Black Box [Torture Garden/Leng Tch'e]

John Zorn, Naked City | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (April 22, 1997)
• Number of Discs: 2
• Label: Tzadik
• ASIN: B000003YUK
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,297 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #18 in Music > Indie Music > Jazz > Avant-Garde

Track Listings

Disc: 1

1. Blood Is Thin

2. Demon Sanctuary

3. Thrash Jazz Assassin

4. Dead Spot

5. Bonehead

6. Speedball

7. Pile Driver

8. Shangkuan Ling-Feng

9. Numbskull

10. The Prestidigitator

See all 25 tracks on this disc

Disc: 2

1. Leng Tch'e

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Naked City ate my baby., August 2, 2003

By 

Lord Chimp (Monkey World) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Black Box [Torture Garden/Leng Tch'e] (Audio CD)

Naked City's post-modernist music belongs to every genre and to none, a baneful musical poltergeist that reassembles its surrounding into an web of chaos. As for the Blackbox collection, these are both definitive Naked City albums. If you could only own three Naked City albums, it would have to be _Absinthe_ and these two.

_Torture Garde_ features 42 tracks, only a few of which last longer than a minute. In these skillful collages, Naked City tightly binds together multiple genres and hops between with reckless abandon, usually played at breakneck speed. "Speedfreaks", the most extreme example, lasts 50 seconds and changes styles and tempos every second or two. Often heavy and loud, with John Zorn's alto sax screeching over blaring hardcore meltdowns or noisy free jazz terrors. There is also Yamatsuka Eye. He's basically just insane. He gabbers and gibbers and screams and shrieks and roars and flies into rabid fits of seizures that seem unrelenting until Naked City hops into something else. Overall, this is some of the hottest playing you'll ever hear. The liner notes come with some grotesque images: stills from Japanese S&M films (nothing very graphic, mind you), a WHACK paintings by Japanese artist Maruo Suehiro.

Then there is _Leng Tch'e_...

"Leng Tch'e" (hundred pieces) was an old Chinese torture ritual where the victim was pumped with opium to prolong his life while he was slowly dismembered. Picture such a dungeon in the Ninth layer of Hell, now imagine its soundtrack. This is one of my favorite John Zorn compositions by far. Of all Naked City songs, this is the most violent and painful, but disturbingly pleasurable like some dark fantasy. A horrible antipodal rapture and agony, it is breathtakingly simple -- a continuous build-up starting on roaring guitar feedback and gradually adding drums, and Yamatsuka Eye's tormented vocals, and finally Zorn's screaming sax, climaxing at a place very different from their starting point and yet constant in its agony. Musically stunning, minimal and gripping, _Leng Tch'e_ is music that seems to play itself, inevitably pouring from a crack in the wall of reality. Eye and drummer Joey Baron are absolutely amazing here, adding so much to the intensity of the music.

Tzadik says:

"A specially-priced double-CD reissue, Black Box couples two of Zorn's most extreme and violent creations with the controversial music and artwork intact. Torture Garden (1991) presents Naked City's intense and groundbreaking music combining free jazz, bebop, r&b, country, funk, rockabilly, surf, metal hardcore and grindcore -- usually in the same song! This avant supergroup has influenced scores of bands including Mr. Bungle, Dim Sum Clip Job and the Boredoms (whose singer Yamantaka Eye is a featured guest on these two albums). The rare, seldom-heard, Leng Tch'e (1992), released only in Japan, and long out-of-print, features Naked City in an agonizingly slow, brutal 32-minute assault."

Your music collection can never be complete without a little Naked City.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jazz musicians play hardcore, August 18, 2003

By 

SPM "scott_maykrantz" (Eugene, Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Box [Torture Garden/Leng Tch'e] (Audio CD)

The first disc is a collection of Zorn's "hardcore miniatures" --- fast and loud songs clocking in between 10 and 90 seconds. Sometimes they turn on a dime from noise to jazz to rock. Sometimes they just scream bloody murder for 20 seconds. I can't think of a more intense CD than this one. It makes Slayer sound like Air Supply.

The second disc is a single track half an hour long. The band builds slowly from scary thumping to a hurricane of throbbing sound. It makes you feel like a frog in a pot of water, rising to a boil so slowly that --- by the time you notice --- it's too late.

If this was played by anyone else, it wouldn't work. It's too gimmicky. But these guys play so well, they make noise sound beautiful. There's a lot of control on this album. It's all carefully orchestrated for maximum effect.

If I had to pick the ten best albums of all time, BLACK BOX would make the list. Easily.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aural assault, March 11, 2004

By 

M. Bergeron "Muziclvr" (Colchester, VT United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Black Box [Torture Garden/Leng Tch'e] (Audio CD)

Disc one is a repackage of earlier NC works..."punk-jazz/speedcore" mostly less than 90 seconds long. Explosive ejaculations of noise and fury.
Disc two (Leng Tch'e) was only available as a very expensive Japanese import before this set came out. The closest I can compare it to is the first 2 minutes of Lou Reed's "The Blue Mask" (the song, not the album), slowed down 25% and stretched out for 30 odd minutes.

Wonderful!!(if you like this kind of stuff)