Tzadik Records Listening Session (Online and in Person 14th May 2024)

Composer John Zorn’s record label Tzadik has brought together some of the most intriguing and experimental music from musicians and composers such as Mark Degli Antoni, Mike Patton, Lesli Dalaba, Noah Creshevsky, Ikue Mori, Melt-Banana, Buckethead, Kayo Dot, Ayuo and Ohta Hiromi, Tangele and Naked City, and delving into experimental music from Japan to radical Jewish culture.

In this session, we will be listening to, and discussing, a selection of tracks from a range of Tzadik albums.

“Cartoon music for me was a real breakthrough in terms of musical form, how it was structured. It seemed to me that it was completely revolutionary for the time. Maybe it was in my subconscious from watching Road Runner as a kid or what-have-you, maybe it is all the kinds of music that is used, the quotations… I always loved Ives as a young composer, Ives was one of my favourites and cartoon music seemed to relate to Ives in some way in terms of quotation and different genres, everything being treated the same, in the same slapstick kinda way, but, you know, a little bit of jazz would appear, classical would appear, all these different kinds of things would appear and really in a new way, and it was really revelatory in a lot of ways and very inspiring. And I used to tape shit off the TV and I’d have all my little cassettes of… Road Runner was the best because there was no dialogue. I used to listen to it and try to imagine it without the picture. It is difficult because we are trained from children to tie those sounds together. You hear da-da-da-da-da-da, you hear someone going up the stairs, but I try to like, you know, listen to it as abstract music and learn something about musical form, maybe new ways of creating music, ways of breaking established ideas of musical development. Nothing is really developed in that music. What’s developed is what you see on the screen, so there is a drama going on. A drama is played out, but to the director the sound is secondary, to me the sound was primary. So I try to analyze some kind of new structures, and I think I learned a little bit about putting new sounds together by the analysis of what happens in Carl Stalling specifically, Carl Stalling’s Cartoon music. “

John Zone in Bookshelf on Top of the Sky: 12 Stories About John Zorn (Dir. Claudia Heuermann, 2002)

Session Lead: Bradley Tuck

In Person: Southern Belle, 3, Waterloo Street, Hove

Click to join: On Zoom

Meeting ID: 842 1896 1652

Passcode: 187206

Time: 7:00 pm Doors. 7:30pm-10:00pm

Book Free Tickets on Eventbrite

–

RSVP and invite your friends on Facebook!

Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group