To be rich in friends is to be poor in nothing, or so the saying goes. Given how barely anyone who dedicates their life to experimental music ends up rich, perhaps the success of such musicians should be measured by their influence and the connections they create. Of course, such an idea cannot be measured quantitatively, but if one were to do that, collaborations could be a handy metric. And by that standard, Masami Akita, or Merzbow to you and I, would take some beating. An exhaustive rundown of his collaborations would be too exhausting to list, but in the…