The album is named after – and the title track samples – Battōtai (抜刀隊, Sword-drawing brigade), a Japanese military march composed by Charles Edouard Gabriel Leroux.

[3][4] In an interview with Arthur Potter, Masami Akita explains how this LP and Antimonument were inspired by his native culture: [...] musical composition and behavior are always related to the structure of one's own language and way of thinking.

The reason those images were used was that I'd been researching misreadings of Japanese public history, and wrote about that in a book called Mannerism of Heterodoxa.

[5] The album samples many electroacoustic / modern classical works by artists including François Bayle, Conlon Nancarrow, Ivo Malec, and Luc Ferrari.

Full-length versions of "Anus Anvil Anxiety", "Mortegage", and "Batztoutai" were later released in the Merzbox, along with an unreleased track from the sessions.