Kotorhizome catches Merzbow in a phase where noise stops behaving like a vertical wall and starts acting more like an underground network. Recorded between 2011 and 2012 and released later as part of the Slowdown archive cycle, the album is built from a deceptively modest setup: small koto, synth, and drone box woven into three extended pieces. The title fuses “koto” with “rhizome,” hinting at what the music does structurally - traditional string resonance is fed into electronics and allowed to branch horizontally, sending out shoots of feedback and overtone rather than climbing toward any clear climax. The Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima disaster form the historical backdrop to these sessions, and that sense of destabilised ground seems to seep into the sound as a kind of slow, irradiated unease rather than explicit program.​