and Matchess is primarily a violist. Neither approaches the voice as a trained vocalist would, and that’s precisely why their voices work here. The voice arrives not as technique, but as a person — with a certain distance, a certain state. The noise seems to sense those states and respond to them.
The meaning of the text is important. The presence of a voice emerges together with meaning — I didn't want to separate them on this album. If you strip meaning away entirely, the voice loses the function I'm interested in. It becomes too abstract and can no longer stand against the noise. It's the text — its meaning — that allows it to remain inside the noise, or to collide with it.
Whether the listener understands the language does change the experience, but I wouldn't call either version lesser. The text on the album is built from four separate writings that were cut up, so even if you fully understand French, the meaning remains difficult to grasp. A listener who understands the language will follow the meaning but never quite arrive. A listener who doesn't may hear the sound more directly, without that pull. Either way, full understanding is never reached. It's a threshold experience.
As for genre convergence — the merging of noise and rock /pop is not new. Artists like Nine Inch Nails or Xiu Xiu have explored it in different ways.
But a form like this album, or a track like dB.XYZ, doesn’t quite have a precedent, I guess? So we may be opening a new space.
More than merging genres or creating a new one, what interested me was erasing them altogether. This album absorbs a wide range of musical elements — from noise and metal to ambient and classical — and reworks them within an experimental context. In doing so, I wanted to show that noise can be deafeningly loud and still be quiet.
That sense of quietness also connects to Merzbow himself. He is a very gentle person, and a devoted animal rights advocate. His work cannot be reduced to violent noise.
I believed in that, and kept searching for another side of noise. Through that repetition, something that hadn’t been visible before began to emerge. I don’t think it would have taken this shape if I had been working alone. I owe that to Merzbow.
In a similar way, noise becomes more compelling once a voice enters it. While working on my previous album, Sky Trajectories, I began to sense a particular relationship between noise and voice. The moment a voice appears, the entire soundscape shifts. The voice acts as a catalyst — it doesn't simply sit on top, it redefines the space.
The title dB.XYZ comes from the idea of loudness — dB — occupying spatial coordinates, XYZ: a space of extreme noise with no body, no human presence. I wanted to see what would happen if a voice entered such a space. This track is that experiment. Once it worked, the overall logic of the album became clear.
In terms of palette, I worked with two voices — Alexandra Cupsa and Matchess. In dB.XYZ, Alexandra's voice functions almost like an edit point, redirecting the momentum of the noise. In ƒƒƒ fraa filum flammm, Matchess's voice works differently — it emerges from within the noise, supporting it as another internal layer.
I don't think noise and singing voices have a natural compatibility. The more theatrical the voice becomes — singing or shouting — the more it loses its presence, as if the noise simply doesn't respond to it.
What interests me is the opposite. The less the voice carries those exaggerated or theatrical qualities within itself, the more the surrounding noise begins to respond and reorganize around it.
Alexandra is a graphic designer, and Matchess is primarily a violist. Neither approaches the voice as a trained vocalist would, and that’s precisely why their voices work here. The voice arrives not as technique, but as a person — with a certain distance, a certain state. The noise seems to sense those states and respond to them.
The meaning of the text is important. The presence of a voice emerges together with meaning — I didn't want to separate them on this album. If you strip meaning away entirely, the voice loses the function I'm interested in. It becomes too abstract and can no longer stand against the noise. It's the text — its meaning — that allows it to remain inside the noise, or to collide with it.
Whether the listener understands the language does change the experience, but I wouldn't call either version lesser. The text on the album is built from four separate writings that were cut up, so even if you fully understand French, the meaning remains difficult to grasp. A listener who understands the language will follow the meaning but never quite arrive. A listener who doesn't may hear the sound more directly, without that pull. Either way, full understanding is never reached. It's a threshold experience.
As for genre convergence — the merging of noise and rock /pop is not new. Artists like Nine Inch Nails or Xiu Xiu have explored it in different ways.
But a form like this album, or a track like dB.XYZ, doesn’t quite have a precedent, I guess? So we may be opening a new space.
More than merging genres or creating a new one, what interested me was erasing them altogether. This album absorbs a wide range of musical elements — from noise and metal to ambient and classical — and reworks them within an experimental context. In doing so, I wanted to show that noise can be deafeningly loud and still be quiet.
That sense of quietness also connects to Merzbow himself. He is a very gentle person, and a devoted animal rights advocate. His work cannot be reduced to violent noise.
I believed in that, and kept searching for another side of noise. Through that repetition, something that hadn’t been visible before began to emerge. I don’t think it would have taken this shape if I had been working alone. I owe that to Merzbow.
— First of all, thank you very much for agreeing to answer my rather long-winded questions — I really appreciate the time and attention.
And secondly, before we wrap up, I’d love to ask if you’d like to say anything at all to our readers. Anything you feel like leaving them with.
And secondly, before we wrap up, I’d love to ask if you’d like to say anything at all to our readers. Anything you feel like leaving them with.
— Thank you!
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