John Zorn — IAO: Music In Sacred Light

John Zorn’s latest composition focuses on occult, kabbalistic themes. Partly inspired by Aleister Crowley but mainly a tribute to Crowley’s magickal disciple Kenneth Anger, a fimmaker. As one would expect these are the conditions for a dark and haunting musical piece.

Kabbalistically speaking, the letters IAO equal the number 666: the number of The Beast that is. The music and artwork evolve around the occult themes of alchemy, mysticism and black and white magic. The excellent artwork depicts various Kabbalistic signs and scriblings and even a Baphomet.

IAO is a composition divided in 7 movements. The first part, Invocation is a dark ambient soundscape. Various sounds like the sharpening of a knife, rattling chains, a wailing and drifting medieval choir and assorted other sounds create a dark atmosphere around Jamie Saft’s organ. The following Sex Magick is a lengthy and hypnotizing percussion piece performed by Jim Pugliese and Cyro Baptista. Part three, Sacred Rites of the Left Hand Path, is a spooky and rhythmic, slightly jazzy tune full of eerie suspense. The Clavicle Of Solomon pierces your ears with very high frequencies, rather disturbing and scary. The vocal piece Lucifer Rising for choir and a whispering and crooning (as ever) Jennifer Charles is a little more soothing but still bearing some familiarity with horrorfilm soundtracks, so the darkness is maintained. Next up: your wakeup-call named Leviathan! The sixth movement is constructed of a heap of sampled deathmetal records, mauled and moulded into a hostile vortex of sound. With Laswell’s soaring bass and tortured vocals by Mike Patton. Jamie Saft’s electric piano guides us to a more friendly end of the CD in Mysteries.

Again Zorn surprises his listeners with new directions, although there are some familiar sounds as well (especially the more atmospheric parts of The Gift pop to mind). As most Zorn-listeners should know by now: ‘surprise’ is John’s middle name. On IAO he leans more into ambient and electronic music than contemporary jazz and classical music. He seems to have discovered the possibilities of computer-aided sound design (although this is not the first time he used the computer).

As for my personal opinion: I like this album a lot, especially the first, third and fifth part are spooky but not too disturbing. Leviathan might be a disturbance in the eyes, erm, ears of some listeners, but Zorn-adepts like me should be used to that by now.