John Zorn is an American composer, conductor, saxophonist, arranger and producer who "deliberately resists category". Zorn's avant-garde and experimental approaches to composition and improvisation are inclusive of jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, contemporary, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and world music. In 2013, Down Beat described Zorn as "one of our most important composers" and in 2020 Rolling Stone noted "Though Zorn has operated almost entirely outside the mainstream, he's gradually asserted himself as one of the most influential musicians of our time".
Dub is a musical style that grew out of reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and is commonly considered a subgenre of it as well as a genre of electronic music, though it has developed to extend beyond the scope of reggae. In the context of reggae, the style consists predominantly of partly or completely instrumental remixes of existing recordings and is achieved by significantly manipulating and reshaping the recordings, usually through the removal of some or all of the vocals, emphasis of the rhythm section, the application of studio effects such as echo and reverb, and the occasional dubbing of vocal or instrumental snippets from the original version or other works.
Anders Leonard Zorn was a Swedish painter. He attained international success as a painter, sculptor, and etcher. Among Zorn's portrait subjects were King Oscar II of Sweden, and three American Presidents, Grover Cleveland, William H. Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt. At the end of his life, he established the Swedish literary Bellman Prize in 1920.
VAST is an American alternative rock band based in Seattle, United States. The acronym VAST stands for Visual Audio Sensory Theater and is the main creation of singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jon Crosby. The band is signed to 2blossoms, an independent record company created by Crosby.
William Otis Laswell is an American bass guitarist, record producer, and record label owner. He has been involved in thousands of recordings with many collaborators from all over the world. His music draws from funk, world music, jazz, dub, and ambient styles.
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.
The Construkction of Light is the twelfth studio album by English band King Crimson, released in May 2000 by record label Virgin. It is the first of two studio albums to feature the “double duo” line-up of Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Trey Gunn and Pat Mastelotto.
Michael John Harris is an English musician from Birmingham. He was the drummer for Napalm Death between 1985 and 1991, and is credited for coining the term "grindcore". After Napalm Death, Harris joined Painkiller with John Zorn and Bill Laswell. Since the mid-1990s, Harris has worked primarily in electronic and ambient music, his main projects being Scorn and Lull. He has also collaborated with musicians including James Plotkin and Extreme Noise Terror. According to AllMusic, Harris's "genre-spanning activities have done much to jar the minds, expectations, and record collections of audiences previously kept aggressively opposed."
Painkiller is a band that formed in 1991, combining avant-garde jazz and grindcore. Later albums incorporated elements of ambient and dub.
Secret World Live is the second live album and tenth album overall by the English rock musician Peter Gabriel, released on 30 August 1994 in the UK. The album documents the concert experience of the Secret World Tour. A concert film of the same name was released simultaneously. Its track listing omits "Red Rain" and adds "San Jacinto" after "Blood of Eden".
"Little Wonder" is a song by English musician David Bowie, released as the second single from his 21st album, Earthling (1997). It was the album's biggest hit, reaching number 14 in the UK. At the 1998 Brit Awards, the song was nominated for Best British Video.
Cirkus: The Young Persons' Guide to King Crimson Live is a live album compilation from King Crimson. It was released in 1999 through Virgin Records.
Kevin Richard Martin, often known under his recording alias The Bug, is a musician, record producer and journalist from England, UK. Martin moved from Weymouth to London around 1990 and is now currently based in mainland Europe. He has been active for over two decades in the genres of dub, jazzcore, industrial hip hop, dancehall, and dubstep.
The Battle of the Ivory Plains is the debut album by the power metal band Dragonland, based on the first part of The Dragonland Chronicles saga.
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.
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.
Autoimmune is an album by Meat Beat Manifesto. Though the album was originally announced as a 20-track double-CD release, frontman Jack Dangers decided to shorten the album to a single disc with different track listings between the US and European releases. Stylistically, it steps up the pace from other recent Meat Beat Manifesto albums, using elements of dub, hip-hop, industrial, breakbeat and more, and it is regarded as a partial return to the early industrial sound of the band in the late 1980s. The album has also been described as Dangers' take on dubstep, though he has stated that Meat Beat Manifesto has always utilized the underlying concepts of that particular genre. Autoimmune is the first Meat Beat Manifesto album with Danger's vocals since Actual Sounds + Voices in 1998; he appears on the track "Solid Waste". The album cover continues the checkerboard/grid theme also seen on earlier Meat Beat Manifesto albums Actual Sounds + Voices, RUOK? and the Off-Centre EP. Most of the remaining songs that were excised from the original double-disc concept were later released on an EP available only on the Autoimmune tour.
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.
Buried Secrets is the second EP by American band Painkiller originally released by Toy's Factory in Japan and Earache in the UK, featuring guest appearances from Justin Broadrick and G. C. Green from Godflesh. Broadrick described the release as the result of various jams and improvisational sessions.
Execution Ground is a double CD by Painkiller, a band featuring John Zorn, Bill Laswell, and Mick Harris.
