Few records from the 1990s Japanese underground carry the weight and the audacity of Ground Zero's Revolutionary Pekinese Opera. Conceived and orchestrated by turntablist and guitarist Otomo Yoshihide, the album is built upon a re-sampling of Heiner Goebbels and Alfred Harth's 1984 rendition of 1960s Chinese revolutionary Peking opera — a source material already once removed from its origins, here detonated and reassembled through the full arsenal of Ground Zero's collective imagination. Recorded at GOK Sound in Tokyo in March 1995, the album stands as one of the most radical statements to emerge from Japan's fertile noise and improvisation scene of that decade.
