Black Box - 20th Anniversary Edition: Torture Garden / Leng

Black Box - 20th Anniversary Edition: Torture Garden / Leng Tch'e

This two-CD set was first released by John Zorn in Japan in the early 1990s. It couldn't be sold in the United States because of the cover art, now concealed within the Black Box. These are Zorn's most horrific inspirations--Torture Garden incited by the images of Japanese sadomasochist pornography contained herein, Leng Tch'e by photographs of a Chinese public execution involving extended torture. A key part of Zorn's aesthetic is to create a musical methodology that matches his subject matter, or, conversely, to find a subject that matches his compositional methods. Like Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, William S. Burrough's cut-up method, or the cutting and pasting of collage, Zorn's methods mimic violence, creating new forms out of the torture and destruction of the old. Torture Garden and Leng Tch'e are, literally, the short and the long of it. Torture Garden consists of 42 tracks, the longest of which is a minute and 14 seconds, the shortest a scant 10 seconds. Musical genres are literally cut up and stuck together, snippets of free jazz, lounge, country and western, pop (ancient and modern), and classical colliding and overlapping in a kind of cultural shock treatment.
The 32-minute Leng Tch'e is drawn out to excruciating lengths in its simulation of the agony (and ecstasies) of torture and death. Throughout the two discs, the execution is at a very high level. With Bill Frisell on guitar, Fred Frith on bass, Joey Baron on drums, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, and vocalist Yamatsuka Eye of the acclaimed Boredoms), Naked City combines many of Zorn's most talented collaborators, and it inspires some of his most brutish and brilliant alto saxophone playing. The Black Box creates a literal connection between "hard core" music and hard-core pornography. To say that it isn't for the squeamish is understatement. --Stuart Broomer
Country USA
Brand Tzadik
Manufacturer Tzadik
Binding Audio CD
ReleaseDate 1997-04-22
UnitCount 1
Format Original recording reissued
UPCs 702397731221
EANs 0702397731221

Country	USA
Brand	Tzadik
Manufacturer	Tzadik
Binding	Audio CD
ReleaseDate	1997-04-22
UnitCount	1
Format	Original recording reissued
UPCs	702397731221
EANs	0702397731221

Black Box - 20th Anniversary Edition: Torture Garden / Leng Tch'e

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