‘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, 18, has been working through all 400+ Merzbow recordings since February, documenting each listen on Instagram — with several videos pulling half a million views.
- Masami Akita (Merzbow) personally noticed the project, following Andrews, liking a reel, and briefly collaborating on a post before removing himself and unfollowing, possibly over a comment criticizing Akita's use of AI art in his backdrops.
- Andrews keeps a color-coded spreadsheet and posts ratings on Rate Your Music, calling 1990's Rainbow Electronics his favorite so far at 8/10 and naming 1996's Merzbow Loves Emil Beaulieau — whose second half is '30 minutes of one frequency' — as his breaking point.
- Despite the Gen Z framing of the story, only 1.6% of Andrews' audience is his own age; most viewers are in their 30s and 40s, including commenters who say they first heard Merzbow in college dorms in 1990.
- Andrews explicitly frames the project as a corrective to short-form content, arguing that sitting with a 40-minute piece 'will do wonders for your attention span' compared to skipping songs after 30 seconds.
- Merzbow has roughly 23,000 monthly Spotify listeners, a figure the piece argues understates his cultural weight, quoting Anohni's point that highly impactful music is often meant to be heard only a few times rather than streamed on repeat.
Why it matters: Andrews' viral project exposes a generational disconnect in how experimental music travels online: only 1.6% of his audience is his own age, while most are longtime fans in their 30s and 40s who first heard Merzbow in 1990 — meaning the deep-listening practice he champions is being sustained by older communities, not by the algorithm-shaped Gen Z feeds that supposedly shape today's music discovery.
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