JOHN ZORN (b.1953): The Fall of Satan, Spectral Angels, The Revelation of St. John.

Description: These live recordings were made at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival as part of Zorn's sixtieth birthday celebrations there in 2013. Zorn writes of his fascination with the massive sonorities and vast range of timbres available on large church organs, from his earliest years to the present day. These improvised pieces are inventive and sonorously impressive, the multi-talented composer-instrumentalist sure-footedly constructing works of considerable cohesiveness and structural integrity, with a hugely inventive, unconventional timbral palette. Although he clearly is more than able to find his way around a keyboard - or multiple keyboards, and the various accoutrements of the large modern organ - variable vibrato and swell effects, for instance - this is not conventional virtuoso organ music; there is nothing in the way of fast passagework or intricate keyboard polyphony, for instance. Massed cluster sonorities are used with abandon, and to great effect, especially in The Fall of Satan, and among other brilliantly inventive effects, in Revelation, Zorn finds a way to evoke a kind of guttural, monstrous snarling speech from the instrument - the voice of the Beast, 'uttering blasphemies', presumably. Hypnotically repeated melodic fragments, pulsing pedal rhythmic devices and the building up of huge romantic organ/horror film soundtrack chords are also trademarks of the improviser's toolbox. Spectral Angels spins somewhat middle-eastern-sounding melodies out of modal scales with accompanying drones - this piece forms a kind of hypnotic, Terry-Riley-esque 'slow movement' to the triptych - but otherwise, sonic splendor and an acoustically conjured dramatic narrative are more the point than conventional musical devices. John Zorn (organ of St. Paul's Hall, Huddersfield, England).