Grand Guignol is the second full-length studio album released by John Zorn's band Naked City in 1992 on the Japanese Avant label. The album followed Torture Garden, which was a compilation of "hardcore miniatures" from Naked City and Grand Guignol. The album is notable for the inclusion of cover versions of pieces written by classical composers, the guest vocal of Bob Dorough, and also, like Torture Garden, a selection of "hardcore miniatures" (tracks 9–41) which are intense, fast-tempo, brief compositions, which feature the wailing of Zorn's alto sax, and the screams of Yamatsuka Eye. The album is titled after the infamous Grand Guignol theater in Paris, which was open from 1897 to 1962, where performances centered around extreme violence.
Grand Guignol was remastered and re-released in 2005 as part of the Tzadik box set Naked City: The Complete Studio Recordings, with the bonus track "Grand Guignol (Version Vocale)" featuring Mike Patton, and an altered track sequencing.
Reception
The Allmusic review by Ted Mills awarded the album 4 stars stating "Naked City's follow up to their self-titled album is a departure from the New York noir that they had perfected... A rewarding album."[1]
Two of the tracks ("Bonehead" and "Hellraiser") were featured in the soundtrack to Michael Haneke's 1997 film Funny Games, and in Haneke's 2008 remake.
Track listing
All compositions and arrangements by John Zorn, except where noted.
John Zorn is an American composer, conductor, saxophonist, arranger and producer who "deliberately resists category". His avant-garde and experimental approaches to composition and improvisation are inclusive of jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, contemporary, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and world music. Rolling Stone noted that "[alt]hough Zorn has operated almost entirely outside the mainstream, he's gradually asserted himself as one of the most influential musicians of our time".
Naked City was an avant-garde music group led by saxophonist and composer John Zorn. Active primarily in New York City from 1988 to 1993, Naked City was initiated by Zorn as a "composition workshop" to test the limits of composition in a traditional rock band lineup. Their music incorporated elements of jazz, surf, progressive rock, classical, heavy metal, grindcore, country, punk rock, and other genres.
Yamataka Eye is a Japanese vocalist and visual artist, best known as a member of Boredoms, Hanatarash and Naked City. He has changed his stage name three times, from Yamatsuka Eye, to Yamantaka Eye, to Yamataka Eye, and sometimes calls himself eYe or EYヨ. He also DJs under the name DJ 光光光 or "DJ pica pica pica", and has used numerous other pseudonyms.
Naked City is an album by John Zorn, released on Elektra Nonesuch in February 1990. The band assembled by Zorn for the album would later be known as Naked City. The album is characterized by its covers of movie themes and its fusion of various musical genres.
Leng Tch'e is the fourth release from John Zorn's band Naked City. It consists of a single track, running at just over half an hour. It was first released on the Japanese Toys Factory label in 1992. Unlike Naked City's previously material, which was known for its fast tempo and rapid transitions between a variety of heterogeneous styles, Leng Tch'e is a more avant-garde take on sludge metal. It was reissued in 1997 along with Torture Garden in the double-disc collection Black Box.
Heretic is the third studio album by the band Naked City, used as a soundtrack for the underground S/M film Jeux des Dames Cruelles. The album utilises different combinations of band members in duos and trios with the entire band performing together on only one track "Fire and Ice".
Radio is the fourth studio album by the band Naked City, and their first to be composed entirely by bandleader John Zorn. The album was also released as part of Naked City: The Complete Studio Recordings on Tzadik Records in 2005.
Filmworks 1986–1990 features the first released film scores of John Zorn. The album was originally released on the Japanese labels Wave and Eva in 1990, on the Nonesuch Records label in 1992, and subsequently re-released on Zorn's own label, Tzadik Records, in 1997 after being out of print for several years.
"For Zorn, filmscores have always been a place to experiment, and the FilmWorks Series is in many ways a microcosm of his prodigious output. This original installment of the FilmWorks Series presents three scores ranging from punk-rockabilly ; a jazzy Bernard Herrmann fantasy; to a quirky classical/improv/world music amalgam for Raul Ruiz's bizarre film The Golden Boat. Zorn's infamous one-minute arrangement of Morricone's classic The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, is included as a bonus track. This is the place where it all began."
Torture Garden is an album by John Zorn's Naked City with vocalist Yamatsuka Eye on vocals. The album collects the 42 "hardcore miniatures" recorded by the band. Nine of these short intense improvisations were spread across Naked City and the other 33 would feature on the next album, Grand Guignol. As Zorn explained in 1990:
Basically, this Naked City record came out, right. In the middle of it are about ten songs that are really short and hard. I said I wanted to do a record of 40 of those pieces, cause I was really interested in the compression and compactness of form that that music gets to. The guys at Nonesuch were not interested. If I wanted to do that, I better take it somewhere else. So what I managed to do was get them to bankroll the whole thing, and then I licensed it to Earache and Shimmy for basically no money and no royalties. So they are just putting this stuff out that Nonesuch bankrolled.
Naked City: The Complete Studio Recordings is a five disc box set that contains all of the studio albums released by Naked City during their five-year history.
Sacrifist is the second album by Bill Laswell's experimental music project Praxis, released in 1993 on Laswell's label Subharmonic. Originally, the album was intended to be a Rammellzee project, but soon was converted into the second Praxis album, after suggestions made by John Zorn.
Music for Children is the first release in John Zorn's Music Romance Series and features three Naked City compositions performed by Zorn with the band Prelapse; a 20-minute composition for wind machines and controlled feedback systems dedicated to Edgar Varese, and a classical chamber music piece for violin, percussion and piano performed by the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio framed by a poly-rhythmic etude for percussion and celeste and a lullaby for music box.
John Zorn appears on over 400 recordings as a composer or performer. This is a selection of recordings released under his name, bands he was/is part of, collaborations with other musicians, and significant albums to which he has contributed. The year indicates when the album was first released and any subsequent years if the following release included additional material.
Pool is an album by John Zorn featuring his early "game piece" composition of the same name which was first released on vinyl on Parachute Records in 1980 as a double album including the composition "Hockey". The album was released on CD on Tzadik Records with an additional bonus track featuring a test recording of Archery as part of The Parachute Years Box Set in 1997 and as a single CD in 2000. The album was the first released solely under Zorn's name following his collaboration with Eugene Chadbourne, School (1978).
Spy vs Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman is the fifth studio album by American composer and saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist John Zorn, featuring the compositions of Ornette Coleman performed in the brief, intense style of Zorn's hardcore miniatures.
Black Box is a compilation album by John Zorn's band Naked City featuring Yamatsuka Eye on vocals. The album is a collection of the "hardcore miniatures" from Naked City and Grand Guignol that were originally released on Torture Garden in 1990 and the extended piece Leng Tch'e which was only released in Japan in 1992. This compilation was released on Tzadik Records in 1996.
News for Lulu is an album of hard bop compositions performed by saxophonist John Zorn, trombonist George Lewis and guitarist Bill Frisell.
Prelapse is an album by the Boston-based band of the same name featuring John Zorn. The album was released on the Japanese Avant label in 1999 and features 10 tracks originally written by Zorn for the band Naked City. The band came to Zorn's attention after transcribing several Naked City compositions.
The Individualism of Gil Evans is an album by pianist, conductor, arranger and composer Gil Evans originally released on the Verve label in 1964. It features Evans' big band arrangements of five original compositions and compositions by Kurt Weill, Bob Dorough, John Lewis and Willie Dixon.
Absinthe is the fifth and final studio album by the band Naked City. Unlike the band's other genre-mixing releases, the music on Absinthe is consistently in an ambient and noise style.
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