Merzbow - The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue (2025)

Recorded in 1996, Merzbow’s The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is one of a series of unique editions from his vast catalogue that reveals a side of his practice often under represented.

During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Masami Akita was sometimes working on film and theatre music. In this space he created a series of recordings that capture the full scope of his sound worlds.

Given the nature of these settings, his compositional approaches were varied, seeking to create both intensely crushing walls of sound and more spatial, and at times rhythmic, pieces that plot out an approach to sound making which atomises his universe of sound, and uncovered the singular detail that is often consumed in the whole.

The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is the soundtrack to the theatre piece 'Akutoku no Sakae/Bitoku no Fuko' by Romantica. Based on Marquis de Sades's 'Historie de Juliette ou les Prosperités du vice' & 'Les Infortunes de la vertu’, this recording was originally released with limited distribution and remains one of the lesser available Merzbow recordings.

This edition is completely remastered and contains an additional cut from those original sessions.