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Naked City

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was working on one of my very first projects for film studies back home in Montreal. We were trying to figure out how to work the 8mm camera and how the hell we were supposed to get rid of the double shadows. I was perhaps 15-16 years old, still impressionable and we were on one of our many breaks, the guys were talking about their week-end while the girls took care of the set. The camera guy wanted to make me listen to something his uncle had lent him, so we went one floor up to the computer with a huge-ass sound system (we were filming in one of the crew's relative's huge million dollar house) and he pops in John Zorn's Naked City. Batman came on and it put a smile on my face, but it was nothing really special for a guy who was listening almost exclusively to Pixies and Jane's Addiction. My friend then turned up the volume and skipped to the third song: You Will Be Shot, when the ninety second long track was over, my eyes were wide open and it felt like I had just lost my virginity. I had no time to realize what had just happened that the next song blasts away and then the next and the next in short violent bursts. I was being aurally gang raped by the music. Talk about a first experience. I was out of breath and had forgotten about the film completely.

This was back in 1992 I believe and Naked City the group had already released most of what they were to put out in their short career. The first album was available at a normal price and I purchased it not long after that first experience. In return for what that album had done to me, I completely devoured it, listening to every track fifty times in a row, slowly getting into the rest of the album. Soon enough however, I wanted more, but the other albums were out of reach for me. There was no way I could afford the fifty dollar import price. It wasn't until I started working in a music store in 1993 that I finally was able to discover the rest of the material, but enough about that, you can read more about them lower down on this page.

Naked City was John Zorn's punk-trash-jazz ensemble including Bill Frisell on guitar, Joey Baron on drums, Fred Frith on bass, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards and guest collaborator Yamatsuka Eye (Boredoms) on vocals. A lot of it, well mostly the short "free-jazz-from-hell" shorts, was influenced by the early grind music of Napalm Death's Scum album (the covers also remind of the violent/strange covers of metal bands of the time). Most of the rest of their output was about changing styles of music every third second or so (you can hear a lot of this influence on Mike Patton's music in general, from Mr. Bungle to Fantômas to his solo work. He even has had a few stints doing vocals with Naked City on stage). And then you have Absinthe which is something else altogether. It sounds like Zorn was trying to give form to all of his influences (which he lists on Radio) and then playing them all at the same time, whether they be surf, punk, film music, lounge, doom, ambient or free-jazz (the list could go on forever). The music seems to have everything but the kitchen sink... or perhaps even that's in there somewhere. It all goes so fast it's hard to notice.

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