Label: Spittle Records

(予約受付中 - 5月中旬荷予定)

LPフォーマット再発!!大友良英を中心としたGround-Zeroが1995年に残した歴史的名作[革命京劇]。1984年にHeiner Goebbels & Alfred Harthのコンビが発表したアルバム[Frankfurt - Peking]に収録された"北京オペラ"をサンプリング~構築した音源であり、多彩なメンバー編成によるインプロヴィゼーション、ノイズ、オペラ、プランダーフォニックスの混濁した世界が継続する超傑作。未体験の方は是非。



On Revolutionary Pekinese Opera, Ground Zero - under the ferociously precise direction of Otomo Yoshihide - detonates a cut‑and‑splice orchestra where free improv, noise, opera and plunderphonics collide with undimmed urgency.
With the blessing of Otomo Yoshihide himself, Revolutionary Pekinese Opera returns to vinyl as one of the defining artefacts of 1990s avant‑garde music, sounding less like a period piece than a live explosive smuggled into the present. Originally conceived as a hypercharged reimagining of revolutionary opera through the cracked lens of sampling culture, the album captures Ground Zero at the height of its powers: a band that refused to respect borders between genres, media or histories, instead treating them all as combustible material. Three decades on, these compositions still feel like they might slip the stylus off the groove through sheer centrifugal force.

At the core of the record is Otomo’s role as a kind of Deus ex machina from Fukushima, orchestrating a dense, unruly melting pot of musicians, sounds and strategies. Turntables, guitars, horns, rhythm section and electronics are marshalled into a constantly shifting field where nothing is allowed to remain stable for long. Fragments of Peking opera collide with free jazz eruptions; abrupt cuts splice militant fanfares into stretches of near‑silence or sandblasted noise; cartoonish samples and solemn themes rub shoulders, unsettling each other. What could have been a mere collage becomes, in Otomo’s hands, a tightly argued montage, where each juxtaposition pushes the music into a new, volatile state.

The album’s power lies in how it weaponises experimentation without losing a sense of structure. Ground Zero operate like a rogue theatre troupe and a demolition crew at once, pulling recognizable motifs out of the wreckage only to shred them again seconds later. Passages of almost symphonic weight flare up out of scratchy loops and feedback, while sudden drop‑outs expose tiny, nervous details - a stray cymbal brush, a voice buried in the mix, a tape wobble - before the full ensemble slams back in. The result is a music of permanent revolution in miniature, forever overthrowing its own premises, yet somehow coherent in its manic logic.

What is striking today is how little of Revolutionary Pekinese Opera’s allure has faded. In an era when sampling, hybridity and “experimental” tags have been thoroughly domesticated, this record still feels genuinely disruptive, its raw drive undiluted by time. The vinyl reissue not only restores one of Ground Zero’s keystone statements to its proper physical scale - with all the crackle, impact and dynamic extremes that implies - it also reasserts the album’s place as a key node in the global avant‑garde of the 1990s. Heard now, these pieces continue to strike with the same force they had on first release: unruly, subversive, and rigorously constructed, a reminder of how dangerous a band can sound when the studio, the archive and the stage are treated as one continuous battlefield.