Naked City
Radio

Among my favorites of Naked City, right next to their self-titled debut album, is this little masterpiece that is much less well-known. And I literally adore Naked City as a band, even when they throw heavy slabs at you like "Absinthe" (about an hour of ambient album with references to Rimbaud, Verlaine, Giacinto Scelsi etc., perhaps a bit pretentious but it has its reasons, I assure you) or free-noise-vomit-consumption improvisations like in "Heretic," an album where Yamatsuka Eye really goes all out.

Anyway, fan or not, like "Naked City" I think you will all appreciate this. It's an album that is a kind of leopard skin with densely packed spots containing all sorts of sonic citations in every musical idiom. You'll find Conway Twitty (??? Wikipedia says he was a country singer) mixed with the grindcore of Extreme Noise Terror and with Santana's guitars. Or Carcass mixed with Funkadelic, or Morricone blended with Albert King. I challenge you to know, at least vaguely, all the musical references cited in the booklet (about fifty). Even Wikipedia falters on some occasions. Who is Yakuza Zankoku Hiroku, for example?

Let's say the entire first half of the album is very much about surf rock and jazz, nicely paced and mellow, almost cocktail-like. Then it gradually fades increasingly towards noise and grindcore. Always with a touch of almost detached humor. A musical duality that can suddenly flare into demonic fury and then transform back into a slow danceable piece. The musical equivalent of a kiss from a beautiful vampire.

There are never, at least I believe, direct quotes from the music of the people mentioned as inspirations. Let's say that in a way Naked City always put themselves in the shoes of the cited characters and play this game: what music would come out of a hypothetical jam between Led Zeppelin, Akemi and Jagatara, and Bernard Herrmann? A kind of board game for our trusted sextet.

The following Wikipedia page is an excellent listening guide:
for each track on the album, you will find the respective influences, all with a link to a web page explaining the character in question. The magic of multimedia, as they say.

But perhaps it's better to just listen to the album outright and not worry about it, it remains extremely enjoyable. Probably Zorn wanted to create the effect of a hypothetical radio that casually moves from country to grindcore. It's fortunate that Zorn didn't listen to the average Italian radio, otherwise who knows what the sky-high blend of Pausini with Morandi, Ligabue and Elisa mashed together would have turned out to be.