By Maurice Windleburn
Japanese guitarist, turntablist, and composer Otomo Yoshihide (b. 1959) has had a particularly prolific and varied career. Born in Yokohama and raised in Fukushima, he moved to Tokyo in 1979 to study with the Japanese free jazz pioneer Masayuki Takayanagi. At the same time, Otomo studied at Meiji University under the ethnomusicologist Akira Ebato, researching the political entanglements of Japanese pop music during World War II, and developments in musical instruments during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Otomo has since worked in various fields, composing soundtracks for Japanese, Chinese, and Hong Kong films, forming free jazz ensembles, and contributing to a variety of electroacoustic, improvisatory, and noise music projects. More recently, Otomo has become a minor celebrity in Japan for organising the Project Fukushima festivals, and for composing the catchy theme tune of the hit TV show Ama-chan.<1>
After meeting the sound artist Chrisitan Marclay in the late-1980s, Otomo began improvising with turntables in addition to guitar, and in 1990 he founded the band Ground Zero. <2> Initially established to perform John Zorn’s game piece Cobra, <3> Ground Zero went on to release five studio albums and perform several live shows across an eight-year period. With a rotating lineup that often featured guest musicians, Ground Zero’s music combined collaged samples with free improvisation, noise, and a rock band sensibility. In 1998, Otomo disbanded Ground Zero; having reached an aesthetic turning point, he was now interested in how turntables could be used to explore abstract textures and minimal sounds. <4> Nonetheless, Ground Zero’s albums remain as exciting exemplars of a period when many avant-garde musicians were exploring polystylism and the combination of disparate methods from free jazz, rock, and contemporary art music.
Part of Otomo’s reason for using musical samples in his work with Ground Zero was to explore issues of copyright and consumption. In several interviews and liner notes of the period, Otomo explains how, to his mind, copyright presupposes ownership and a need to exchange what one owns for money. <5> Acknowledging that ‘down with copyright’ sloganeering will not alter this unfortunate situation, Otomo nonetheless questions whether the very notion of ownership, on which copyright is based, is appropriately applicable to all music. For Otomo, musical ownership is historically tied to the written score – a readily bought and sold object – along with a predominantly Western notion that music is produced by an individual genius who subsequently owns what they create. <6> Yet, as Otomo states, ‘not all forms of creativity can be accredited to a single entity’, <7> and he goes on to suggest that, since all music stems from a tradition, perhaps no music can truly be credited to any singular owner.
This issue of multi-authorship is explored most explicitly in Ground Zero’s album Peking Revolutionary Opera, which results from a chain of temporally and spatially dispersed acts of creation. Firstly, the albumis a loose reimagining of ‘Peking-Oper’, a live performance by the Duo Goebbels/Harth, <8> recorded and initially released as the second side of their album Frankfurt/Peking (1984). <9> This performance itself consisted of improvisations built around looped samples taken from a 1970 China Record Corporation LP of the jingju yangbanxi (or ‘model revolutionary Peking opera’), Shajiabang. <10> A dual-layered process of creative reimagining hence sits behind Ground Zero’s album, something that is further complicated by the fact that the most readily available version of this album – released in 1996 and subtitled ‘Ver. 1.28’ –is in fact a remix that Otomo himself made of his band’s original 1995 version (which was released in limited edition and is now rather difficult to find). Subsequently, Ground Zero extended this reimagining process by making a highly condensed 7″ single version of the album dubbed ‘Ver 1.50’ (also released in 1996), and several, noticeably different, live performances, recorded in 1995, 1997, and 1999, respectively.
Appropriately, the track-titles for Peking Revolutionary Opera, Ver. 1.28 allude to the album’s complicated origins, suggestively combining the names of Maoist poems from Xiao Hua’s Song of The Long March with references to Japanese consumer culture. <11> The title for track five also alludes to Goebbels and Harth’s initial album, while track-titles ten and eleven mention the musical genres of enka and ‘yellow music’ (a type of pre-revolutionary Chinese pop song). Table 1 lists all of these track-titles, along with the entry times for each Shajiabang quotation in Peking Revolutionary Opera, Ver. 1.28. Also listed are the entry times for the same excerpts as they appear in ‘Peking-Oper’ and the original China Record Corporation LP. While all of the quotations in ‘Peking-Oper’ are samples, some of those in Peking Revolutionary Opera are rearrangements, newly recorded by Ground Zero. Music scholar Serge Lacasse uses the terms ‘autosonic’ and ‘allosonic’ to distinguish between these two types of musical quotation – the first involving direct, physical copying (as with samples or tape splices), and the second, the use of an abstract or ideal musical structure, like a melody (as with covers or jazz standards). <12> In lieu of scores that would otherwise make these quotations apparent, the reader is encouraged to hear the intertextuality for themselves by cross-listening to each recording. <13>
| Peking Revolutionary Opera, Ver. 1.28 | Location of quotation | Location in ‘Peking-Oper’ | Location in Shajiabang |
| (1) Flying Across the JP Yen | 00:05 (autosonic) | 00.08 | Scene 1: Making Contact (Disc 1, 01:02) |
| (2) Consume Mao | 01:19 (autosonic) | 00.08 | Scene 1: Making Contact (Disc 1, 01:02) |
| (3) Rush Capture of the Revolutionary Opera 1 | 00:01 (allosonic) | 06:08 | Scene 1: Making Contact (Disc 1, 00:16) |
| (4) Red Mao Book by Sony | 03:12 (autosonic) | 05:28 | Scene 1: Making Contact (Disc 1, 00:00) |
| (5) Crossing Frankfurt Four Times | 00:01 (allosonic) | 05:28 | Scene 1: Making Contact (Disc 1, 00:00) |
| (6) The Glory of Hong Kong – Kabukicho Conference | 02:34 (autosonic) | Scene 2: Evacuation (Disc 2, 00:04) | |
| (7) Pariaso 1 | 00:19 (autosonic) | Scene 2: Evacuation (Disc 1, 08:05) | |
| (8) Announcing Good News from the West | |||
| (9) Revolutionary Enka 2001 | |||
| (10) Grand Pink Junction Ballad | |||
| (11) Crossing Snow Mountains with Yamaha Bike | |||
| (12) Rush Capture of the Revolutionary Opera 2 | 00:01 (allosonic) | 06:08 | Scene 1: Making Contact (Disc 1, 00:16) |
| (13) Yellow Army, Beloved of all the Nations | 00:00 (autosonic) | 14:18 | Scene 5: Holding Out (Disc 3, 18:02) |
| (14) Triumphant Junction | 00:00 (allosonic) | 14:32 | Scene 5: Holding Out (Disc 3, 19:18) |
| (15) International – Epilogue | |||
| (16) Paraiso 2 |
Table 1. Tack-titles and samples for Peking Revolutionary Opera.
Notably, the autographic samplesin Peking Revolutionary Opera are all lifted from the original Shajiabang recording and not from ‘Peking-Oper’. This is known because the improvisations made over the samples in the Goebbels/Harth recording are not heard in conjunction with the same samples found on Ground Zero’s album. Additionally, tracks six and seven quote excerpts from Shajiabang that are not at all present in ‘Peking-Oper’. Yet Ground Zero does borrow from several parts of the Goebbels/Harth recording that do not contain Shajiabang excerpts, along with samples from many additional sources. At times, this melange of quotations is rather thick and difficult to sift through. For instance, track ten combines the final section of ‘Peking-Oper’ with a sample of the noise musician Rudolf Ebner screaming and an excerpt from Jon Rose’s album Violin Music for Supermarkets. The latter excerpt itself features Ground Zero member Sachiko M reciting Japanese pornography ads, making it a kind of self-sampling. A brief list of some other samples in Peking Revolutionary Opera include theatre director Norimizu Amaya speaking on the telephone, Yumiko Tanaka playing the shamisen, the band Compostela (who blend European folk music, Japanese chindon’ya, and Communist song), and the scratched surface noise of Christian Marclay’s Record Without a Cover.
Clearly, all these quotations are what complicate the album’s creative provenance, though they also have evocative semiotic associations with the themes of political economy, consumption, and commodity. This is most evident with the album’s key source material, Shajiabang, with jingju yangbanxi being key exemplars of the Cultural Revolution’s ‘newborn socialist things’: commodities deemed appropriate for a socialist state transitioning from capitalism to communism. <14> Additionally, Goebbels and Harth were heavily influenced by Hans Eisler and his desire to combine avant-garde aesthetics, radical politics, and popular appeal. <15> In both cases, music’s commodity function is reoriented towards explicitly anti-capitalist ends, and comparable purposes can also be read into the music of Jon Rose, Compostela, and Christian Marclay.
These associations naturally raise the question as to whether similar intentions lie behind Peking Revolutionary Opera. Yet, even with Otomo’s comments regarding copyright and authorship, it is difficult to attach any direct political meaning to this album, with Otomo having since stated that he does not make music to convey political messages. <16> Instead, Peking Revolutionary Opera might be best understood as, what Otomo calls, ‘a “chopping board” of consumption and sampling’: <17> referring not only to its cut-upped and reworked source material, but perhaps also to the Japanese idiom manaita ni noseru, meaning to put something on the table (or, more literally, the chopping board) as a topic for critical reflection.<18>
Notes
<1> See Noriko Manabe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 106.
<2> Otomo Yoshihide, ‘Interview with Otomo Yoshihide, The Mastery of Guitar & Turntable Achieved in His Mid-60s – Part 2’, by Narushi Hosoda, Tokion (February 28, 2024), https://tokion.jp/en/2024/02/28/interview-yoshihide-otomo-part2/.
<3> Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 189.
<4> Subsequently, Otomo became a key figure in the onkyô genre; see David Novak, ‘Playing Off Site: The Untranslation of Onkyô’, Asian Music 41, no.1 (2010): 36-59.
<5> Otomo Yoshihide, ‘Consume Ground Zero!’, 1996. Translated by Yoshiyuki Suzuki. Accessed August 15, 2024, http://www.japanimprov.com/yotomo/groundzero/consume.html.
<6> Otomo Yoshihide, in Lloyd Peterson, Music and the Creative Spirit: Innovators in Jazz, Improvisation, and the Avant Garde (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 311.
<7> Otomo, ‘Consume Ground Zero!’.
<8> A West German new music and multi-media project that consisted of Heiner Goebbels and Alfred Harth.
<9> A second performance was also recorded in 1987 and released on the 1989 album Live à Victoriaville.
<10> Jingju refers to the operatic tradition that emerged in Beijing in the late eighteenth century. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, several attempts were made to reform jingju according to revolutionary principals. In 1966, Kang Sheng announced eight yangbanxi or ‘model works’, suitable for the Cultural Revolution – five of which were jingju with revolutionary stories (along with two ballets and one symphony). For a much more detailed history of the complicated development of jingju yangbanxi, see Xing Fan, Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera during the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018).
<11> The original titles that Ground Zero borrow from include, ‘Flying Over the Dadu River’, ‘Rush Capture of Lu Ting Bridge’, ‘Crossing Chishui Four Times’, ‘The Glory of Zunyi Conference’, ‘Announcing Good News’, ‘Crossing Snow Mountains and Grassland’, ‘Red Army, The Beloved of Various Nationalities’, and ‘Triumphant Junction’.
<12> Serge Lacasse, ‘Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music’, in The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, ed. Michael Talbot(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 38.
<13> For Peking Revolutionary Opera, see https://groundzone.bandcamp.com/album/revolutionary-pekinese-opera; for ‘Peking-Oper’, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS-ANZy918k; for the original China Record Corporation LP, see https://archive.org/details/lp_shachiapang_china-peking-opera-troupe_1 and https://archive.org/details/lp_shachiapang_china-peking-opera-troupe. Notably, there is a third LP for this recording of Shajiabang, but it was not released until 1971 (a year after the first two LPs) and is not sampled by Duo Goebbels/Harth (presumably because they did not own it), nor, consequently, by Ground Zero.
<14> See Laurence Coderre, Newborn Socialist Things: Materiality in Maoist China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
<15> Ed McKeon, Heiner Goebbels and Curatorial Composing after Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 30.
<16> Otomo Yoshihide, ‘Interview’, by Michel Henritzi, Revue & Corrigée, December, 2001. Translated by Cathy Fishman and Yoshiyuki Suzuki, http://www.japanimprov.com/yotomo/interview01.html.
<17> Otomo, ‘Consume Ground Zero!’.
<18> Digital Daijisen, s.v. ‘俎板（まないた）に載（の）・せる’. Accessed, August 15, 2024, https://japanknowledge-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/lib/display/?lid=2001017396600.
Bibliography
Coderre, Laurence. Newborn Socialist Things: Materiality in Maoist China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
Kelly, Caleb. Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
Lacasse, Serge. ‘Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music’. The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, edited by Michael Talbot. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
Manabe, Noriko. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
McKeon, Ed. Heiner Goebbels and Curatorial Composing after Cage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Novak, David. ‘Playing Off Site: The Untranslation of Onkyô’. Asian Music 41, no.1 (2010): 36-59.
Otomo, Yoshihide, ‘Consume Ground Zero!’. 1996. Translated by Yoshiyuki Suzuki. Accessed August 15, 2024, http://www.japanimprov.com/yotomo/groundzero/consume.html.
Otomo, Yoshihide, ‘Interview with Otomo Yoshihide, The Mastery of Guitar & Turntable Achieved in His Mid-60s – Part 2’. By Narushi Hosoda. Tokion. February 28, 2024. https://tokion.jp/en/2024/02/28/interview-yoshihide-otomo-part2/.
Otomo, Yoshihide, ‘Interview’. By Michel Henritzi. Revue & Corrigée. December, 2001. Translated by Cathy Fishman and Yoshiyuki Suzuki. http://www.japanimprov.com/yotomo/interview01.html.
Peterson, Lloyd. Music and the Creative Spirit: Innovators in Jazz, Improvisation, and the Avant Garde. Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2006.
Xing, Fan. Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera during the Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018.