david toop on john zorn
Zorn has claimed that music is not about sound, not even about time, but at a fundamental level an instantaneous communication of thought. Much of his music is an audible realisation of actions set in motion.... [His performances shift] 'the focus from the performer's manipulations to the objects themselves ... the objects became for me like solid sounds, different shapes, textures, colors, histories, to be ordered in musical fashion.' .... Zorn's interest in structures based on linear assemblages of blocks....

To listen to two albums back to back - _Cynical Hysterie Hour_ and _Cobra:Tokyo Operation_ - is to plunge into a vortex in which simultaneous memory and precognition of all stimuli within the pleasure dome is permanently switched to stun power. The music fulfills his criteria of an immediate communication of thought, an insight into the idea-streaming of a person wholly alive to the chaotic marvels and horrors of 20th- and 21st-century culture.

One of his contributions to contemporary music is his search for new compositional means to organise this illuminated consciousness. ...gamepieces... methods for raising the potential of group improvisation to a vehicle for extreme diversity.

---David Toop, _Haunted Weather_

- posted by ...lg... @ 18:04