John Zorn's two extreme-music bands: Naked City's jump-cut hardcore-jazz miniatures and Painkiller's grindcore-jazz-dub · the projects through which downtown composition met the noise and metal worlds head on.
Naked City and Painkiller are John Zorn's two extreme-music bands, and the Bureau files them together at Tier I because they serve one purpose between them: they are where Zorn's downtown composition meets hardcore, grindcore and noise head on. They made his lower-Manhattan world legible to listeners arriving from the heavy end, and they are the projects nearest to the noise and metal traditions this archive documents.
Naked City, formed in 1989, paired Zorn's alto saxophone with Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, Fred Frith and Joey Baron, with Yamatsuka Eye of Hanatarash screaming over several pieces. The band compressed jazz, surf, film music and hardcore into violent jump-cut miniatures that could change idiom every few seconds, realising Zorn's file-card method of composition (pieces built from blocks of contrasting material) as a live band. It is the collage instinct played at speed by virtuosos.
Painkiller, formed in 1991, went further into the heavy. Zorn took his saxophone into a trio with Bill Laswell on bass and Mick Harris, the former Napalm Death drummer, on drums, fusing free jazz with grindcore and dub. This is the project that put Zorn directly adjacent to the extreme-metal and noise worlds, and its records, Guts of a Virgin and Execution Ground among them, sit closer to the genre this archive covers than anything else in his catalogue.
Both bands lived across the labels of the experimental world, Nonesuch, Avant, Earache and later Zorn's own Tzadik, and both passed into legend through performance. On 26 September 1991 at Tokyo's Shibuya La Mama, Painkiller shared a now-storied bill with Fushitsusha, downtown skronk set against Japanese free-rock, one of the meetings that tied the New York and Tokyo undergrounds together.
The Bureau files Naked City and Painkiller at Artists · Tier I as Zorn's extreme-music vehicles: the bands that took his compositional method into hardcore and grindcore, drew the noise and metal worlds into the downtown orbit, and stand as the clearest meeting point between avant-garde composition and the heavy end of this archive's field.