Pat Metheny
Zero Tolerance For Silence

I remember the winter evenings of 1995, I remember spending the nights in the company of friends who were undertaking civil service in my city at the time, ordinary people who had found accommodation in a common downtown apartment. I remember that the living room magically transformed into a small music experimentation lab complete with an analog 4-track—just thinking about it makes me nostalgic—and in the evening, we would gather to play armed with guitar, bass, drum machine, and one passion: music. I recall that the main listening of that time included Butthole Surfers, Kyuss, John Zorn, JS Blues Explosion... but one above all had captured my attention: the enigmatic and irreverent guitar experiment known as "Zero Tolerance For Silence", one of Pat Metheny's few solo compositions. Therefore, we started recording some demos trying to adapt a noise style to some old Delta Blues: perhaps the original ideas were even passable, but the music we produced was certainly less so.
In short, you have to be pure jazz musicians in technique (and especially in the soul) to know how and where to cut the canvas of an imaginary "sound painting", to know how to calibrate the colors in the right spots and then illuminate this painting with an old neon light, which at times emits that typical refresh glow and at others emits decided and sparkling brightness in profusion. This is what you might seem to see... while listening to "Zero Tolerance For Silence".

You can't just say: "And what's the big deal... I can do that too!" Eh No.
Pat Metheny did it, in a single night: on December 16, 1994, at Power Station (NYC), where he recorded 39'16" of wild and electric riffing, a sort of "Metal Machine Music" of jazz, entering the realm of radical experimentation alongside musicians like Sonny Sharrock, Glenn Branca, or Derek Bailey. Subsequently, a famous rock guitarist (Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth) remarked: "... a new milestone in electric guitar music... searing, soaring, twisted chords of action guitar/thought process. An incendiary work by an unpredictable master, a challenge to the challengers... ".
Legend has it that at the time Mr. Metheny had some differences with the record label and that, by virtue of the contract that still bound him, he had to release a final work before parting ways.
"Oh really?" - he thought to himself - "Well then I won’t let you sell even a single copy, who cares how it affects me... ".

...I like to imagine it that way.
I like to imagine that he composed the 5 tracks like this, with distraction, for fun or for a mocking joke, pouring onto the record streams of words that do not become dialogue, that are bothersome, that don't find agreement, streams of notes that overlap, voices of an argument that want to overshadow and dominate one another, voices that irritate you, that disagree because they are orphaned of mutual harmony. Dissonant voices, with distorted views, thoughts, effects, nuances: now shouted with passion, impetuosity, anger; now spoken with unpredictable cadence, sometimes gloomy, leaving you with a sense of disorienting strangeness; now whispered with calm... calculated... pondered.
A record where the substance of the sounds seems composed of a floating space meshes of crystal, flooded with blinding light and then, a moment later, hidden in the darkest darkness; a place where the emotional spheres of consciousness are cut, intersected by irregular planes that belong to other geometries, to other rules of the game, a game where you roll the dice and maybe move to another square, but certainly of another game with new rules to learn. A space where symmetries are beyond their traditional context and where common thought logics are taken for a walk, like in an Escher lithograph, like in a maze of mirrors deforming any sensible image you try to see or create. And here, the highest probability of participating in a unique zero-sum game, with its simple and coherent rules, seems only to surrender to a state of "trance": only then could all these oblique paths take the form of a familiar and comforting straight line... a solution to grasp... a full-score dice roll... leading you to the journey's end.
But a safe place? A home, a refuge... in other words: AND THE SILENCE?
It’s just a brief pause between one stage and the next of the journey... it’s just a place of the shattered, devastated, suffocated inner space, indeed... with zero tolerance.

Because, perhaps, that time they really pissed him off... and then "Here's how I WON'T wrap up the record you're expecting!"
Moral of the story: the public receives it coldly and the record labels despair.
Pat Metheny, with sobriety, smiles, thanks, and closes the game.