Customer Reviews

Civilization Phaze 3

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Civilization Phaze III is a testament to Zappa's genius. It is not intended to conform to mainstream popular music. For those who are interested in this form of Zappa, look elsewhere. Joe's Garage, perhaps.

Parts of this work were in development for some 10 years prior to their completion. Zappa never really "completed" it; he just stopped working on it because he passed away. Even days before his death, he spent time at the Synclavier tweaking and tweezing parts, constantly molding the work to his liking.

Conceptually, the construction of each piece is brilliant! At the time, Zappa owned one the largest collections of digitally sampled sounds in the world, which was sold after his death for a tidy sum. It was from this catalog of sounds that Zappa would compose. The Ensemble Modern was added at length to this catalog of sounds, during the development of the Yellow Shark. Portions of these samples can be heard on Buffalo Voice and elsewhere. As Zappa composed on the Synclavier, elements of his score were assigned to sampled sounds, and the entire composition was digitally constructed using Zappa's score as a road map. This form of composing is entirely Zappa's creation and it is ingeniously conceived.

While other reviewers may comment that these works are "unlistenable" or they cannot imagine listening to them more than once, keep in mind, this is one person's opinion. I have listened to the compositions in this work countless times (well over 100) since its release, and have most of it memorized. It is one of the most brilliant compositional works I have ever heard, within the realms of electronic music.

Civilization Phaze III wraps-up the musical life of Frank Zappa. For those who are familiar with Zappa and his musical career, one can hear the numerous classical composers who influenced Zappa. Listen close enough and you will come to new insights on life and music from those speaking from within the piano. Many compositions contain parts that are unplayable by humans. Some rhythmic parts are so complex they open our ears to new sounds we have never heard before, much the same way Conlon Nancarrow's compositions did for the player piano.

Nancarrow's works performed pieces that were impossible to play on the piano. Conceptually, they were brilliantly thought out. Musically, they are fascinating works you will never hear elsewhere simply because they are impossible to perform. Nancarrow's approach influenced Zappa. Nancarrow applied his approach to a mechanical instrument, the player piano. Zappa applied his approach to a digital instrument, the Synclavier.

It's difficult to capsule the essence of this release into one review. It is true to state that this work stands on its own merits for what it is. If it means something to you, then it is of great value. If it holds no value to you, then it means nothing at all.

Listen to Amazon's samples of this release. If what you hear remotely interests you, there's bound to be some nuggets of enjoyment within the work for you to enjoy and explore. If this occurs, the work will expand in meaning with further listening.

If you enjoy Lumpy Gravy and Jazz from Hell, you are guaranteed to love this disk. If you're still not sure, listen to the sound samples to these disks and compare them to the samples of Civilization Phaze III, then take a chance and acquire this work. Judge it for yourself and make an intelligent decision... that's what Zappa would have wanted you to do.

Originally released a year after Zappa's passing was his life-long project "Civilization Phaze III." The idea for this project started in the 1966 with Lumpy Gravy, and with the help of the Synclavier, Ensemble Modern et al, and lots of compositional experience, Zappa managed to finish this [his greatest] musical achievement close to 30 years later.
He has called "C.P.III" an "opera-pantomime," which tells a story about several characters who live inside a grand piano. The speaking characters were recoded while sitting under a grand piano with weights on its sustain pedal to get an "echo" effect which makes it sound as if they actually were inside the instrument. The characters recorded in 1966 include members of the Mothers of Invention, and the characters recorded in 1991 include Zappa's daughter Moon Unit, actor Michael Rappaport, Ensemble Modern's arranger Ali N. Askin and pianist Hermann Kretzschmar.
The music is performed mainly on the Synclavier, but also--in the second act--by Ensemble Modern who incidentally performed throughout the "Yellow Shark" album (1993).
This is the best sounding album I've ever heard. When I first heard this album five or six years ago, I could not believe that science had evolved as far as for music to sound this pure and clear. The feeling of listening to this music through a good sound-system and professional studio head-phones is indescribable. If I'm not mistaking, the 18-minute long "N-Lite" was recorded on 200+ audio tracks. With that in mind, the sound engineering is truly amazing. Hats off to everyone involved!
This album won, in 1995, a Grammy for best packaging (idiotically not for the music.)
If anyone claims that Frank Zappa was not a musical genius, then play this set of discs for them, and watch their chins drop to the floor. If you have any trouble finding "C.P.III," then try Barfko-Swill online; they've been able to offer the title ever since its release.

Civilization Phaze III is a testament to Zappa's genius. It is not intended to conform to mainstream popular music. For those who are interested in this form of Zappa, look elsewhere. Joe's Garage, perhaps.

Parts of this work were in development for some 10 years prior to their completion. Zappa never really "completed" it; he just stopped working on it because he passed away. Even days before his death, he spent time at the Synclavier tweaking and tweezing parts, constantly molding the work to his liking.

Conceptually, the construction of each piece is brilliant! At the time, Zappa owned one the largest collections of digitally sampled sounds in the world, which was sold after his death for a tidy sum. It was from this catalog of sounds that Zappa would compose. The Ensemble Modern was added at length to this catalog of sounds, during the development of the Yellow Shark. Portions of these samples can be heard on Buffalo Voice and elsewhere. As Zappa composed on the Synclavier, elements of his score were assigned to sampled sounds, and the entire composition was digitally constructed using Zappa's score as a road map. This form of composing is entirely Zappa's creation and it is ingeniously conceived.

While other reviewers may comment that these works are "unlistenable" or they cannot imagine listening to them more than once, keep in mind, this is one person's opinion. I have listened to the compositions in this work countless times (well over 100) since its release, and have most of it memorized. It is one of the most brilliant compositional works I have ever heard, within the realms of electronic music.

Civilization Phaze III wraps-up the musical life of Frank Zappa. For those who are familiar with Zappa and his musical career, one can hear the numerous classical composers who influenced Zappa. Listen close enough and you will come to new insights on life and music from those speaking from within the piano. Many compositions contain parts that are unplayable by humans. Some rhythmic parts are so complex they open our ears to new sounds we have never heard before, much the same way Conlon Nancarrow's compositions did for the player piano.

Nancarrow's works performed pieces that were impossible to play on the piano. Conceptually, they were brilliantly thought out. Musically, they are fascinating works you will never hear elsewhere simply because they are impossible to perform. Nancarrow's approach influenced Zappa. Nancarrow applied his approach to a mechanical instrument, the player piano. Zappa applied his approach to a digital instrument, the Synclavier.

It's difficult to capsule the essence of this release into one review. It is true to state that this work stands on its own merits for what it is. If it means something to you, then it is of great value. If it holds no value to you, then it means nothing at all.

Listen to Amazon's samples of this release. If what you hear remotely interests you, there's bound to be some nuggets of enjoyment within the work for you to enjoy and explore. If this occurs, the work will expand in meaning with further listening.

If you enjoy Lumpy Gravy and Jazz from Hell, you are guaranteed to love this disk. If you're still not sure, listen to the sound samples to these disks and compare them to the samples of Civilization Phaze III, then take a chance and acquire this work. Judge it for yourself and make an intelligent decision... that's what Zappa would have wanted you to do.

This has to be one of the greatest Zappa projects that I've stumbled across since "Burnt Weeny Sandwich". I was lucky enough to find this used at my local music shop when I was thumbing through the "Z" (Zappa, Zevon) section. What struck me first was the bizarre, futuristic cover art that looked a lot like the drawings I used to attempt as a child. I know quite a few people who listen to Frank and it was surprising that none of them owned this two-disc opus. Cool packaging and artwork aside, what really got me hooked was when I took my first listen. For some reason, I can't seem to muster the right words to do the music justice. It is unlike anything I've ever heard and the more I listen, the more I love it. Yes, I'm a sucker for complex music and yes, I'm also a sucker for spoken word (Tom Waits is one of my heroes) but I can't even think of anything to compare this too. I'm pretty sure that fans of his "Yellow Shark" will love it but I don't think I can even compare it to that. When you listen to the first few seconds of "Put A Motor In Yourself" you will know exactly what I'm talking about. From there it settles into a more mellow vibe and stays there for a while, only to be interrupted by sparse bits of conversation between the "piano people". Unpredictable is another word I can think of. When you think it's going to go left, it goes right, when you think it's going to go up, it goes even lower. There are starts and stops, zigs and zags and everything in between. Best of all, it becomes an addiction. After you hear the whole thing straight through a few times, you will find yourself coming back over and over.

With all that said, I can't reccomend "Civilization Phaze III" enough. If you can find a copy (it may be a little pricy, but SO worth it) don't miss the opportunity.

Zappa worked on this project longer than any other. He got an idea for this in 1967 and taped some conversations. Some of them ended up to Lumpy gravy, but rest of them stayed on the shelfs many years, because technology wasn't advanced enough to finish this project. This work is definately a testament to Zappa's genius like one reviewer pointed. This album is performed almost completely by a synclavier, but it doesn't sound artificial. Actually this one of the greatest sounding albums I have ever heard. The sound is so relaxed. There are many odd sounds that are not playable with normal instruments and material here is very complex and probably unplayable by humans. What makes this album so interesting is that it is closer to classical music than techno or electronic music. This album tells you a story about a civilization that lives in the piano. The conversations here are continuation of Lumpy gravy and they detract musical pieces. The difference in this time is that they are separate songs. So you can skip them, if you are not interested.

But I found some of the dialogue very interesting and maybe it really means something on a symbolic level. Keep in mind that most of this album is instrumental. The longest tunes are 15 and 18 minutes long and in the best case you can listen nearly 20 minutes of music without any kind of stop. About 2/3 of this album is instrumental. This music can be difficult to understand, if you try to catch every single note. But when you understand what you are listening to it is quite easy. This is electronic chamber music. It makes your mind wandering other things and that's not because it's boring. The fact that this music makes your mind flow is really the strongest point of this album. Just close your eyes and be ready to be blown away.
This works well as a background music.

The music here is great and beautiful. Some weird sound effects spice up the things. One track called Waffenspiel is completely a collection of sound effects. You can visualize a war and a dog barking. This was Zappa's life long project and one of his most serious works. It is even occasionally dark and there's not much humour here, except maybe in some dialogues.The music here is rich, textured, unique and relaxing. Only flaw is that the longest dialogue sections last 5 minutes.This is not so inaccessible as some reviewers make it out to be. Maybe not good as a starting point, but highly recommendable.

P.S. N-Lite is one of the most adventurous musical pieces ever.

As I write this, CP3 is relatively hard to find and expensive to buy. This is a shame, since it is one of Zappa's most fascinating works, and the music pretty much blows away anything else that he brought forth in the last decade of his life.

Of course, the structure of CP3 is basically an adaptation of the centuries-old operatic practice of recitative + aria. The "recitatives" here are spoken word passages lasting a minute or so, recorded (famously) by having the actors talk into a piano with the dampers lifted. Since the earliest of these recordings date from the late 1960s, Zappa appears to have priority over George Crumb's more famous exploitation of this effect in Ancient Voices Of Children (from 1970). According to Zappa's liner notes, the "arias" (episodes of tape music) in Act One are entirely Synclavier-processed, while 30% of Act Two is "pure" Ensemble Modern. It's very hard to tell which is which, since Act One makes extensive use of the Synclavier's direct-to-disk capabilities (essentially very long "samples"). Regardless, they represent Zappa at his most complex, melding his modernist instrumental style influenced by Varèse, Webern and Stravinsky with the techniques of electronic music as developed by the likes of Berio, Stockhausen and (again) Varèse. I definitely recommend listening to this music with headphones because of the use of space as a parameter. Often the most noticeable result of the Synclavier-based post-production of Ensemble Modern recordings is the rotational panning of individual sustained notes in one instrument.

Xmas values in Act One reminds me of the sound world of Simon Stockhausen's recording of his father's piece Solo. It's one of Zappa's finest pointillist compositions, one of the few that can sit alongside the masterworks of the post-Webern classics written by several composers in the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Boulez, Feldman, early Stockhausen, late Stravinsky). Zappa's slant on this technique is to alternate irregular unmetered passages with passages built from a steady beat. The latter feature cimbalom sounds and other struck/plucked stringed instruments. Recall that Stravinsky wrote atonal cimbalom lines in Renard, and that Schoenberg and Webern were fond of including mandolin and guitar in their ensemble works. The rhythmically irregular passages emphasize Zappa's trademark atonal skips in unison woodwinds (reminiscent of Stockhausen's Formel). Note that throughout CP3, Zappa suppresses the sudden transitions into more commercial sounding music that characterize his earlier "classical" works. Instead you'll get little whiffs of Hollywood jingle here or of honky tonk there.

Amnerika (originally from Thing Fish) has a hocketed accompaniment where the same minor second is traded among instruments and in space. Over this a more lyrical, plaintive (and tonal) melody is heard, though with a similar klangfarben instrumentation. Think John Adams with a more imaginative use of stereophony. Very little of Zappa's music strikes me of bearing the influence of the minimalists (or post-minimalists in the case of Adams), but this is an intriguing example. The liner notes to the corresponding track on Everything Is Healing Nicely mistakenly associate hockets with Baroque music, whereas they're actually associated with Medieval music.

The first act ends with N-Lite. This is anything but lite, and at 18 minutes, is the longest instrumental section. It concludes with a remarkable piano cadenza that culminates with B in octaves capped by a glockenspiel on top. This is as good a time as any to acknowledge that the Ensemble Modern sounds wonderful throughout, even rekindling my long-distance crush on Catherine Milliken, one of the world's most important new music oboists, from my oboe playing days.

Dio Fa from Act Two is the track that features a Tuvan throat singer. At first we hear his solo line accompanied by sampled instruments. Later his voice itself is looped and becomes its own instrument. After this it comes back combined with itself. Toward the end we hear loops of human choruses, with sustained bowed bass sounds very reminiscent of the ending to Stockhausen's Hymnen.

Beat the Reaper is a nine-movement suite, continually accompanied by "rain" cheated toward the R channel (though it sounds more like a shower stall to me). I do wish I could hear the music without the rain, regardless of the ostensible dramatic reason (a thunderclap that occurs just before the music starts), since I think it's overbalanced and goes on too long. One of the movements of this piece is obviously derived from Ligeti's "metronome" pieces (e.g., third movement of the Second String Quartet). This track devolves into Waffenspiel ("weapons play"), which is uncharacteristically built exclusively from outdoor recorded sounds (gunshots, cars, thunder, and other mechanical sounds). It's the only such track in the opera. The guns finally give way to birds chirping and dogs barking, though there's a very faint musical sound, concentrated in the L channel (a distant marching band perhaps), suggesting that we're still in a human-populated landscape ("life goes on outside the piano"). Another interpretation is the quiescence of death. Imagine a soft ending to a Zappa album! The connotations of imminent death are unmistakable and touching here given the circumstances surrounding the work's conception. It's a stunning musical valedictory gesture, a far cry from some 1970s Zappa stage set culminating in Muffin Man or Strictly Genteel.

The trouble with CP3, of course, is the quality of the spoken word interpolations. They're in the style of the great collage albums of the Mothers of Invention period, but they don't come off as well here, both because the technique works better with brief snippets than with extended surreal conversations, and because Zappa is trying to at least give lip service to a narrative arc (the living piano, etc.) that isn't adequately supported by the material. Where We're Only In It For The Money sounds playful and transgressive, CP3 sounds self-conscious and closer in caliber to the penalty tracks added to the Uncle Meat CD release. Despite these flaws, CP3 is admirable for its complex and expressive music. Think of it like you would all those repertory operas whose libretto isn't up to the standard of the music, but whose total impact is nevertheless considerable. At least CP3's texts are free of the puerile misogyny that disfigures many Zappa albums from the 1970s onward.

I'm not generally sympathetic to "crossover" music arguments (er, Leroy Anderson anyone?), but perhaps CP3 can help listeners acquainted only with commercial music bridge the gap to the musical richness of 20th Century Western art music. As Zappa said in statement to the US Senate: "Why not bring jazz or classical music into your home instead of Blackie Lawless or Madonna?".

There is an interesting pre-release version of CP3 that is worth hearing if you can get your hands on it. As of this writing I don't believe you can legally purchase it though. Of course the Everything is Healing Quite Nicely artifact is also available, released six years after Zappa's death.

Clearly Zappa intended CP3 to be his crowning work, rather like Messiaen's St. Francis of Assisi (another opera!). I would have to say that of Zappa's through-composed instrumental works, CP3 is the one that can possibly stand alongside its models in Varèse, Webern, Stockhausen and many of the other greats of the 20th Century.

There a some very good reviews on here already, and they are the ones that are informed and positive. The people that don't like it, don't like music outside of the realm of the Zappa music they understand. That is fine, nothing wrong with that. However, they should just say that they don't care for the type of music that is on Civilization Phaze III, but not judge it disfavorably.

This recording should never be out of print, it is far too important in the history of music.

Zappa once characterized his work (in "200 Motels") as "comedy music". "Comedy music" does not apply to Civilization Phaze 3, one of his last projects, which according to other reviews, he completed (or didn't) while he was dying of prostate cancer.

The genre tag I got when I ripped the album was "Indie pop". Completely wrong.

This album is serious concert music, not rock and roll. And certainly not comedy music. (Although...there are hints of both.) If you listen to this music expecting rock or comedy or both, you will be sadly disappointed. If you expect complex concert music, then you may be pleasantly surprised at its richness and quality.

I have long believed that Zappa deserves to be evaluated as a serious 20th century composer, following in the footsteps of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, early Copeland, Stockhausen, and in his use of synthesizers (as he does on this album) Subotnik.

I am not alone in this opinion, and Zappa's work has been performed by other serious concert musicians. See, for example, the album, "Boulez Conducts Zappa.")

Don't get me wrong: I love Zappa's "comedy music": "Billy the Mountain", or "Call any Vegetable" just to name a couple.

And he and his band could make excellent rock.

But Zappa's music grew as he aged. It became less humorous and more like concert music. I love that too.

And I loved this album. It consists of a kind of collection of pieces intermixed with a bizarre set of dialogs.

Bizarre? Maybe that's a key word in understanding Zappa's music--and comedy for that matter. His record label was "Bizarre Records." It is also a term often applied to 20th-century concert music. It certainly describes Zappa's music.

Ok, I admit: I enjoy bizarre music. Just ask my family. But "bizarre" doesn't necessarily mean "good." I have generally found Zappa's music to be both bizarre and good. That's why I like it.

I found "Civilization Phaze 3" to be bizarre and good. It was rich, complex, and exciting. Listen to it as serious music, and maybe you will too.

...of why I don't own an MP3 player. I just received this in the mail and I must say I am very pleased with the digipak format of these two CD's. Very sturdy packaging with great artwork and even beautiful velum sheets with full color printing throughout the booklet. Since other reviewers have already done an excellent job describing the audio content, I'll spare you my two cents. This is obviously for any Zappa fan or anyone who appreciates music that is not concerned with whatever "flavor of the month" is selling right now.

There are a number of good reviews of this final masterpiece by Frank Zappa and I won't repeat what has already been (well ) said. I would just like to say that this album is the most fitting summation of Zappa's brilliance as a composer. For the most part it is Music/Music although there are some deep reflections from a dying man here if you know how to hear them.

I'm sure a lot of Zappa's fans might prefer Joe's Garage or one of the other more ( in my opinion ) lightweight recordings, but for me; This album fulfills the promise of musically stellar albums like Uncle Meat, Jazz From Hell, Grand Wazoo, The Perfect Stranger....you catch my drift I'm sure.

This is the one ( along with The Yellow Shark ) that confirms Zappa's high standing as a truly original and visionary composer. Thank you Frank!