Fear, terror, noise. Pleasure, enjoyment. Tearing music apart and putting it back together in our own way. It may come out noisy, it may even be ugly, but it will be ours. It will be fun (to make it), and it will be even better, when someone hears it, to see their face. To see their disdain and say, "Look what I did." And you might be disgusted, maybe we'll even call the police (the postal one if you downloaded the CD, kattifoni), give them a slap, bring them back to the right path, the bastard. Or you might sit beside them, give them a smile, have a beer and listen to it all over again.
Here, this time the bad kids that need to be put back on the right path are the Ground Zero, they're Japanese and they're a mutant ensemble (a total of ten people) revolving around the figure (of a kattifo kid) of Otomo Yoshihide, who this year celebrates his fiftieth birthday and who, in addition to being a friend of John Zorn (has released many albums on tzadik) has done a frightening amount of collaborations (according to RYM, among groups and collaborations, appears in about 45 projects). This gray eminence surrounds himself, from 1990 to 1998, with people who play everything (from classical rock instruments to samplers, turntables, percussion instruments of all kinds) and creates his personal idea of musical manipulation.
Revolutionary Pekinese Opera ver. 1.28 (there are also versions 1.0 and 1.50) is dated 1996 and it is the best sound butchery in the universe. Not only a butchery, but also a delicatessen, copy shop, armory, typography, dry cleaner. Everything. The sound material used in the revolutionary Pekinese opera mainly comes from two sources: one is the ensemble itself, which is dedicated to very respectable noise-making, another part comes from the cut and paste and vinyl obsessions that the group indulges in, mixing samples from movies and TV operettas, political speeches, classical music, traditional Japanese music, melodramatic works. The result is incredibly tasty, a kind of ironic and ultra-distorted snapshot of the Japanese (and non) musical (anti)culture that surprises at every turn. The band's low digestibility sound solutions create a sick and tormented unicum behind which, despite everything, there is the intention (very Zornian indeed) to create a kind of sound pastiche that, in a certain sense, makes you reflect and lend a more attentive ear to music as a whole. Some things certainly remind us of Naked City, and with an equally noisy attitude, but Ground Zero's music goes beyond. In short, in Naked City one way or another you could feel the band, the people who were playing. With our dear Japanese friends, however, the first impression is "where the §°ç$%& hell are these sounds coming from", and the first impression (and also the second) might be fear, terror, noise (as mentioned at the top), oblivion, incomprehension, alienation.
Yet it's all fully human. We are made of this too, otherwise, when Romanticism ended, humanity could have rewound itself into a great implosive spiral of total love and compassion and tenderness and sweetness (and I wouldn't have liked that at all). But we are also dirty, noisy and maybe even ugly people, but we are always us. And these are the Ground Zero. Music made with the gut for people with big brains.
Tracklist
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