Otomo the Butcher
Ground-Zero - shocking and unique
Original position in magazine: pages 18-19
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Ground-Zero
Consume Red Project: Consume / Consume Ground-Zero Volume 1
JAPAN CREATIVEMAN DISC CMDD-00046 CD (1997)
UNITED KINGDOM RER MEGACORP ReR GZ2 CD (1997)
Words fail me…the Revolutionary Pekinese Opera was more than enough to keep my senses reeling for years, but then along came the May 1997 ReR catalogue update. Oh no, not another Ground-Zero CD to buy…Chris Cutler’s review of Consume Red whetted the appetite: ‘…a monster structure that starts screaming and gets more and more intense and massive until you don’t imagine there is anywhere else to go. Then it gets bigger…’ Reading this, I had that terrible feeling that a date with destiny was in the offing. I knew if I ever heard a CD like that I’d go completely over the edge. Later that month, Ground-Zero were booked to appear at the London Musicians’ Collective Sixth Annual Festival of Experimental Music. Altered States, another fine Japanese guitar and sax band, also put in an appearance two days before their confreres, and everyone was struck by the superlative clarity of sound at the Conway Hall venue - and the excessive volume. These signs augured well for Ground-Zero…when they took the stage Bank Holiday Monday I was more than ready to face the dentist’s drill…
‘It’s easy and maybe even cool to say “to hell with copyright”. But of course things aren’t really that simple,’ states composer and turntable artrist Otomo Yoshihide on a webpage where he briefly discusses the background to Consume Red. Sampling is the core of the whole project. Kim Suk Chul is a Korean musician, a ‘national treasure’, and a few seconds of his hojok playing are the first thing you hear on Consume Red. Otomo is more than aware of the issues; Revolutionary Pekinese Opera was a hornet’s nest of ’stolen’ snatches of music, some of which were samples to begin with; and Otomo knows this CD has been sampled yet again by Stock Hausen and Walkman! Otomo is asking us - what price ownership? ‘…how can anybody say for sure who created what?’ Balanced against this creative side of the argument, there’s a pecuniary one: payment of mechanical royalties, and samplers ’stealing’ someone else’s ideas to get rich. There is only one copyright organisation in Japan - JASRAC. A TV company can steal Otomo’s music and it’s declared ‘legal’ so long as they pay a fee to JASRAC, yet Otomo never gets a bean. As to Opera, that never made any money either…
Comsume Red blows away the dust that fills the eyes of pettifogging men. Kim Suk Chul’s music is sacred; says Otomo, ‘his superhuman playing is without question a product of his own creativity, but it could also be that he is in fact a vessel for the voices of gods or ancestors.’ By using this sacred music as a foundation stone, Otomo brings the sampling argument back to art, to the spirituality at the centre of great music. But then he goes one step further and pushes the whole thing into total chaos again. The next two proposed volumes of Consume Red will be further remixes; Volume 2 will be a rehash of Volume 1 by ‘five of the world’s most shocking and unique artists’; Volume 3 a further mincing by members of the public, based on Volumes 1 and 2 - an open competition. ‘Go ahead and butcher this with your own hands’, urges Otomo, ‘we can talk later’…
Live, the terrifying and ear-splitting hojok blast (I have no idea what a hojok may be, but I don’t want to meet one ever) is played over and over again on a Fairlight or other sampling keyboard by Matsubara Sachiko, and the remaining members of Ground-Zero calmly walk onto stage when it’s their turn, and gradually ‘drop in’ to the piece. The first of these is Tanaka Yumiko, a traditional shamisen player, followed by electric guitar, bass, two drummers (the two drum set sound is particularly satisfying on the CD), saxophone, and finally Otomo himself wreaking physical vengeance on the metal trestle table supporting his wheel of steel. His performance was manic; the slice of vinyl offered up as sacrifice to the Great Red God finally split in two beneath his pulverising assault. The Ground-Zero players are astounding, betraying little sign of emotion in their collective countenance, yet delivering fantastic performances; supreme mastery of the instrument is a prerequisite to allow this gigantic madness to take over and pour forth in a magnificent explosion of noise. And, as Cutler had predicted, the piece grew and grew like the monster in Forbidden Planet, sustaining power and regenerating itself to even greater heights with every second. As if hearing Consume Red weren’t enough, we had a condensed portion of Opera as an encore, followed by their version of what I think was announced as a classic piece of Tokyo psychedelia from the 1960s (but by whom?). This piece was simply transcendental, heavenly music.
In the context of much of the stodgy White European music at LMC in 1997, Ground-Zero and Altered States stuck out like exotic birds at an Ugly Duckling parade. All credit to whoever managed to book them on the programme (it was probably Ed Baxter), in the face of opposition from dissenting voices; perhaps Otomo is too experimental for some people. I’ll never forget seeing a gentle well-dressed couple in their late 60s, settling down to the start of Ground-Zero after an otherwise tasteful acoustic and semi-jazzy evening of music; then politely making their way out as they realised their horrible mistake. Shortly after the performance the gloomy rumour was circulating that Ground-Zero were to be disbanded. The hints are there anyway in the proclamation ‘Consume Ground-Zero’ - if that cycle is played out to the end as planned, it’ll be a conflagration of nuclear war proportions and should put the final cap on the sampling debate. A shame that Otomo had to sacrifice his own band in the flames. With this record and live performances, Otomo has established himself as a titan of music, and for my money one of the most important people on the planet today!
ED PINSENT