Ultra Materials 1986–1991 is not merely an early-years compilation. It documents the period in which Ichiro Tsuji discovered the fundamental materials from which Dissecting Table would continue building for decades: metallic percussion, distorted bass, sequenced machinery, damaged electronics, screamed language, ritual repetition, and an almost physical conviction that music should place the listener under pressure. The title is exact. These are “materials” rather than a collection of polished historical monuments. Rhythm appears as a hard substance that can be struck, bent, accelerated, and broken. Voice becomes another abrasive surface. Electronics provide atmosphere, but they also behave like industrial chemicals reacting unpredictably when combined. Across more than two hours, the set allows us to hear Tsuji learning how these substances interact and gradually constructing an unmistakable musical world from them.
The earliest pieces possess the compressed urgency of musicians discovering that ordinary punk structures can no longer contain the force they want to release. Tsuji had already served as the original vocalist for Hiroshima hardcore group Gudon, and that background remains audible in the vocal attack. The scream does not arrive as theatrical horror or detached performance art. It carries the direct bodily function of hardcore: breath driven outward until language and physical strain become inseparable. What changes inside Dissecting Table is the environment surrounding that voice. The social machinery of guitar, bass, and drums is dismantled and replaced with sequences, metal, electronics, and rhythms that sound capable of continuing after the human participants have collapsed.
“Accomplishment” makes an appropriate beginning because the title can be heard either sincerely or with suspicion. Accomplishment ordinarily marks the successful completion of labor, yet the track sounds less like a victory ceremony than a system becoming operational. The pieces that follow repeatedly question the language through which societies measure success, obedience, identity, and control. “I Get My Slogan” suggests a person receiving the phrase by which thought will be organized. A slogan is useful precisely because it condenses complexity into something repeatable. Tsuji’s rhythms expose the mechanical side of that process. Once a phrase or beat is repeated often enough, it can begin functioning independently of conviction. The body participates before consciousness decides whether it agrees.
“Camouflage,” “Answer,” and “Illusion” continue this investigation of surfaces and hidden structures. Camouflage does not make an object disappear; it causes the object to resemble its environment closely enough to escape detection. Industrial society operates through similar disguises. Violence can resemble procedure, exploitation can resemble efficiency, and obedience can appear as personal choice. Dissecting Table’s electronics repeatedly strip away this visual smoothness by making systems audible as pressure. The machinery is not hidden behind a finished product. Motors, impacts, sequences, and overload become the product.
The material from Ultra Point of Intersection Exist contains some of the collection’s most distinctive collisions between punk aggression and mechanical composition. Even the title proposes a strange spatial condition: an intersection so intensified that it becomes “ultra,” a point at which several lines, forces, or states occupy the same location. Tsuji’s music works through such intersections. Human scream meets programmed repetition. Metal percussion meets distorted low frequency. Improvisational violence meets rigid sequencing. The resulting pieces are neither conventional band performances nor completely impersonal electronic constructions. They inhabit the friction between the two.
“Dissect” can be understood as the project’s operating instruction. To dissect is to cut a body apart in order to study its internal relationships. The procedure destroys the body’s original wholeness while producing another kind of knowledge. Tsuji applies this method to musical form. Rhythm is separated from the drummer, voice from the singer’s conventional social role, and sound from the obligation to resemble an identifiable instrument. These parts are then reassembled into an artificial organism. It may no longer behave naturally, but it reveals structures concealed by the familiar appearance of a rock band.
“Clear Up All” and “Psychic Noise” deepen the psychological dimension. Noise is not only acoustic excess. It is unwanted information, internal disturbance, ideological interference, and everything a system excludes in order to present itself as orderly. Psychic noise is especially difficult to remove because the receiver and disturbance occupy the same consciousness. Tsuji’s crowded electronics can sound like mental processes refusing to remain silent: repeated phrases, alarms, memories, urges, and contradictory signals competing for authority. The music does not imitate madness from a safe artistic distance. It creates a listening condition in which attention must struggle to organize what it receives.
“Today Is Holiday” offers one of the set’s strangest titles. A holiday promises rest from regulated labor, yet the track’s extended duration and harsh mechanical movement make release feel uncertain. A scheduled holiday remains part of the calendar that controls work. Leisure itself may become another administered period, permission temporarily granted before the system resumes. Dissecting Table’s rhythm keeps operating beneath the title’s apparent freedom. The machine has no holiday because it possesses no distinction between work and rest.
“Control Matter” brings the relationship between human intention and physical substance into direct focus. Matter can be shaped, processed, struck, amplified, recorded, and forced into repeated patterns, but every material also places limits upon control. Metal resonates according to its dimensions. Tape distorts. Electronics introduce noise. The voice becomes exhausted. Tsuji’s music is powerful because it does not conceal these resistances. Control is always partial. The composer establishes a mechanism, but the mechanism answers with frequencies, accidents, and physical consequences that exceed the original command.
The two “Humanism” pieces make the collection’s relationship with humanity particularly uneasy. Humanism places human value, reason, or experience at the center of thought, but Dissecting Table continually reveals the fragility of that center. The human voice is surrounded by machines more consistent than lungs and muscles can ever be. Industrial systems were supposedly constructed to serve human purposes, yet they frequently demand that human bodies adapt to their rhythms. Tsuji’s music does not simply celebrate machinery against humanity or retreat into sentimental faith in the individual. It places both inside one hostile circuit and listens to the conflict.
The second disc moves increasingly toward death, transfer, and destruction. “Transfer the Object by the Spirit” sounds like an impossible technical command joining physical material with invisible force. A recording performs a related action. It transfers an event without transferring the body that produced it. Breath, impact, rhythm, and electronic current become information capable of crossing distance and surviving their original moment. Ultra Materials itself performs this transfer, moving fragile early recordings into a later digital carrier and then into another generation of listeners.
“From Life to Death,” “Road to Death,” and “Death March” turn mortality into movement. Death is not represented as a single terminal strike. It becomes a road, transition, and organized procession. The march is especially significant because it joins bodily rhythm with institutional purpose. Feet move together, individual timing is surrendered, and collective motion becomes a demonstration of power. Tsuji’s programmed percussion pushes this logic beyond human discipline. The machine performs the perfect march because it cannot hesitate, become afraid, or refuse the destination.
“Murder Music” is the set’s longest piece and one of its most overwhelming statements. The title does not necessarily mean music depicting murder. It can also imply music that murders musical comfort, recognizable form, silence, or the listener’s ability to remain detached. Its length matters because the assault becomes environmental. A short explosion can be admired as spectacle; sustained pressure requires adaptation. The ear searches the dense surface and begins discovering separate rhythms, layers, and distances within what initially seemed like one mass. Tsuji’s extremity contains structure, but he makes the listener work physically to find it.
“Dark Side of the Life,” “Ruin,” and “Cosmic Death” widen the final movement from individual mortality toward social and universal scale. Ruin is both destruction and evidence. A ruined structure no longer serves its original function, yet its remains reveal how it was constructed. Dissecting Table treats industrial civilization in the same way, as though examining it after collapse might expose the systems hidden beneath its polished surfaces. “Cosmic Death” removes the final privilege of imagining human suffering as the center of existence. Stars die, matter transforms, and systems vastly larger than civilization continue without moral concern.
The collection’s historical importance lies partly in how unusual this sound was within its original Japanese context. Tsuji was not following the later stereotype of Japanese noise as unrestricted electronic eruption. These recordings are intensely noisy, but they remain rooted in rhythm, song-length construction, physical performance, and the confrontational economy of hardcore. Their violence is organized. Tsuji understands that a rigid pattern can be more oppressive than chaos because pattern implies a system capable of repeating its force indefinitely.
Ultra Materials also demonstrates that Dissecting Table’s later philosophical and technical developments were already contained in the earliest work. Questions of control, bodily limitation, death, illusion, human identity, and machinery are present throughout the track titles and structures. Later recordings would explore geometry, Buddhist philosophy, electronics, decay, and self-designed synthesis systems with greater abstraction, but the primary conflict had already been established: a temporary human body attempting to preserve autonomy inside structures built from repetition and force.
Steinklang’s compilation does more than rescue scarce releases. By placing the 1986–1991 material into one long sequence, it transforms scattered objects into a developmental map. Early urgency expands into extended architecture. Punk-derived attack encounters electronic space. The voice moves between command, protest, pain, and an additional layer of noise. Every piece contributes another sample to the laboratory.
The “ultra” in the title finally describes not refinement but concentration. These materials are pushed beyond their ordinary roles until metal becomes rhythm, rhythm becomes discipline, voice becomes impact, and recording becomes a method of transferring a vanished physical struggle into the present. More than thirty years later, the machinery has not become an inert museum exhibit. It begins operating again whenever the discs are played, and the listener becomes the latest body placed at its point of intersection.
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