Zettai Reido’s 1980 seven-inch is only three tracks long, but it already contains nearly everything that makes the group difficult to file neatly under punk, post-punk, new wave or experimental rock. “Kiretsu,” “Mukade” and “Hello 3” were recorded at Studio Magnet in Tokyo on July 4 and 5, 1980, after the band had already begun attracting attention in the city’s underground. The original personnel were Yasuo Namitome on vocals, Teruo Sasayama on guitar, Wataru Okuma on synthesizer and keyboards, Ichiro Nakagawa on bass and Shinya Kimura on drums, with Okuma writing the words to “Hello 3” while Namitome wrote the lyrics to the other material. The record was issued through Junk Connection, and in retrospect it feels less like a tidy debut statement than a compressed document of a band already trying to destroy the shape of the thing it had just entered.
“Kiretsu” is the longest piece here at just over six minutes, and it immediately demonstrates why contemporary descriptions of Zettai Reido emphasized instability and indeterminate form. The track does not behave like a punk song stretched past its natural length. It feels constructed around tension between forward motion and interruption. The uploaded file has a strong low-mid body, but plenty of upper-frequency activity keeps the surface restless. The rhythm sits around a moderate pulse rather than sprinting, giving the arrangement room to mutate. Guitar, bass, drums and electronics do not simply stack into one wall. They continually seem to pull apart from one another, then reconnect before the structure collapses completely.
That instability makes the title especially appropriate. “Kiretsu” can be translated as “fissure” or “crack,” and the music itself feels fissured. A groove may establish itself, but the surrounding sound keeps opening little fractures inside it. This is one of the most useful distinctions between Zettai Reido and more conventional punk from the same moment. The band is not rejecting structure altogether. It is interested in making structure feel provisional. Something can exist strongly enough to be recognized and still remain vulnerable to disruption.
“Mukade” is shorter and tighter, just under four minutes, with a slightly faster pulse and a heavier, more compact center. The title means “centipede,” and without forcing the image too literally onto the music, there is something appropriately segmented about the track’s movement. The rhythm seems to advance through repeated units rather than through a smooth rock-and-roll flow. The uploaded file has less high-end brightness than “Hello 3” and more of its energy concentrated in the middle range, giving it a denser, slightly darker feel. The band sounds less expansive here and more locked into repeated pressure.
What stands out across both “Kiretsu” and “Mukade” is how physical the rhythm section remains beneath the abstraction. Nakagawa’s bass and Kimura’s drums keep preventing the music from floating away into pure experimental gesture. The songs can be irregular, noisy and difficult to predict, but there is almost always something bodily underneath them. That physicality helps explain why early writing about Zettai Reido could describe the band as freaky and avant-garde while still treating them as part of the rock underground rather than as academic experimental music.
“Hello 3” changes the atmosphere again. At a little over four minutes, it is the brightest and most high-frequency-heavy file of the three. It also has the roughest surface by several simple measurements, with more zero-crossing activity and a noticeably higher spectral center than the other tracks. Those technical differences line up with the subjective impression: this one feels sharper, thinner and more nervous. Okuma’s authorship of the lyrics is also significant because the track’s overall character feels more detached from straightforward vocal rock. The electronics and percussion have greater prominence, and the arrangement seems less interested in settling into a recognizable groove.
That makes “Hello 3” an ideal closer because it pushes the record away from the shape established by the first two pieces. A weaker debut EP might use three songs to define a single style. Zettai Reido uses three songs to demonstrate that style itself is unstable. “Kiretsu” stretches and fractures. “Mukade” compresses and crawls. “Hello 3” brightens and destabilizes the surface. The common element is not a fixed sound but a method: establish enough musical order that breaking it becomes meaningful.
The original artwork reinforces that instability. The sleeve is stark, cheap, graphic and mysterious. Large black-and-white photographic imagery, rough reproduction, and the severe use of the band name create something that feels closer to a small-run art object than a commercial rock single. The later booklet material makes clear that this was not accidental amateurism. Zettai Reido were already thinking about form, image, language and the surrounding underground infrastructure as part of the same activity. The surviving Junk Connection documentation describes the group as one of the bands representing a new flow of sound in Japan, built from multiple musical elements and characterized by an always-indeterminate form.
That phrase, “always indeterminate,” may be the most useful way to hear the record. The music is not random. It is not formless in the sense of lacking decisions. It is actively resisting final shape. The band sounds as though it wants every section to remain capable of becoming something else.
The context around Junk Connection matters too. This was a tiny independent environment rather than a conventional record-industry launch. The physical documentation is full of the things that defined underground music culture at the time: names, addresses, photographs, notes, hand-drawn graphics, typewritten material, small-scale production details and evidence of people physically organizing around bands they believed were worth preserving. The record did not arrive surrounded by a large promotional apparatus. The object itself had to carry the information.
That small scale may have helped the music remain this peculiar. There is no obvious pressure to produce a hit, settle on a recognizable image or make the three tracks resemble one another closely enough to reassure a label. The EP sounds like a band still discovering what its own instability can do.
The later history makes the record even more fascinating. Zettai Reido would change personnel, lose Namitome, move into a more instrumental and progressive second period, then reorganize again into the song-oriented third phase documented on III 1981-1982. Hearing this 1980 single with that future in mind makes it feel like a seed containing several incompatible plants. The rhythmic discipline of the later instrumental work is already here. The experimental electronics are already here. The willingness to let songs mutate is already here. Even the strange relationship between rock structure and something more poetic or abstract is already beginning.
What makes the seven-inch so valuable is that it captures those possibilities before they separate into later versions of the band. There is still one lineup, one moment, three songs and one tiny physical object.
Yet nothing about it feels settled.
The record begins with a crack.
It ends with a greeting.
Between them, Zettai Reido invents a problem it would spend the next two years refusing to solve.
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