Merzbow, Balázs Pándi & Richard Pinhas with
Lieko Shiga

Merzbow is a Vegan Straight Edge Noise Project by Masami Akita. Part of the industrial noise scene in the early 1980s, he mainly started releasing music on overseas labels. In the 1990s, influenced by Grindcore, he released an album of the Death Metal label Relapse. In the 2000s, resonating with label mego's "punk computer music" he was the first in Japan to adopt a method of playing live using a laptop. In recent years, he has been working mainly with analog equipment. Since around 2003, he has practiced veganism from an animal rights standpoint. He has created works on the themes of anti whale and dolphin fishing, anti fur and the liberation of livestock animals. In recent years he has collaborated with artists such as Mats Gustafsson, Thurston Moore, BORIS, Keiji Haino, Nyantra, Lawrence English, Xiu Xiu, GEZAN, Alessandro Cortini. Merzbow’s new work Hope will be released from a Ukrainian label in support of the Ukraine.

Balázs Pándi is a drummer based in Hungary. Experienced in anything between the genres of dub, breakcore, free improvisation, noise, grindcore and jazz, he has worked and toured with various artists from around the world including Venetian Snares, Otto von Schirach and The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble. Since 2009 he has frequently played drums live with Merzbow and they have also released three live records with artists such as Mats Gustafsson, Keiji Haino and Thurston Moore. Since 2013, he also works as a journalist at Hungarian news site Telex.

Musician, guitarist and writer. Pinhas studied philosophy under the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, and has been active as a musician, guitarist and writer since the 1970s. He founded the band Schizo, which later became Heldon, one of France's leading Avant Rock groups, and is recognized as one of France's major experimental musicians as well as being a pivotal figure in the development of electronic rock. While influenced by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, he has a very original musical style. In addition to his activities as a soloist and in bands, he is also active beyond the genre of music and writes books on philosophy.

Photographer. Born in 1980 in Aichi, Japan, Shiga lives and works in Miyagi, Japan since 2008. She graduated from London College of the Arts Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004. In her work she continues to pursue the relationship between society and nature, to think about life through imagining death, and after the Great East Japan Earthquake, to purse the inner reality of the madness of the human mind and body that she feels continues to be suppressed by the earthquake reconstruction plan promoted by the national government and big corporations. Recently she has been holding regular open studios at Studio Parlor, a creation space in Miyagi Prefecture, as well as workshops and talks in collaboration with the members of the art collective PUMPQUAKES. Major group exhibitions include Off the Wall (The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2021), Tsumazuki no Niwa (Kyu Kankeimaru Shoten, Ishinomaki, 2022). Major solo exhibitions include Human Spring (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2019). In 2021 she received the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (TCAA) 2021–2023.