Merzbow

Bit Blues sits in the middle of Merzbow’s Horizon cycle like a scorched signpost, three tracks cut from performances recorded at Munemihouse in 2011 and 2012 and later remastered in 2021. All the music is by Masami Akita, working with a small, intensely exploited setup that favours dense, bit‑crushed textures and overdriven loops over the more sprawling configurations of earlier decades. The title points in two directions at once: “bit” as in digital grain and reduced resolution; “blues” as in a mood rather than a form, a slow-burning tension that has more to do with environmental dread and post‑industrial fatigue than with twelve-bar progressions. It is a record haunted by the years immediately following the Fukushima disaster, where questions of radiation, contamination, and technological hubris seep into the music as pressure and colour rather than explicit statement.