Naked City
Leng Tch'e

THE REVIEW

On the cover, a famous photo that sparked much debate among theorists and scholars (notably: Bataille) at the time of its release is displayed. The shot depicts the Leng Tch'e, a torture widely used in China until its complete abolition in 1905. It was a torture inflicted on those condemned for attempting crimes against the government and high state officials, slowly mutilating their limbs to make the pain so unbearable that they eventually wouldn't feel it anymore.
Bataille saw in this shot his entire poetics and thinking linked to the human being: in the Chinese condemned man, he saw a grin, an orgasm derived from the unsustainability of the pain, able to demonstrate how the human being seeks nothing but self-destruction in their life. They spend their entire life avoiding injury, and then, when it happens, it is the moment of maximum splendor of their existence.

This is how this long piece (31 minutes) divided into three acts sounds: a continuous and exhausting balance between orgasm and rigor mortis. Extremely violent and cathartic music, starting by weaving a purgatory drone-doom to continue increasingly towards madness, self-destruction, the tearing of flesh: a noise chaos where shards of free-jazz drown for the schizophrenic and the howling, furious barking of the vocalist. The voice is an instrument of horror, embedded in a network of tremendously bloody, grotesque, infernal sounds. 

The more the piece progresses, the more it grows: it becomes increasingly extreme, excruciating, liberating. Listen to it when you feel like destroying yourself: by its end, you will already feel better. Listen to it while reading Bataille's "The Story of the Eye." While you have tears in your eyes. When you just want to scream in a field of poppies to kill the sky. In the dark. In the most blinding light. While you are dying. 

John Zorn has achieved the unthinkable: a confessional of pain that cannot leave one indifferent. "Leng Tch'e" is a descent into hell with no possibility of return. A marvelous and horrendous glimpse that opens between ejaculation and the flowing of blood. 

One of the pinnacles of John Zorn and Naked City.
This much is certain.