nce a person has picked out the highlights from the mighty 50-disc Merzbox, there didn’t seem to be much left to discover about the way Merzbow operates. An apparently unstoppable conveyor belt of black, angry noise seemed to have painted him into a corner. One of the acknowledged overlords of this extreme genre, there seemed few avenues which he hadn’t explored with the palette he’d set himself. Then, with 2005’s barrage of more rhythmic work, Merzbow opened up a whole new dimension to explore. Masami Akita reinvented himself as more than just a purveyor of white noise and bondage soundtracks; Merzbow’s got rhythm and he’s definitely using it.

Akita seems to have stumbled across the secret of great beat making through years of hearing/investigating the inherent rhythms in layering loops of noise. Each of the three “Tracts” here features at least one beat that any raging electronic act would be proud to terrorise floors with. Senmaida has more in common with a rougher Meat Beat Manifesto than it does with poltergeist-in-the-machine-style noise rumblings.

The great metallic hailstorm drums of “Tract 1” turn swiftly into some hardcore shit while remaining noddable through the twisted tones of the breaks. This piece is almost a dark re-rendering of some lost classic techno-industrial jam. With a big ol’ slab of fucked vocals rammed in the middle, there’s enough FX on the track to mimic a hundred pugnacious tempo changes. The beat even briefly picks up a steel drum sound-alike percussive passenger as it morphs through a range of different paced headlong sprints at a brick wall of sound.

With Senmaida, Merzbow is beginning to cut more obvious and distinct layers into his music. There are more obvious, unsettling “out of the blue” blasts of noise, more filtered shifts in sound, and the effect is of a busier and more calculated piece of music. “Tract 2”’s blooping (definitely not bleeping or blipping) thin crust of bouncing static is soon bust wide open by some live-sounding drum abuse. Manipulating this up and down the scale quickly begins to fester into vine-like drones. From a starting point of a simplistic break, he manoeuvres the percussion into virtually gabba territory and borrows the structure of “build it up and break it down” early rave music.

Keeping to the animal rights theme that he has used on most of his releases, Akita leaves both subtle (a title meaning "a thousand rice paddies") and heavy hints here. The chillingly irreverent Val Denham artwork is awkwardly balanced between the humour and horror of massive bunny rabbits experimenting on humans. He adds sheep, chicken, and pig/dog hybrid sounds into both “Tract 2” and the fanatic march of “Tract 3” to further (subliminally) hammer the message home.

At just under an hour long, this might not match the sheer heaviosity of his previous ‘noise only’ sonic punishments in short-sightedness or aural damage. Merzbow has become an altogether different musical animal; you haven’t heard it all before.