‘Get up, get breakfast, noise’: the teen going viral for enduring all 400 of Merzbow’s ear-splitting albums — SkimNews
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- Sam Andrews, an 18-year-old from Georgia, has been attempting to listen to all 400-plus Merzbow albums since February, documenting each day's listening session on Instagram Reels where some videos have hit half a million views.
- Masami Akita (Merzbow) himself engaged with Andrews' page — following him, liking a reel, and briefly collaborating on a post — before unfollowing, reportedly after seeing a comment criticizing his use of AI-generated backdrops.
- Andrews keeps a color-coded spreadsheet rating every release, awarding 1990's Rainbow Electronics an 8/10 as his favorite while calling 1996's Merzbow Loves Emil Beaulieau, which features 30 minutes of a single frequency, his 'breaking point.'
- Only 1.6% of Andrews' Instagram audience are his age; most viewers are in their 30s and 40s, with some commenters recalling listening to Merzbow in college dorms in the 1990s.
- Merzbow has released more than 400 recordings since 1979 — including a 10-hour album misleadingly titled Merzbient and a free-noise supergroup dubbed Flying Testicle — yet pulls only about 23,000 monthly Spotify listeners, a figure Andrews argues understates the artist's cultural weight.
- The viral project is being framed as a counterpoint to streaming-era short-form content, with Andrews arguing that deep listening to noise music builds attention span better than algorithm-driven feeds that push listeners to skip after 30 seconds.
Why it matters: Andrews' project challenges the streaming-era equation where quality gets conflated with consumption — Merzbow draws only about 23,000 monthly Spotify listeners, yet the videos attract mostly 30-to-40-somethings who engaged with the music in an era when you 'had to know a guy who knows a guy' to even get the records.
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