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Rating: The "Grand Guignol" presented in Paris between 1897 and 1962 is not only the theater of horrors but the celebration of the dark side of our existence, which persists through time, cultures, customs, and religions. This brief introduction, a summary of the cover notes, is necessary to understand the sensations that listening to this work transmits to us.
Macabrely intrigued by the cover, we delve into the listening. Coldly welcoming us are sounds that Horowitz spreads into the atmosphere like sulfur fumes on which Baron alternates violent blows; then Bill arrives, emitting shrill sounds while sharpening a knife on the guitar strings. Naked City enters the mind of a schizophrenic preparing to kill, commits the act with all his fury, sits by a stream to wash his hands of the blood, and his thoughts alternate without logical continuity between premeditation and deviant instinct, satisfaction for the deed done, and the thirst for new violence.
He is still lurking like a cat; his heartbeats are slow but very strong and deep, he pounces again on the victim, and in an orgy of indescribable mutilations, he labors over the pieces, then looks at the sky and contemplates his demons. Such is his life, a dance of death, in search of a new bloody orgasm that satisfies him in that ever more unsatisfactory act, a prisoner of his obsessions, of that continuous cycle that does not leave him, of desire, blood, calm, and the urge again.
It is almost eighteen minutes of journey into horror, one of the most beautiful pieces by Naked City.
We then await translations of four composers that close the first part of the CD:
"Debussy - La Cathedrale Engluotie," taken from "Syrinx" of 1910, a quite unusual piano composition from his repertoire in an extraordinary arrangement, showing us the great talents of Zorn. Chilling.
"Scriabin – Three Preludes, op. 74,” another transcription of piano compositions from the Russian composer's last work.
"Orlando di Lasso – Prophetiae Sybillabrum," a Renaissance manuscript, a very evocative piece.
"Ives – The Cage," his "Lied" (a German word meaning a song accompanied by the piano), which seems not to fit the context unless interpreting the text:
A leopard went around his cage
from one side back to the other side;
he stopped only when the keeper came around with meat;
A boy who had been there three hours
began to wonder, "Is life anything like that?"
"Messiaen – Louange à l'éternité de Jésus" closes this part of the "covers," music with wide resonance, melancholic, sad, and desolate which by contrast serves as an introduction to the thirty-two insane splinters that will follow in pure extreme Naked City style (brevity and cohesion school D.R.I.) thirty-two crimes, rapes, hammer blows to the head, exhumed corpses, incest, slit abdomens, sodomized pigs...
The first part of the album truly manages to convey horror, desolation, and alienation, while the final pieces are more suited to the B-movie splatter films so dear to Zorn, with abominable scenes but which also give us a sarcastic or genuinely amused smile like the one our heroes have when between a burst of gunfire and another, they look at each other or see that mad Eye screaming like a pig in the slaughterhouse.
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By Tomato Express Cake
This is obviously the Naked City I prefer: contemplative, slow, then lightning-fast, wicked, insane, FREE.
It can be defined as such: Blasting Insanity.
