condition (disc/cover): NM / VG+
Insert included.
A tribute release from the self-styled "America's Greatest Living Noise Artist." Emil Beaulieau is the performance alias of Ron Lessard (born July 5, 1957), who runs RRRecords out of Lowell, Massachusetts and has done since the early Eighties. Dedicated To Masami Akita, issued in 1997 on the Pure sublabel, offers three long tracks as homage to Merzbow's legal name.
The dedication is not empty. Lessard was among the earliest Western figures to take Japanese noise seriously on its own terms; the 1986 抜刀隊 With Memorial Gadgets 2LP on RRRecords was arguably the first major-statement Merzbow release outside Japan, and the two labels have maintained a trans-Pacific correspondence ever since. Dedicated To Masami Akita acknowledges that debt and attempts a response in kind.
Live, Beaulieau performs with the Minutoli, a custom four-armed turntable built by his friend Michael Minutoli, dressed in a signature grey cardigan, pink shirt, and tie; his stage presence veers between noise violence and deadpan comedy. The studio material on this CD does not carry that theatrical layer, leaning instead into the pure dense feedback and turntable abuse that had become his lingua franca. Lessard coined the term "anti-record" in the Eighties for physically altered vinyl, and much of his method here is recognisably an extension of that project. For the shelf of proper RRRecords deep cuts, this is the late-Nineties entry point.
