Frank Zappa
Dance Me This

Frank Zappa – Dance me this 2015

Yes, it happened again. It happened and we have reached a round number, 100. The hundredth album in Frank Zappa's planetary discography and never a title was more fitting than this. Let's go back to the end of 1993 and find him sitting at the console after having prepared the material for an album that he perhaps hoped to see published during his lifetime. Nothing doing, there's a massive amount of material, reel after reel, entire hours of ready things and life flickering with the flame going out. Result: the prospect that another 48 minutes of Zappa's things might, forever, remain in a drawer. If we're being picky, it's worth noting that the album, in the form of an audio cassette, began to circulate among industry insiders as early as 1994, but then ended up in oblivion. For the next twenty-two long years, the family "factory" churned out published, unpublished, live works, oddities, and whatnot to keep alive the total sense of our mustached hero's music. But in the long run, that album comes out, it was just waiting to be the hundredth, and here it is.
What is this work part of? Unpublished tracks, certainly, but also the toughest and most spectacular things produced by the great genius of the last century, which somehow conclude the genius outbursts of "Civilization, Phaze III". "Dance me this" is as provocative and irreverent in its title as in its contents. There is not a single fraction of a second that can be canonically danceable. So, dance me this! The tracks travel on polyrhythms that are absurd. We are at the apotheosis of quarter notes, the triumph of free, the glorification of the most unrestrained experimentalism, the celebration of the most irreverent musical onanism.
The album is trivially divisible into three parts, two preamble tracks, a mega suite of over 27 minutes and four tracks to close the "dance". The Synclavier dominates the first and last parts. And it is the title track that opens it, for a song that in two minutes gathers blues, minimalism, a micro guitar solo, vocals in diphonic style by a trio of Tuva singers (Tuvan throatsingers). The progression of the subsequent "Pachuco Gavotte" is quite particular. Let's start from the assumption that the Gavotte was born as a court dance in Renaissance France, on a binary rhythm and offbeat accents, here one can forget about the dance because its development from binary becomes polyrhythmic with a very long return, but maintaining the offbeat and with percussion that seems to have fun capturing all the weak accents of the plot in a crazy game.
The suite "Wolf Harbor" is ideally divided into 5 parts, although in fact no significant variations are perceived. We are in the shameless experimentation and avant-garde, a superficial listener not accustomed to the most extreme Zappa-isms might catalog the entire suite as a single noise. Apparently, there is no rhythm, apparently, there is no musical coherence, there is only a liberation in the air of subdued percussions, electronic sounds, dark and mysterious breaths, terrifying, sometimes desperately empty in others. All together and we are in the presence of a black, deep, and claustrophobic drape, from which emerge the ghosts of Varese, Boulez, Nono, and Romitelli.
After the suite, the tension does not drop. We return to pirouetting on themes dear to Frank Zappa of the latest compositional period. Some themes from "Jazz from Hell," some notes snatched from Stravinsky, the steel throats of Siberian singers return, and for the finale, a mathematical genius and Zappa, with the help of the programmer Todd Yvega, pulls an algorithm out of the Synclavier that allows the metronome to go crazy. "Calculus" brings us rhythmic devastation with continuous accelerations and decelerations automatically generated based on the variation of the diphonic singing improvisation of the Tuvan throatsingers. Something truly unique.
Here we are at the end. Have you never listened to Frank Zappa? DON'T start with this one. Do you have everything by Zappa and adore him? Go buy this one too. Do you know something and want to delve deeper? Ask for advice.

Sioulette p.a.p.