Search - John Zorn :: Film Works V: Tears Of Ecstasy

When John Zorn was approached to produce a soundtrack for Japanese filmmaker Hiroyuki Oki's Tears of Ecstasy, he was given only one requirement: the music had to be divided into 60 one-minute segments. As for style and substance, Zorn and company, including Robert Quine and Marc Ribot on guitars and Cyro Baptista on percussion, were allowed to experiment without limitation. The resulting stroboscopic soundtrack rips through a multitude of genres. Sleek jazz and lonesome Western instrumentals butt up against trash-compactor noise that in turn sits adjacent to the nocturnal clicking of robotic crickets. This pastiche of mutated melodies becomes a flawless example of premeditated musical surgery operating out of control. --Michael Woodring