Search - John Zorn :: Astronome

3 1/2 stars-- an opera in vocalese.

Michael Stack | North Chelmsford, MA USA | 10/25/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

""Astronome" is the second album by the band John Zorn assembled to record "Moonchild"-- vocalist Mike Patton, bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Joey Baron. But this time the concept is slightly different, Zorn was challenged by Richard Foreman to compose an opera in vocalese and came up with something altogether unexpected. Not for the feint of heart, "Astronome" is, even for Zorn, quite a challenge.



As any opera, "Astronome" is apparently designed to tell a story, although you'd be hard pressed without the included libretto (more on that in a minute) to make heads or tails of it, the music is very visual. On first listen, it appears to be pretty much an endlessly aggressive slice of Zorn-avant-hardcore, but the more I've listened to it, the more it's revealed itself to be startlingly diverse. While it is indeed dominated by fierce sections, there's quite a bit of oddly melodic and intriguing portions here-- for example about thirteen minutes into "Act Two", after building to frantic heights, the music settles into a fine groove and maintains a gentle atmosphere pretty much until the end of the track with Dunn's playing both deep in a groove and at times downright pastoral in sound.



This isn't to say, mind you, there isn't a healthy dose of noise and explosiveness-- Dunn's bass is distorted more often than not and Patton's range of vocal textures seem to emphasize a sense of franticness and torment more than anything else.



One thing of note is the packaging of this record-- contained in a small box, the CD is accompanied by two booklets-- one with a set of liner notes by Zorn the other a libretto for the album, with photographs accompanying each "scene" in the opera. It's really quite a fine package.



As a whole, while I found "Astronome" to be an interesting record with a lot of great material to offer, I've found it a bit less intriguing than "Moonchild" and haven't been coming back to it as consistently as I do with a lot of Zorn's other albums. Having said that, it's got a lot to offer and I'm curious whether my opinion of it will change over time-- there's an underpinning of subtlety here that isn't obvious on first dozen listens or so that I've noted as of late that I wonder if it will blossom into something more (as "The Gift" did for me)."

An important addition to Zorn's oeuvre

Steward Willons | Illinois | 12/24/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

""Astronome" begins with a fascinating premise - a completely non-verbal "opera". The result is actually more of a operetta, but lets not argue semantics. The style is hardcore similar to the "Moonchild" song cycle with the same instrumentation (Patton, Dunn, and Baron), but don't let that scare you. The aural palette is surprisingly diverse.



Lets deal with the vocal aspects of the work. Richard Foreman supposedly composed a libretto in "vocalese". First of all, I think the term 'vocalese' is malapropos. Vocalese has strong connections to a very distinct style of jazz vocalization (e.g. Lamber, Hendrics, and Ross or the Swingle Singers) and Patton's vocals have nothing to do with this. It's a much more primal, pre-linguistic style of utterances. Where vocalese imposes syllables borrowed from verbal language, Patton's style seems to be somehow before language. Whatever it is, it's certainly unique and effective.



The important thing to note is that Patton's vocals are not just a lot of screaming. It may sound like screaming if you skim through the work, but there are many times when he adopts strange and menacing tones. He can do a lot of odd things with his voice. Rest assured, it doesn't get old.



The music is much more varied than one would expect. For those Naked City fans, this is nothing like "Leng T'che". It's not a huge wall of grinding, painful, death music, but an episodic journey through an ancient mystical world. Formally, I can't comment too much at this point. I've listened to "Astronome" in its entirety around ten times and I don't detect a lot of large-scale development. There are small themes and motives that return in different configurations, but nothing like the thematic development in "Six Litanies for Heliogabulous". I'm not expecting a strict sonata form or anything so mundane, but the whole thing sounds rather through-composed to my ears.



Overall, this is a wonderful new work that explores new sonic realms, even for Zorn. Every Zorn fan should pick this up and give it some serious time. The material is challenging, but no where near as challenging as his game pieces are to me. It WILL take some time before you start to enjoy it fully, but isn't that really true of most Zorn projects?"

DEATH JAZZ anyone?

Geoffrey R. Balme | raleigh NC | 02/01/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Lyric-less vocalizations (sounding much like a muppet hyped on amphetamines) replace the usual lead horns, or guitar work. The musicianship is first class, wildly sweeping in it's complexities and easily able to keep your attention.



At first, I laughed at the slurping sucking noises the vocalist was making thinking it was much like the embarassing noises section of a Monty Python routine - but, it's easy to forget that it's a human generating those noises and just think of them as instrumentation.



It's certainly genre stretching, and a lot of fun.

I like it best when it mellows out about 15mins into the second track (I'm thinking this is the medieaval laboratory segment)

It's a very warm interlude between exhausting vocalizations that seems much needed!

get ready it's all about to take off again!"