Merzbow, Elvin Brandhi

Baba Yaga's Hut presents:

Merzbow + Elvin Brandhi at Iklectik

Sunday 7 June 2026, 4 pm to 8 pm.

Merzbow (メルツバウ) is a vegan, straight-edge noise project by Masami Akita from Japan. Merzbow started out in the noise industrial scene of the early 1980s and began releasing music. In the 1990s, Merzbow was influenced by grindcore and released an album on the death metal label Relapse. In the late 1990s, he resonated with Mego's "punk computer music" and was one of the first in the Japanese noise scene to adopt a live performance technique using laptop computers.

Since around 2003, he has practiced veganism from the perspective of "animal rights." He creates works on themes such as "anti-whaling," "anti-dolphin fishing," "anti-fur," and "liberation of livestock animals." In recent years, he has been creating music that is not limited to digital or analog formats. Recently, he has been experimenting with incorporating AI into album artwork.

He has also collaborated with Balázs Pándi, Mats Gustafsson, Thurston Moore, Boris, Keiji Haino, Richard Pinhas (Heldon), Duenn, Nyantra, Lawrence English, Xiu Xiu, Gezan, Alessandro Cortini, Vanity Productions, Vatican Shadow, Bastard Noise, Meat Beat Manifesto and others.

Elvin Brandhi is an improvising lyricist, producer and sound artist from Bridgend, Wales, who builds aberrant beats from field recordings, tape, vinyl, instruments and voice. Using sound and voice as an expansive language transgressing intrinsic systemics and inherited syntactical etiquettes, her live shows are unyielding bursts of erupting animation where her caustic stream of consciousness cavorts with restless, glitched-out heaviness. Her creative momentum comprises a range of collaborations and an endless nomadism.