His extremely diverse career has put out some very extraordinary masterpieces:

But there's way too much to list for an opening post, but you get the idea.

His music in some projects are very proggy, some bands are grindcore jazz, Klezma, surf rock, CLASSICAL, you name it! 

Masada - Live in Sevilla 2000

Filmworks XIII: Invitation to a Suicide

The Dreamers

O'o

Pretty much in the soft side of his music. 

Another fan here. I prefer his more out/noisy/difficult recordings (like Naked City, Painkiller, Simulacrum, etc), but stuff like A Vision In Blakelight, The Goddess, Transmigration Of The Spirit... is quite wondrous.

Hard to keep up with everything he releases though. :p

This is the only album of his I'm familiar with. Playful trad jazz interpretations (though they verge on avant jazz in places) of well-known Christmas tunes, plus a couple of self-composed tracks. Mostly instrumental, great fun. Recommended.

IAO is amazing!!! 

Cheers! 

I'm a bigger fan of contemporary classical music than any other genre, so that stuff is definitely among my favorite in Zorn's discography. Moonchild and the mystical series is also very close to the kind of aesthetics I love but obviously as a Zornian (Zorn fanatic), I have a very broad range in my musical tastes.

His recent organ trio group Simulacrum is certainly up the prog metal alley 

Whenever I want to listen to something more berserk and heavy than most metal bands, this is the one I reach for, I always get a silly grin whenever it gets insanely crunchy.

I enjoy the hell out of that one too, the playing is some of the tightest I've heard but at the same time it's so loose and free 

Also, I think that version of Metaltov may have eclipsed the original Naked City version 

I surprisingly haven't  but I'll check him out  

The Aussie composer I'm most personally familiar with is probably Carl Vine but the majority of my favorite classical music came out of the Darmstadt school + Webern. 

Btw, is there a thread for classical music discussion here? 

This is an odd one to be the only album of his that you know.  but I do like to listen to it around this time of theyear.

I have started picking up a few of these.  So far, Mount Analogue is outstanding.  Parts of it remind me quite a bit of some of the more avant-garde output of Blue Note Records in the sixties, particularly the albums featuring Bobby Hutcherson on vibes / marimba and Joe Chambers on drums. The resemblance may be coincidental - or indeed exist only in my mind! - though I've no doubt Zorn is familiar with this oeuvre. But the piece as a whole seems entirely individual to me.

Filmworks I - 1986-1990

A Dreamers Christmas

Naked City Live, Volume 1 - Knitting Factory 1989 (This is the only Naked City album I can listen to, it's free of annoying vocals)

Terrapin Station wrote: 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.

Sounds like you are not an alchemist then.

Just some fun of course. I certainly don't blame anyone for not liking Zorn (in any facet really).

Absinthe doesn't have annoying vocals either.

I fell in love with the first Simulacrum when it came out, the Painted Bird and Inferno are also incredible. Great you like it!!! 

Aside from (the masterpiece) Astronome, you can't go wrong with this one. It's it's more song-structured and the vocals are text (aka lyrics). Astronome is still the shining achievement for me of the series though. 

I love most Zorn:  Masada, Electric Masada, Bar Kokhba, Cobra, Naked City, Locus Solus, The Big Gundown, Duras: Duchamp, Spy v Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman, The String Quartets, Filmworks.  He's SO prolific that I haven't scratched the surface of his classical music or Filmworks, yet nearly everything I hear, I enjoy.

I  was lucky enough to see him a few times, since first running into him working the counter at Soho Music (everybody's got to start somewhere).  I saw the premiere of The Big Gundown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  Also, with Naked City and Masada at The Knitting Factory & doing solo and quartet improves with Fred Frith at The Kitchen.

....which appears on the new album called "There is no more Firmament":