JAZZ FROM HELL

There's one thing you can say for sure about Zappa: the dude was a keen early adopter when it came to new technology. At its best, this yielded groundbreaking, incredible results in the studio, as on Hot Rats; failing that, it at least made him seem prophetic from time to time, like late in life when he speculated about novel systems of music distribution, essentially considering the creation of online streaming a while before the technology was really there to implement the idea.

Then there's Jazz From Hell, an experiment in making most of an album (bar for St. Etienne, a live track) using just his trusty Synclavier. This is an electronic instrument whose sound has dated poorly, but which may have some nostalgic associations for some, especially those who love videogame soundtracks of a certan era - don't think NES-style beeps and boops, think of the sort of output you'd have got on a nice Roland soundcard from a game which really explored the possibilities of that equipment (a Sierra graphical adventure, perhaps).

Freed of the need to work with other musicians, Zappa unleashes complex material which would be difficult to achieve in real life - indeed, he thought some of this was genuinely unplayable by human hands, though eventually sufficiently talented performers proved otherwise. It's an interesting technology demo for sure, but it's not really more than that; Zappa is pushing one-man digital composition to its limits here, and whenever you push technology beyond its limits you risk creating something which ages worse because it exposes all of the limitations of the equipment you are working with.

A solid attempt, but the passage of time has seen other hands find a more nuanced and less gung-ho "all complexity all the time" approach to composing on this sort of legacy electronics yield works that have largely eclipsed Zappa's early efforts here, such as on the chiptune scene. Zappa gets credit for blazing the trail, but others have walked it with more confidence and better results.