Zettai Reido II 1980-1981 documents the band at the exact point where its first identity had broken apart but a new one had not yet settled. The original five-piece lineup had formed in late 1979 around Yasuo Namitome on vocals, Teruo Sasayama on guitar, Wataru Okuma on synthesizer, Ichiro Nakagawa on bass and Shinya Kimura on drums. They quickly became part of the Tokyo underground circuit around Kichijoji Minor, then moved into venues such as Shinjuku Loft and Shibuya Yaneura, sharing bills with groups including INU, Auto-Mod and Zelda. Their 1980 Junk Connection EP gave that first period a small but durable physical trace. Then Namitome left almost immediately afterward. The version of Zettai Reido captured on II begins in the aftermath of that rupture. What had been a vocal-led, chaotic punk and post-punk group becomes something more instrumental, more progressive, more abstract and in some ways harder to classify.
That change is the key to hearing this collection. Zettai Reido’s early reputation was built around words such as “freaky,” “formless” and “chaotic,” descriptions that still make sense, but the second period starts reorganizing that chaos. Without Namitome at the center, the remaining musicians do not simply replace him and continue. The band begins leaning much harder into instrumental interaction. Bass and drums become structural anchors while synthesizer, guitar and noise move around them in less predictable ways. OTOTOY’s description of the second period is especially useful here, characterizing the music as moving away from the initial chaotic sound toward an alternative style with a much stronger progressive and instrumental character. That does not mean Zettai Reido suddenly became a conventional prog band. The music remains too nervous, too unstable and too uninterested in polish for that. What changes is the amount of space given to development.
The 2CD format suits that period because II is not really one lost studio album. It is an archive of a transformation. The material comes from unreleased studio work and live recordings made during 1980 and 1981, after the original singer had left but before the band dissolved in spring 1981. That gives the set a documentary quality. The listener is not hearing a finished statement assembled at the time. The listener is hearing surviving evidence of a band trying to determine what it could become.
The rhythm section is one of the most important constants across that change. Nakagawa and Kimura had already been singled out in descriptions of the earliest band for their force and groove, and in the second period those qualities become even more important because the music is no longer organized around a fixed vocal personality. Bass and drums provide the floor while everything above them is allowed to misbehave. Kimura’s playing can feel direct and physical, while Nakagawa often gives the music a surprisingly strong sense of movement underneath otherwise fractured arrangements. That tension between groove and instability is one reason Zettai Reido never sounds merely academic. The music may be strange, but it still moves.
Okuma’s role also becomes more exposed. Synthesizer had already been part of the original group’s identity, but in this transitional version electronics and noise can function less as decoration and more as one of the principal voices. The official Zettai Reido history later emphasized how freely his synthesizer and noise guitar moved over the rhythm section in the early period, and II feels like the place where that freedom starts taking on more structural weight. Sounds arrive as interruptions, signals, textures and directional changes rather than simply filling harmonic space. This is one of the places where the band’s relationship to post-punk becomes especially interesting. The synthesizer is not there to make the music futuristic in a superficial sense. It changes how the group organizes attention.
Sasayama’s guitar works similarly. Rather than constantly providing a stable rock foundation, it can become another disruptive element, moving between recognizable riffing and more abrasive or fragmented gestures. The result is music that can sound composed and provisional at the same time. A passage may establish a clear rhythmic identity, then another instrument appears to pull against it. The band rarely seems interested in making every part agree.
That disagreement is productive. Zettai Reido’s stated identity from the period often revolved around resisting easy musical absorption. The band was described in 1980 as throwing together many different musical elements while remaining fundamentally “indeterminate” in form. II shows what happens when that principle survives a lineup collapse. Instead of becoming simpler after losing the singer, the group becomes more open-ended. The absence of a dominant front person creates more room for the ensemble itself to become the subject.
There is a historical reason the collection feels restless. After Namitome’s departure, the remaining members still had enough momentum to attract attention from Toshiba EMI, and they made test recordings there. They also toured Nagoya and Kansai. That is an important detail because it shows the second-period band was not merely a private rehearsal-room afterlife. There was still enough belief around Zettai Reido for the possibility of a larger future to remain open. Yet that future never solidified. By spring 1981 the second configuration had dissolved.
That unrealized possibility hangs over the studio material. These recordings can be heard as documents from a branch of Japanese underground music that might have gone somewhere else entirely. Zettai Reido had already moved from the hyper-local environment of Kichijoji Minor into more visible Tokyo clubs. They had released a record. EMI had shown interest. The second period then becomes more instrumentally ambitious rather than more commercially streamlined. The usual narrative would be that attention from a major label pulls a band toward accessibility. Zettai Reido appears to have moved in the opposite direction.
The live material is equally important because it reveals how this unstable new language functioned in front of an audience. Studio experimentation can always be dismissed as something assembled through editing, but the live recordings show the group carrying those ideas into real rooms. That matters with music this dependent on tension. A rhythm can only remain compelling if the musicians physically hold it together while everything around it shifts. The surviving performances demonstrate that the second-period Zettai Reido was not simply searching. It had already developed a working method built around pressure, repetition, interruption and collective instinct.
II also helps explain why the band is difficult to fit neatly into the usual story of Japanese punk. The dates place Zettai Reido squarely inside that historical moment, and the venues and associations connect them to the underground surrounding punk and new wave. Yet the music keeps escaping those labels. There is punk energy, but not always punk structure. There is post-punk abstraction, but also progressive development. There are electronic textures without any stable synth-pop identity. There is improvisational looseness without the music becoming free improvisation. Zettai Reido seem less interested in belonging to a style than in using whatever tools happen to create the desired instability.
The archival nature of the 2013 Super Fuji release makes that instability easier to understand than a single contemporary record might have. A conventional album freezes a band into one official statement. II does almost the opposite. It exposes a period of change. Different recordings capture slightly different balances between rhythm, noise, structure and improvisation. The seams remain visible. That is a strength rather than a flaw because the collection is documenting process rather than pretending the process had already produced a final form.
It also gives the second period a historical weight it did not possess at the time. Zettai Reido released almost nothing during its original existence compared with the amount of surviving material now available. For decades, the group could easily have been reduced to the 1980 EP and a few memories. II changes that picture. It shows that the band’s story did not end when Namitome left. In some ways, that departure made the group stranger.
The later history makes the transition even clearer. After this second configuration ended in 1981, some members regrouped and continued into the third period documented on III 1981-1982. That later incarnation moved further toward songs, poetry, psychedelic pop and a more openly melodic vocabulary. II therefore sits between two very different versions of Zettai Reido. The first band is chaotic, vocal-driven and connected strongly to the punk underground. The third band becomes more song-oriented and dreamlike. The second band is the unstable bridge where neither identity fully controls the music.
That makes II perhaps the most revealing of the archival sets. It captures the moment when Zettai Reido had lost the form that first made people notice them but had not yet discovered the form that would follow. The music is therefore full of possibility. Rhythms keep moving while the surface changes. Synthesizers and guitars push against one another. Structure appears, dissolves and reforms. The absence of a permanent answer becomes the point.
Zettai Reido II 1980-1981 is not the sound of a band failing to decide what it wants to be.
It is the sound of a band discovering that deciding may have been the least interesting option.
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