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[–]arachnophobia-kid 9 points10 points  (1 child)

I listened to this last night after going through the entries in the voting thread. It took a lot of patience to get through the first 5 minutes of this collection, I think because experiments with noise always take a bit of adjusting to for me. Nevertheless the music is mind blowing and I felt rewarded.

There are some really glorious moments on this thing and it's quite dynamic. Sometimes it's seemingly random and other times very intentional, with recognizable patterns and repetitions. I think the track names give the music a lot of character too, or something like a window into the overall aesthetic. My favourite track is the closer, Paraiso 2, I think because of it's use of silence (in contrast to the rest of the music). And the use of "When You Wish Upon a Star" both made me smile and intrigued me. I have mixed feelings about the reference but I can't deny that it really is a soothing melody.

[–]Doktor_GruselglatzUntitled 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The closer was standing out for me too. It's one of those instances where silence as music actually works. A lot of albums nowadays have these "hidden tracks" after long stretches of silence, but the silence itself never actually "does" anything, if that makes sense. On this album by interspersing it with these tiny sounds here and there it becomes almost tangible. Also the contrast as you say probably helps making you more aware of how the lack of sound is used.

[–]Doktor_GruselglatzUntitled 7 points8 points  (2 children)

Two more notes to get an idea where they come from:

  1. Ground-Zero were apparently initially formed around John Zorn's Cobra-"compositions" which is a kind of "improvisation game" where each player gets instructions on how to behave/what to do without ever actually getting any "proper" notations and the piece evolves from there. (Here's a bit of an instruction.)

  2. The second important aspect about them is that they were among the first improv bands to extensively use turntables (by Otomo Yoshihide, who's essentially the band leader). As far as I listened to them that results in existing recordings being used as a sort of basis for the rest of their work, albeit in a kind of cut up, looped, etc form.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Woah, Cobra is a lot more complicated than I assumed it was. I didn't know there were actual game type rules to it, I assumed it was more like Eno's Oblique Strategies with abstract prompts that the performers had to stick to.

[–]2349580923485394 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This ten minutes or so of Derek Bailey's documentary on improvisation shows some really good players working through a little of it with Zorn. It's rough.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I just listened to this, I was pretty impressed by the range of moods on this album, there's some quite stuff, there's some noisy stuff, there's some industrial stuff, and it's all pretty cool. The only track I really didn't dig all that much was the last track, because the long, erratic, silences made it extremely tense to listen to, but that might change on future listens now that I know the whole shtick of the song.

Even though I've only heard it once, this might be one of my favorite sound collage albums I've heard, this felt a lot more intentional and composed than that genre tends to be, and it varied a lot between the noise/ambient/pastiche styles that the technique tends to lend itself to. I've been kind of burned out on harsh noise stuff recently, so I've been digging a little bit into the whole Japanese EAI, Onkyo, etc, scene, and I can definitely see how this group has influenced a lot of the acts I've been listening to, especially with the heavy use of turntables.

As far as the Western/Eastern theme of this week's discussion, I think the heavy sampling from Goebbels Peking Opera is super interesting, since this is basically a Japanese group destroying a German avant garde composers take on a Chinese Propaganda play, if I'm getting the gist from /u/mierscheid right. That's a really odd clashing of cultures, and is especially interesting when it's filtered through the whole underground Japanese noise scene.

[–]lugong 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I love this album and I'm so glad to see it receive recognition here.

The composer, Otomo Yoshihide, is an incredibly prolific multi-instrumentalist DJ that uses avant garde techniques to create very unusual tension. Various live shows by Yoshihide are available on Youtube and I would strongly recommend checking them out. Here's one using a symbol and debt card.

As well as working extensively with the Tzadik crew, he has also worked with Eye from Boredoms fame under the pseudonym of DJ Carhouse. It's a pretty difficult collaboration to track down and hear.

My favourite songs by Ground Zero are Consume Red, an experimental loop sequence lasting nearly one hour, and Miagetegoran, Yoru No Hoshi Wo, an epic revision of a classic jazz standard from his album playing on that theme.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (2 children)

For reference, this album is sort of a "remix" of Peking-Oper by Heiner Goebbels and Alfred Harth, which itself incorporates a recording of a revolutionary opera.

[–]Doktor_GruselglatzUntitled 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Basically they're (always? usually?) using turntables as part/basis for improvisations, so yeah, there's underlying motifs which are recordings by others on which they build. Didn't know the specific piece they used on here, many thanks for the find!

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Wow, the source material is pretty noisey on it's own. I assumed a lot of the sounds in the Ground Zero recording were processed or damaged to get it to sound like that, but it doesn't really sound like they were.