BORIS & MERZBOW – Live Set @ Boiler Room Tokyo (2014)

In June 2014, Boiler Room arrived in Japan for the first time, teaming up with Dommune in Tokyo to host a special live event. One of the highlights was a night billed as “Boiler Doom,” featuring the experimental noise artist Merzbow alongside the genre-bending band Boris. The show took place at Dommune’s intimate venue, known for its precision sound system, which allowed the overwhelming volume and density of the performance to remain clear and immersive rather than muddy. The crowd filled every corner of the space, creating a charged atmosphere that matched the intensity on stage.

Boris delivered a set that moved between sludge, drone, and shoegaze-inspired soundscapes, with pieces from their album Noise and older works like Flood and Pink. They even performed a crushingly heavy cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes,” pushing the room into a cocoon of distorted resonance. Merzbow followed with his trademark barrage of electronic noise: layers of feedback, distortion, and mechanical sound that felt like collapsing structures and colliding machinery. The sheer force of his set left little room for subtlety, creating a physical as much as a sonic experience.

The two then joined forces in a collaboration that blurred the line between Boris’s slow, crushing riffs and Merzbow’s relentless noise. Tracks such as “Vomitself” and “Sun Baked Snow Cave” were reworked and blasted against Merzbow’s walls of sound, culminating in a punishing yet strangely hypnotic finale. For many who witnessed it, the performance was not just a concert but a kind of overwhelming, transcendent experience of sound.

The collaboration planted the seeds for a new project. Inspired by this live meeting, Boris and Merzbow went on to create Gensho in 2015, a double album designed so that both discs could be played separately or simultaneously, producing new layers of interaction with each listen. The Boiler Room event is often remembered not only as one of the heaviest and most unusual sessions in the platform’s history, but also as the catalyst for this ambitious recording, solidifying the partnership between two of Japan’s most radical musical forces.