Death Is Deaf to My Wailings begins with one of Ichiro Tsuji’s bleakest observations: suffering does not guarantee an audience. A cry may be sincere, physically exhausting, and desperate enough to consume the person producing it, yet death possesses no ears with which to receive the appeal. It cannot be persuaded, delayed through eloquence, embarrassed by grief, or made merciful through volume. Across this two-disc release, Dissecting Table turns that failure of communication into an immense electronic environment. The wailing is not necessarily represented by a recognizable human scream. It exists in overloaded frequencies, repeated pulses, unstable oscillations, and signals apparently straining to cross a boundary incapable of responding.
The title belongs naturally to Tsuji’s long history of writing about mortality, but the sound is far removed from the metallic industrial architecture of Zigoku or Music for Performance “Dead Body and Me.” By 2020, Dissecting Table had become something closer to an independently evolving electronic research system. Tsuji’s work with computer-controlled pulse-width modulation, USB devices, circuitry, and self-designed synthesis allowed him to create material whose organization feels less like a band arrangement than an electrical organism. The machines do not imitate drums, guitars, or conventional synthesizer performances. They generate pressure, interruption, swarming frequencies, unstable rhythmic behavior, and long structures that seem to discover their own internal laws while unfolding.
The title piece occupies the first disc as one extended confrontation. Its duration removes death from the scale of an isolated dramatic event and makes it a continuous condition. The music does not depict a person dying in one theatrical instant. It resembles the long knowledge that death exists ahead of every action, relationship, argument, pleasure, and attempt at preservation. This awareness may remain beneath consciousness for years, then suddenly rise through illness, grief, age, danger, or the discovery that another person has vanished. Tsuji’s electronics operate similarly. Large masses remain present beneath sharper surface activity, occasionally moving forward until they seem to occupy the entire field.
A wail differs from ordinary speech because it occurs when language has failed or become inadequate. It may contain no detailed proposition, yet it communicates pain through pitch, duration, breath, and force. Tsuji translates that pre-verbal communication into circuitry. Frequencies bend, strain, and repeat as though attempting to make themselves understood by an absent receiver. Some tones feel almost vocal without becoming literal voices. Others resemble alarms whose emergency has continued so long that no one remembers what originally activated them. Their repetition becomes tragic because the signal remains active while the possibility of rescue has disappeared.
The piece also raises a question that runs through recorded music itself. A living body produces sound, but the recording can continue after the body has ceased. Every archived voice is therefore potentially a message addressed to listeners who will exist beyond the speaker’s lifetime. Death may be deaf, but recording is not. Tape, discs, files, and future ears can receive what mortality ignored. Tsuji’s tiny handmade edition becomes a vessel launched against disappearance, even while its title denies that such preservation defeats death. Fifteen copies do not create immortality. They create fifteen temporary routes through which one arrangement of electrical thought may continue moving.
The second disc opens with “Tychonic System,” invoking Tycho Brahe’s historical model of the cosmos. In that arrangement, Earth remains stationary at the center while the Sun and Moon orbit it, and the other planets revolve around the Sun. It was an ingenious compromise between older geocentric belief and the emerging Copernican system, preserving the apparent stillness of Earth while incorporating much of the new astronomical evidence. The title suits Tsuji because it concerns competing explanations capable of organizing the same visible movements differently.
Music also changes according to the center from which it is interpreted. A listener may treat rhythm as central and hear surrounding noise as disruption. Another may hear noise as the primary material and rhythm as a temporary local pattern. The electronic signal itself possesses no obligation to recognize either interpretation. “Tychonic System” seems to rearrange its apparent center repeatedly, allowing one pulse, frequency, or density to become the organizing body before another force changes the perceived orbit of everything surrounding it.
The historical Tychonic system was not foolish. It was a serious attempt to reconcile observation, inherited knowledge, physics, and theology during a period when decisive proof remained incomplete. That matters because incorrect models can still possess internal elegance and explanatory power. Human beings depend upon such models to make reality manageable, but the model may eventually become a prison if its structure is mistaken for the universe itself. Tsuji’s electronic systems expose this danger by creating patterns that feel authoritative while they are present, then reorganizing them until their authority appears temporary. The listener repeatedly mistakes a local arrangement for the law governing the whole work.
“My Nightmare Flashback” turns from the cosmos toward involuntary personal memory. A nightmare ordinarily belongs to sleep, while a flashback invades waking consciousness. Combining them creates an experience in which an unreal event returns with the force of remembered reality. The body may react before the mind establishes that the danger is absent: pulse accelerates, muscles tighten, breath changes, and the present room becomes contaminated by another time. Tsuji’s signals resemble this temporal confusion. Sudden electronic movements enter established textures without appearing to originate from the current environment. They sound imported from a previous disturbance that has not finished occurring psychologically.
A flashback is not simply memory played again. It collapses the distance that ordinarily protects the present from the past. Tsuji’s use of repetition has a similar effect. Material returns without becoming nostalgic or reassuring. Each recurrence may increase tension because the listener recognizes the pattern while remaining uncertain about what it will do this time. The machine remembers perfectly, but the human body experiences every repetition differently. Recorded sound remains unchanged; the nervous system accumulating exposure does not.
“Sentimental Ditty” closes the set with a title almost comically gentle beside the preceding death, cosmology, and traumatic recurrence. A ditty is ordinarily brief, catchy, and emotionally uncomplicated, something hummed without effort. Tsuji’s use of the phrase can sound ironic, but irony does not necessarily eliminate genuine sentiment. After decades of extreme sound, even a damaged melodic shape or comparatively modest electronic phrase can carry unusual tenderness. Sentiment may survive inside machinery precisely because it is fragile, embarrassing, and resistant to the severe intellectual systems surrounding it.
The title also questions how emotion is recognized. Listeners are trained to identify sentiment through melody, harmony, lyrics, and familiar performance gestures. Dissecting Table removes most of those signals, leaving emotion to emerge through texture, repetition, pressure, and duration. A sound may become moving not because it resembles sadness conventionally, but because it appears vulnerable inside a hostile field. One frequency persists while larger forces gather around it. A pulse returns after being buried. A thin tone remains audible despite distortion. Survival itself begins to resemble melody.
This final piece prevents the album from becoming a simple statement of cosmic indifference. Death may be deaf, yet the living continue addressing one another. A wail unheard by death can still be heard by another person. A nightmare can be described, a cosmological model debated, and a sentimental fragment shared. None of these actions cancels mortality, but each creates a temporary relationship within it. Tsuji’s music has always been severe because it refuses false consolation, yet its very existence demonstrates continued communication. The artist makes the signal; the label duplicates it; a listener preserves it; another person eventually hears it in a room Tsuji never imagined.
The edition’s rarity intensifies this contradiction. Fifteen regular copies and three special editions make the physical object almost impossibly private, especially within a discography already filled with editions of two, three, or four. Such scarcity can frustrate listeners and reduce the visible history of an artist’s later work to scattered catalogue entries. Yet it also reveals how completely Tsuji separated production from conventional expectations of career management. He continued constructing systems, packaging objects, and releasing enormous quantities of music without waiting for a broad market to validate each experiment.
Death Is Deaf to My Wailings is therefore both an album and one station inside a nearly unmanageable current of work. Its two discs preserve a late phase of Dissecting Table in which circuitry, software, custom synthesis, philosophical titles, and physical dread have fused into a solitary method. Earlier Tsuji recordings often placed the human scream against industrial machinery. Here, humanity has been absorbed more thoroughly into the signal, but it has not disappeared. The wailing remains in every frequency that strains against silence, every pattern that refuses to end quietly, and every handmade copy sent outward despite the certainty that all physical carriers eventually fail.
Anyone who owns either edition, has photographs of Tsuji’s 2020 packaging, or understands more about the synthesis system used for these recordings could restore valuable details to this difficult period of the catalogue. The music itself remains a tremendous statement of unanswered persistence. Death does not listen, negotiate, or reply. Dissecting Table continues transmitting anyway.
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