New Merzbow & Pedro Vian collab - Bardo Thödol
On 7 July, Modern Obscure Music is releasing the 3rd collaboration between Merzbow and Pedro Vian - who, imho, work very well together. The album will be called Bardo Thödol and is their 3rd collab in 3 years time. One full track can be streamed via Merzbow's Bandcamp: https://merzbow.bandcamp.com/album/bardo-thodol
A snippet of the second track can be streamed here: https://wordandsound.net/release/167718-MOM073-Merzbow--Vian-Bardo-Thdol
For those who haven't heard the first two collabs yet:
A Wheel on Mani (2025): https://merzbow.bandcamp.com/album/a-wheel-on-mani
Inside Richard Serra Scultures (2024): https://merzbow.bandcamp.com/album/inside-richard-serra-sculptures
Info about the upcoming album taken from Merzbow's Bandcamp:
In their third collaboration, the shared project between Merzbow and Pedro Vian shifts towards less confrontational and more introspective terrain. Bardo Thödol, released as an LP, draws on The Tibetan Book of the Dead not so much as an explicit narrative framework but as a conceptual resonance: a passage, a suspension between states.
Where Inside Richard Serra Sculptures and The Wheel of Mani foregrounded a relatively defined dialectic between Vian’s environmental restraint and Masami Akita’s impulsive, textural excess, that friction here appears to dissolve in favour of a more homogeneous mass. Noise, far from its most abrasive edge, is reconfigured as a continuous field — dense yet permeable.
Within this flow, melodic structures emerge without assertion, surfacing almost incidentally as by-products of the accumulation of frequencies itself. The result is less a reconciliation of languages than a blurring of their boundaries: a space in which intensity is internalised and the radical gesture folds into a more sustained, contemplative mode of listening.
