LOCUS SOLUS 50th Birthday Celebration Vol. 3

Tzadik TZ 5003 (2004)

During the month of September, 2003, the downtown New York club known as Tonic celebrated the fiftieth birthday of one of the city's most famous and prolific avant-garde musician/composers, the eternally youthful John Zorn, by hosting a month-long series of shows featuring Zorn in collaboration with artisitic contemporaries such as Fred Frith, Milford Graves, Wadada Leo Smith, and many others. The concerts were taped and many have been released in a series of recordings on Zorn's own Tzadik label, including this one featuring his improvising trio Locus Solus.

Locus Solus consists of Zorn on alto saxophone, Arto Lindsay on guitar and vocals, and Anton Fier on drums. The three have also worked together as part of Fier's Golden Palominos, but the music of Locus Solus is a departure from even the most "out" work of that band. The seventeen brief tracks on this album consist of strangulated nonsense vocals and squealing sax laid atop thundering, sometimes arhythmic drums and stabbing, overdriven shards of Lindsay's trademark "skronk" guitar style. The music is loud, hard, and fast (and strange) with little room for quiet introspection. Tracks like "Doll Moment" and "Come Yelling" achieve a monolithic metallic stomp before quickly breaking apart into chaos.

Here's a clip from the show of Zorn and co. playing "This Year's Skirts", and here's to another fifty years of Zorn!