Ground Zero

About

Ground Zero were a Japanese noise rock collective active through the 1990s, built around guitarist and turntablist Otomo Yoshihide and a large, rotating cast of performers. They came together originally to play John Zorn's game piece Cobra, which tells you a lot about the kind of restless, rule bending energy they brought to everything they did. Their sound pulled from free jazz, rock, experimental noise and improvisation, and their instrumentation was genuinely wild: turntables, sampler, shamisen, koto, saxophone, omnichord, electric guitar and two drum kits at once. They were among the first free improvisers to seriously incorporate turntables. Highlights from their catalogue include Revolutionary Pekinese Opera Ver. 1.28, a noise collage laced with samples of Peking opera, and Consume Red, where the performers improvise around a fragment of hojok music by Korean holy musician Kim Seok Chul. That latter record had a long tail too as it was sampled on the 2024 noise rock album Attempted Martyr by Prostitute. Ground Zero played their final show on March 8, 1998, and their last album Last Concert captured that night.