Customer Reviews

Black Box [Torture Garden/Leng Tch'e]

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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)

"The Black Box" combines two albums, "Torture Garden" (a collection of hardcore pieces from "Naked City" and "Grand Guignol") and "Leng Tch'e", a nearly 32 minute piece.

"Torture Garden" is an accurately named and brutal listen-- while the material is stunning in its diversity, direction,and virtuoso performances, its not exactly easy to digest, and it switches directiosn drastically. Within the context of the two albums this material is also present on, it works better. If you've got those two, this is really not of much use to you. If not, this is just amazing-- a song like "Speedfreaks" can cover a genre in two and a half seconds, the album ranges from jazz to blues to neo-classical to pop to rock to death metal, and sometimes in the context of one song under a minute.

"Leng Tch'e" is another story altogether. Its really quite a piece, dark, mysterious, pulsing and growing. Its the kind of thing you're either open to or you'll hate-- improvised grindcore metal, essentially. It builds over the first 15 or so minutes, growing more and more insistent before it climaxes-- over a long period of time with Eye's voice and ZOrn's sax howling, this dies down in a cyclic form, ending similar to the beginning.

If you think you can deal with that for 30 minutes, building tension and darkness until the explosion, you'll probably love this. If not, you'll probably think this is awful.

Personally, I love it. I also love the hardcore stuff on "Torture Garden", though its less necessary given its presence elsewhere, and given the advent of the Naked City box, this set is probably less essential. Still, some great music here.

TORTURE GARDEN, or much of it, is available as a bonus on the GRAND GUIGNOL disc by Naked City -- the one with the severed head on the front cover and the stack of severed limbs on the back, and the autopsy photos inside. Since you can get it anyway, and since, really, once you "get the point," you don't really need to hear it all that often, and since the gross cover art is just kinda DISGUSTING (this is the one with the Japanese guy peeling the skin off a young girl's face to passionately lick her exposed eyeball -- a PAINTING, folks, not a photo -- at least, it came with the original disc, I dunno about the BLACK BOX edition) -- there is no real need to buy this box for TORTURE GARDEN. L'ENG TCHE, however, is INDESPENSIBLE listening for any serious Zorn fan, and any fan of intense music. It reminds me at times of some of the darker, noisier moments from a Neil Young and Crazy Horse show, but it builds to such a feverish, bloodletting intensity that it is ultimately beyond compare. This is indeed the soundtrack to torture -- but a torture that includes an element of rapture, a blissed-out transcendence like that seen on the face of the torture victim in the controversial cover photos. (Anyone know anything about whatever L'eng Tche actually means or where the photo was taken, what it depicts, etc? E-mail me if you do, please). Also, unlike TORTURE GARDEN, this disc is now completely unavailable elsewhere -- was only ever released briefly by Toy's Factory in Japan, where it is now completely out of print. BLACK BOX is probably the only way to hear it. So...

Whew! This work is a sensory assault! It is nearly impossible to love and makes your skin crawl, and yet it is oddly powerful. Zorn's Black Box is almost infamous in progressive music circles. Banned in it's original form because of the artwork, the album contains nevertheless, some of Zorn's most powerful and disturbing music. And Naked City has never sounded better.

Black Box consists of two separate albums. Torture Garden is music that will be familiar to Naked City fans, as most of the hallmarks of that band can be found on the disc. There are the dizzying changes in style, all out sonic thrash and Yamatsuka Eye's trademark shreiks mixing with piercing overblowing from Zorn's alto. The album is an imaginary soundtrack to a Japanese S and M film. Cuts vary from just 10 seconds to a little over a minute, but each packs a sonic punch that can't be ignored. Fans of Naked City won't find the 60's camp material that livened up albums like Naked City and the Gift. This is unadulterated thrash jazz, but it is the best of it's kind.

Torture Garden is impressive, but the real reason to get this album is for Leng Tch'e. This work couldn't be more contrasted to the first disc. Inspired by truly disgusting photographs of the last public execution in China using the Leng Tch'e toture method (Many Parts - it is basically the slow dismemberment of the victim over about three days. Ugh!!!)the work is hypnotic and deeply disturbing. It is one long slow drone song, in the manner of, say, death-metal. Bill Frisell's guitar work is a revelation as is the thunderous drumming of Joey Barron. And when Yamatsuka Eye enters halfway through the piece, the effect is shattering.

And yet the whole set is disquieting. As powerful as it is, and it is powerful, I find it is probably not something I will listen to often, except in certain moods (no doubt inspired by mid-life crisis!) And the cover art, which I must admit does hold a certain morbid fascination, is sufficiently disturbing for me to want to hide the album. It's almost an embarrassment. Which is no doubt one of the reactions Zorn wanted to inspire.

This is not the first Naked City album I would recommend to a new comer. Rather, go to the Naked City or Gift albums. These are leavened with more stylistically palatable tracks. But if you find yourself intrigued by Zorn's wild vision, Black Box may be one of his strongest efforts.

Good god what a beautiful box set. Torture Garden is a classic extreme music album. I won't just throw it into grindcore, since it's way too avant-garde just for that genre. Yes it has the song lengths of grindcore/extreme hardcore, but there's too many other styles from jazz, surf rock, and world music. There's pleanty of great reviews for this album so I won't have to go into detail. Leng Tch'e is something else too, it's pretty much the first drone metal album. Bands such as Earth, SunnO , and Khanate are drone metal. Earth pretty much birthed the subgenre, but Naked City released the first album for it. This is where extreme metal bands like Pig Destroyer and Cephalic Carnage kind got the idea for making a pulverizing one song EP. Which I think more bands like them should do since it sounds sick. Like the title of this review, after you get over the "ridiculousness" of the music, you see how multi talented these musicians are and what they can do with music pushed to the extreme. This set is crucial for anyone into extreme and totally out there music.

3 1/2


Even if only packaged with audio-masochist-completists in mind, the flimsy but balanced double-dose of death diversities certainly begs far further examination than many are willing to invest but most definitely not enough to build a cult over.

somebody needs to explain to me what is so great about leng tch'e.

i'll describe it for ya:
it's a very low, droned out guitar, playing somewhere between 1 and 3 notes. it just...drones. through out the entire song, it just...echos. and that's it. that's what this song does, w/ the only exception being some interesting drum parts thrown in.

torture garden, however, is incredibly impressive. if you're a mike patton fan, you can be disapointed to know that this is where he got his fantomas vocal styling from. this eye guy is incredible.

so i say buy it for torture garden. fantomas's "delirium cordia" is a much better ambient piece than leng tch'e, so buy this and delirium cordia.

I never understood why this music is said to be 'weird' or 'shocking'. In a sense, it is some of Zorn's most conventional work. All the sentiments are familiar. We lived through the jagged random barrage of hours of television. We lived through the soul-deadening horrors of consumerism and continual cultural brainwashing. We lived through the mind-numbing cultural complacency of the 80's. We heard crap pop, heavy metal cheese, smooth jazz, easy listening, punk and hardcore. So what? Can any music really be shocking after all that? And it doesn't all exist in a vacuum. On any given day the real life demolition cartoon of the urban experience delivers something truly shocking, something that should really bother you. Even at its darkest Naked City's oeuvre seems to be a lyrical, playful, and adventurous way to respond to the actual horrors with some dignity and honesty. It may be uproarious or unsettling, but it shouldn't be strange to you. We should feel it coming. Zorn's chamber works for strings, for example, seem infinitely more bizzare because they make statements that fly beyond the rubbish heap of postmodernism. They offer something beautiful arising like a phoenix from the fiery dungheap of the pretentious status quo. And there is so much more; the game pieces present us with sounds we literally have never heard, Masada takes us directly into rarified ecstatic soul exploration. We don't see those works coming. Naked City, although far from ordinary, seems like a logical reaction to late 20th centurylife. There is nothing in it that isn't always there right below the surface...waiting...mocking us, making faces at us. Its fractious gyrations seem to want to restore sanity simply by taking a good look at the mouth of the beast. I think we need that. I am disappointed in my fellow man for complaining.