John Zorn
Mount Analogue

What were you doing at 15?

Afternoons spent in front of the Super Nintendo? First kisses? Soccer matches at the playground? Maybe your first serious books, adult books, perhaps even your first interest in politics.

Maybe I'm underestimating you.

In 1969 in New York, kids had other things to do. In fact, THE kid. Zorn spent his afternoons with friends this way: talking about controversial mystical figures, occult philosophers, great beasts. As he chatted with a friend, the boy's attention settled on one of these mystical figures, Georges Ivanovic Gurdjieff. To explore the topic further, he went to 734 Broadway to Weiser's Bookstore, the oldest occult bookstore in the United States, and the most stocked with materials concerning another of John’s undeniable loves, the Great Beast Mr. Aleister Crowley. And perhaps it is in this very bookstore that the unhealthy ideas of the New York composer, which would give birth to various Moonchild works, were born. He browsed here and there on a certainly dusty shelf—after all, it’s an occult bookstore, damn it—and he finally found something: Gurdjieff's semi-autobiography "Meetings With Remarkable Men." It's a story that captures the 15-year-old Zorn’s imagination. Who was Gurdjieff, really? Easy: a dance master, a philosopher and writer, an Armenian-born mystic. He traveled and studied the human condition until he arrived at his thought that we live our lives in a state of apparent wakefulness close to dreaming and that to transcend this state we need to achieve a kind of isolation and calm followed by confrontation with others, culminating in a higher consciousness of our own existence. He ends up founding his own spiritual group called the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Zorn would never mingle with Gurdjieff’s group but was so impressed that a broader and more musical picture of this harmonious development of man began to form in his mind.

That year was bizarre and unusual for him because, think about it, these damn 15-year-old New Yorkers, he went to a hotel to try to hand none other than Salvador Dalí some works crafted by his teenage hands, and as he talks with the St. Regis Hotel receptionist asking if he could leave said works for the Marquis de Púbol, who appears behind him? Exactly him! He accepts his works and goes out to the street with him, chatting about flowers. But it's another spark that ignites his unhealthy engine. In 1971 he reads the book "Mount Analogue" by René Daumal, a French writer and disciple of Gurdjieff. Question for you dear mysticism and cinema nerds: which film was inspired by this book? Well done, it's "The Holy Mountain" by that other madman Jodorowsky. The book speaks of a journey by a group of mountaineers seeking the world's highest peak to climb, traveling on a boat named "Impossible" and eventually landing on an island that would connect Earth and Heaven, where they will end up understanding themselves, delving into the known and unknown. 

John Zorn decides to undertake the same mystical journey in 2011 through the tides of musical discomfort. On his Impossible, he embarks the Banquet quartet of Cyro Baptista and dives into work as exhausting as it is mystical and insane. Three consecutive days of takes, 12/16 hours of work each day, almost total isolation, and focus on one's inner self. The result? 61 musical moments. Sorted, squeezed, and pressed into the 40 minutes of the album. Intense, utterly Masada, it's a journey into realms of introspection and calm, effusions of Armenian melodies and piano mantras, with the constant presence of orchestra and prayer bells, traversing the desert striking the calabash to arrive at the foot of Mount Analogue to the notes of a litany for gimbri that seems straight out of "The Circle Maker" by Bar Kokhba, and enjoying the sixty-ecclesiastical inserts (Zornian hybrids of pure erection) of organ and wild piano escapades that pierce open parts and darker moments that touch the most hidden points of the soul counterpointed by voices coming from nowhere.

This is "Mount Analogue," this is the journey towards an impossible rendered human through percussion and one of the most maniacal soundtracks of an impossible journey towards one's self. One of Zorn's best albums of recent times and of all time, no doubt about it.