Zs - Score: The Complete Sextet Works 2002-2007 : 4 x CD box set
SKU
39-NTHS 27.2
"September, 2012, New York band Zs celebrates their ten-year anniversary with the release of SCORE, the complete sextet works from 2002 to 2007.
Zs have been described with a dizzying array of adjectives, and
performed alongside an equally dizzying complement of colleagues and
collaborators ranging from Throbbing Gristle's Genesis P. Orridge to
Roscoe Mitchell and Christian Wolf. Belonging nowhere and everywhere,
Zs have absorbed the editorial space of Howard Stern and Alex Ross
alike, filling the pages of publications like The Wire and Signal To Noise as often as those of the New York Times and The New Yorker."
I saw Zs in 2006 and they were really amazing and really difficult; four guys (2 guitars, sax, drums) sit in chairs facing each other with VOLUMINOUS amounts of musical scores in front of them. Using head & hand signals as well as the scores, they played a very, very intense, long, loud music that touched on aspects of rock, punk, 20th century composition, improvisation and lord knows what else.
I mean, I know thorny music and difficult music, but this performance was a mind-blowing concert of rehearsal intensive, relentless music.
I felt like what I imagined people must have felt like in 1971 when they saw the original Philip Glass ensemble for the first time when no one had ever heard music like THAT before, yet here was this utterly alien music unfolding before your eyes. Phew! And what I saw was by a quartet; this is by the SEXTET version of the group! Dear lord, can you say 'rehearsal intensive'?
FOUR CDs filled with amazement and bafflement and conditionally recommended if you are a person who thinks the stuff released on Cuneiform is for pussies and/or you like to inflame your neighbors.
- LabelNorthern Spy
- UPC741360699748