A cult cornerstone of 1990s Japanese experimental music.
Revolutionary Pekinese Opera Ver.1.28 (1996) is the third full-length album by Ground-Zero, the free-improvisation / noise-rock ensemble led by guitarist, turntablist, and composer Otomo Yoshihide—one of Japan’s most internationally respected figures in avant-garde music.
The concept begins with a meta-sampling approach:
In 1984, Heiner Goebbels & Alfred 23 Harth sampled 1960s Chinese Peking Opera to create their groundbreaking work Peking Oper. Ground-Zero takes that already radical piece and re-samples it further, transforming it into a politically and sonically explosive collage.
Beyond Peking Opera motifs, this album integrates an expansive array of archival fragments:
• Spoken voices & narration
• Commercial advertisements
• Telephone conversations
• Political speeches — including Ronald Reagan and Mao Zedong
• Raw band improvisation and layers of noise textures
The result is a hyper-dense confrontation between cultural memory, propaganda, ideology and sonic deconstruction — stitched together by Ground-Zero’s frenetic improvisation and unrestrained noise-rock power.
This version upgrade (Ver.1.28) goes even further, incorporating:
🔹 Live recordings from Shibuya La Mama, August 1995
🔹 An epilogue sampling Christian Marclay’s vinyl works
🔹 Expanded and remixed structure beyond the original Revolutionary Pekinese Opera — a release that became impossible to obtain within a year of its original debut
A landmark of ’90s avant-garde music — intense, intellectual, chaotic, and unforgettable.
Specifications
🎧 A must-have for collectors of Japanese experimental music, free improvisation, noise, and radical sound-collage.
