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Kikù Hibino is a participating artist in Carrier, curated by Bosco Bae and John Neff at Co-Prosperity, Chicago (2026). The exhibition concludes with a closing sound performance responding to Gregory Bae’s scroll-based work.

March 13, 2026; Friday

KIKÙ HIBINO & MERZBOW ANNOUNCE DEBUT COLLABORATIVE ALBUM 

HEAR LEAD SINGLE "DB.XYZ"

ROCOCO ∞ ECHOMATTER LP OUT MAY 29 VIA SUPERPANG

Chicago sound artist Kikù Hibino and legendary Japanese artist Merzbow announce their debut collaborative album Rococo ∞ Echomatter, out May 29 via Superpang. The album is a charged, cinematic exchange between two artists working at the edges of sound. To introduce the project, the duo share lead preview "dB.XYZ," featuring spoken word from Alexandra Cupsa, whose voice acts as a structural axis across the album. 

Hibino explains: "Listening closely to the material Merzbow sent, I began to notice tiny openings in the sound. Instead of layering the voice over the noise, I started cutting into those gaps and placing Alexandra's voice inside them — imagining the abrupt edits of a Jean-Luc Godard film. Her voice doesn't float above the sound. It confronts it directly, functioning almost as an edit within the noise itself." Merzbow's noise carries a powerful sense of acceleration, while Hibino pushes that momentum further with beats and sub-bass. "'dB.XYZ' is where the album's logic first became clear," he adds. "Voice and noise don't blend — they collide."

Following the ambient drift of 2022's Fell to Fern and the beatmaking of 2024's Sky Trajectories, Hibino proposed an abrasive partnership to Masami Akita (Merzbow). The album's title arrived before a single note was recorded, sparked during a visit to Italy. "In the Vatican and in Florence, I was struck by the ceiling decorations — their endless expansion, their excessive ornamentation," Hibino recalls. "What stayed with me was a structure with no place for the eye to rest, a movement that seemed to proliferate without end. To express that feeling, I added the infinity symbol." Endlessness becomes a structural principle for how noise is organized. 

Echomatter emerged from something more personal: the strange persistence of a voice after loss, when words take on a physical weight closer to presence than vibration. The voice becomes material, substance that cuts deeper than narration.

Though Merzbow is closely associated with serrated cacophony, Hibino coaxes out dynamics, offsetting clamor with spoken word, cinematic atmosphere, and theatrical pacing. Working through remote file exchange, final mixing took place at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. "I mainly used Prophet-6, Antilope drum machine, and Eurorack modules, edited in Ableton," Hibino shares. "I would first create a structural sketch of a track. Akita-san would add noise and send it back." Saxophone from Patrick Shiroishi and viola from Whitney Johnson interrupt the mass, adding texture to a vital installment in both artists' dense discographies. With Rococo ∞ Echomatter, Hibino and Akita employ noise less like chaos and more as an ornament — proliferating, mutating, and folding back into itself.

Listen to "dB.XYZ" above and stay tuned for more from Kikù Hibino and Merzbow ahead of the release of Rococo ∞ Echomatter on May 29 via Superpang.