Japanese noise legend Merzbow joins forces with Chicago-based sound artist Kiku Hibino for a debut collaboration that already stands as a striking statement in ambient experimental music.
Born in Nagoya, Hibino’s artistic path has always resisted easy categorization. Though he was steered toward classical piano as a child, he quickly sensed that tradition alone couldn’t contain his curiosity. Moving to Keio University in the nineties opened the door to experimental electronic music, and crucially, to the work of Masami Akita. Encountering Merzbow’s uncompromising sound reshaped Hibino’s understanding of what music could be.
Despite that influence, Hibino deliberately avoided meeting Akita until he felt he could approach him as a peer rather than a disciple. That moment came years later. In 2021, he launched Signal Noise with the initial goal of releasing a Merzbow record, an ambition that ultimately led to their collaboration.
Following a run of ambient and rhythm-driven solo work, Hibino proposed something more abrasive. The result is Rococo ∞ Echomatter, a record named after his experience of endlessly ornate Rococo ceilings in Italy, an image that mirrors sound unfolding without limit. Echomatter, in turn, draws on Jean Cocteau’s notion of sound as a physical presence, evoking the lingering weight of a voice after loss.
The album finds a compelling balance. Merzbow’s raw intensity is shaped by Hibino’s structural sensibility, with spoken-word contributions from Alexandra Cupsa and instrumental textures from Patrick Shiroishi and Whitney Johnson. Working remotely, Hibino built the frameworks, Akita layered in noise, and Hibino then carved the material with abrupt, Jean-Luc Godard-like edits.
On dB.XYZ, Kiku Hibino comments: "Listening closely to the material Merzbow sent, I began to notice tiny openings in the sound. Instead of layering the voice over the noise, I started cutting into those gaps and placing Alexandra Cupșa’s voice inside them, imagining the abrupt edits of a Godard film. Her voice doesn’t float above the sound — it confronts it directly, functioning almost as an edit within the noise itself. Merzbow’s noise carries a powerful sense of acceleration, and I pushed that momentum further with beats and sub-bass. For me, “dB.XYZ” is where the album’s logic first became clear: voice and noise don’t blend — they collide. On this album, the excessive ornamental movement of Rococo ∞ intersects with the idea of voice rising as physical matter — Echomatter. “dB.XYZ” is the track where that collision first became audible."
What emerges is a record where noise sheds its purely disordered connotations, becoming something closer to ornament, and constantly folding back in on itself.
ZR