note: zappa wrote orchestral scores for some of his works: and for those boulez conducts on the album below, he and zappa worked together. so this is not the case of a famous conductor/composer deciding on his own to transpose zappa into orchestral terms. what’s recorded, is zappa’s own orchestral work. for better or worse. personally, i prefer zappa’s non-orchestral versions. but you can’t blame Z for wanting to hear his works played by one of the most renowned, avant-garde classical musicians/composers of the period. zappa began listening to Verèse when he was 13, even wrote to him and attempted to meet that amazing avant-guardist, which never happened. so the boulez conducts album is his realization of his 13 year old self’s, dream. and hey, boulez should be given his due credit for recognizing zappa’s musical brilliance.

Frank Zappa “Letter to Edgard Varèse”

 

john zorn:

if Nietzsche had been 20th C. modern… he would have been grooving to Yello as the perfect antidote to Wagner. my comment is not entirely parodic, at all. N lay claim to the necessity of the necessity of joy and pleasure with absolute seriousness. and Y realizes in it’s music, that all important pearodox, in a 21st Zarathustrian way.

perhaps even in a Sufistic way. if you don’t believe me, listen to and watch this:

okay, be skeptical, but Y is and has been the greatest, poetically consistent euro band for decades:

and L of dorset would concur. why?

why? they synthesize, spin, mutate and thereby, evolve, not only themselves, but ‘culture’ in general. in Yello, there is nothing that does not permute, joyously even when absolutely bleak. they join spectacle with calvinist anti-spectacle; join deprivation with what’s rife; condemn while elevating. they joyfully embrace tragedy as the most worthy of humanly conscious inevitabilities. and they sing about everything that is and is not. and they make condemnatory commentary that is simultaneously, acceptance. they are modern epicurians with something of both the skeptics and the  give-up-your-soul religious nihilists. but in the end, they are not nihilists but promoters of a possible, far from guaranteed, future.

just listen to them.