The not-for-profit New York label John Zorn founded in 1995: a curated, artist-first cooperative whose scale and reach built a home for the international avant-garde, and whose New Japan series carried the noise underground to listeners far outside it.
Tzadik is the platform, and the Bureau files it as the label that did more than any other to carry the international avant-garde, and the Japanese noise underground in particular, to listeners far outside it. Founded in 1995 by John Zorn with the jazz producer Kazunori Sugiyama, it is a not-for-profit cooperative built on a simple principle: keep adventurous music in print, with the artist first and the profit motive removed.
Its scale is part of its meaning. Tzadik has released more than nine hundred albums, several new titles a month for decades, under Zorn's hand as executive producer, making it one of the largest bodies of experimental recording ever assembled under a single editorial vision. The uniform, austere house design across the whole catalogue is deliberate: a Tzadik release is recognisable at a glance, and the label functions as a curated whole rather than a loose roster.
For this archive the crucial strand is the label's documentation of Japanese music. Through its series, the New Japan strand above all, Tzadik released and distributed work by Merzbow, Hanatarash, KK Null and many others, putting the Japanese noise underground onto shelves far beyond the small-run cassette and CD-R networks it had lived in. The Bureau notes that this is the most direct standing tie between Zorn's downtown world and the noise tradition documented here.
Beyond the noise releases, Tzadik's reach across composed avant-garde music, Jewish music through Zorn's Masada songbook, film music, improvisation and the Lunatic Fringe and Composer series, has made it a standing institution of the experimental field rather than a label of one moment. It is where a great deal of the music adjacent to this archive has been kept available.
The Bureau files Tzadik at Tier II as the platform: the not-for-profit cooperative whose scale, consistency and curatorial reach built a home for the international avant-garde, and whose documentation of the Japanese underground is the clearest channel between the downtown scene and the noise tradition. It remains active, and remains among the most important experimental labels of its era.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Edwardian era · last revised c. the Edwardian era