John Zorn's Alchemists

Thatfabulousalien wrote: My favorite Zorn albums are the following (In no specific order) Radio Chimeras Mount Analogue Simulacrum The String Quartets Astronome IAO The Alchemist Songs Without Words Hen To Pan Fragments, Prayers and Interjections  Grand Guignol At the Mountains of Madness Spillane Angelus Novus Guts of a Virgin The Gift Hermetic Organ (2 or 3, they're all amazing though) Classic Guide to Strategy  Anything from the original Masada band

Some Zorn I love, some I hate, and there's a lot of in-between.  That's very rare for me.  I usually don't think that artists vacillate a lot in quality, and there's not a lot of music I hate in general, but definitely some Zorn I've hated.  I find Zorn a bit frustrating because of this.  If I were to dislike everything he does I could just ignore him, but I like some stuff enough that I feel a need to hunt for the gold in his work.  The sheer volume of stuff that he puts out makes this more frustrating.  Since I only strongly like a minority of his work, he reminds me of Buckethead in that, and I find myself thinking, "Man, try not releasing an album every week, so that you have more time to well-develop your material and achieve better consistency.  You can discard some of those ideas."  He's not quite as bad as Buckethead in this, at least.--Buckethead I just completely gave up on.  I'm not sifting through 500 "Pike" albums just to try to find a few good tunes.

The Big Gundown is probably my favorite album of his that I'm familiar with . . . some of the Naked City stuff is probably second, although sometimes the balance with Naked City is too far on the jokey grindcore stuff.  I don't mind a couple of those tracks, but too many of them just starts to seem like filler to me--so obviously the Torture Garden album wasn't that good of an idea in my opinion.  The bottom line with me is that I like quirky stuff--obviously as a prog fan I would, but ideally I still want tunes with some semblance of traditional push-pull techniques with melody, harmony, rhythmic patterns, sectional structures, some catchiness, etc.

At any rate, Zorn's almost always interesting from a conceptual angle, at least, but that's not sufficient for me to like something.


Edited by Terrapin Station - January 06 2017 at 12:13

Also, really starting to love the Simulacrum releases. Both The Painted Bird and 49 Acts... will be making my top 20 list from last year.

I forgot to mention this album, which is another of my favorite Moonchild albums:

Also, with the classical area of his work, you can't go wrong with the Cartoon S/M CD. It's got string quartets, chamber orchestra and a genre hopping solo piano piece. Very different from his more spiritual/occult-charged current works (which are also mindblowing)