John Zorn's "Spillane"

December 2, 2011 7:28 PM

Using his "file card" technique to create the title piece "Spillane" (whereby musical ideas written on note cards form the basis for discreet sound blocks arranged by way of a unifying theme), John Zorn forges an impressionistic narrative out of stretches of live-music jazz, blues, country, lounge, thrash, etc., and a variety of samples and spoken dialogue inspired by Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer detective novels (recited by John Lurie). - AllMusic

John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer. He's had experience with a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore punk, classical, extreme metal, klezmer, film, cartoon, popular, and improvised music. - Wikipedia

posted by Trurl (7 comments total)

Interesting. It feels very like a DJ mix, played live -- when was this recorded?
posted by empath at 9:26 PM on December 2, 2011

when was this recorded

Summer of 1986.
posted by Trurl at 9:34 PM on December 2, 2011

Summer of 1986.

Ah, the heady days of the newly-blossoming East Village noise/avant music scene... We had some fun then, back when NYC was, well, affordable!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:47 PM on December 2, 2011

I put his head where his wallet used to be.
posted by Wolof at 3:37 AM on December 3, 2011

Episode one of One The Edge, Derek Bailey's BBC documentary (available at Ubu Web) has some nice footage of Zorn, Zeena Parkins, et al., doing the file card thing ca. 1990.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:02 AM on December 3, 2011 [1 favorite]

This is great stuff.
posted by caddis at 4:25 AM on December 4, 2011

One of my favorite Zorn albums. Thanks for this post.
posted by box at 12:15 PM on December 4, 2011