John Zorn - 2015 - Inferno

 

Tzadik – TZ 8336

John Zorn’s Inferno does not descend through Dante’s carefully measured circles. Its model is August Strindberg’s more private catastrophe, a world where alchemy, religion, paranoia, physical distress and invisible powers become impossible to separate. Zorn translates that unstable interior weather into music for the bassless trio of John Medeski on organ, Matt Hollenberg on guitar and Kenny Grohowski on drums. The instrumentation suggests a psychedelic or progressive-rock organ trio, but the music continually sabotages any comfortable historical reference. Metal riffs, jazz reflexes, atonal collisions, sustained ambient space and tightly organized repetition are not visited as separate genres. They behave like competing states of mind, replacing one another before the listener can decide which reality is governing the room.

Across “Dance of Death,” “Pariah” and “Ghost Sonata,” titles drawn from Strindberg’s dramatic universe become entrances into different kinds of confinement. Medeski’s organ can provide enormous low-end weight without a bassist, but its sustained tones also make the music feel haunted from within, as though harmony itself has begun producing shadows. Hollenberg moves between exacting metallic figures and rawer eruptions, while Grohowski gives Zorn’s abrupt changes a physical logic. He can turn a difficult rhythmic construction into bodily momentum, then remove the ground almost instantly. The trio’s technical command is extreme, yet virtuosity is never displayed beneath a clean spotlight. Every demanding passage is absorbed into atmosphere, character and forward pressure.

The twenty-one-minute title composition is the album’s central chamber, but it does not behave like an extended jam or a progressive-rock suite assembled from neatly labeled rooms. It feels closer to a sequence of recurring visions whose meanings change each time they return. Zorn’s writing repeatedly tightens into sharply synchronized attacks, opens into freer movement, sinks into ominous suspension and then reappears in another form. Medeski is especially important to this continuity. His organ can function as bass, harmony, drone, orchestral mass or diseased carnival color, binding together passages that might otherwise seem violently unrelated. Hollenberg and Grohowski respond with equal flexibility, making composition and improvisational danger feel less like opposites than two methods of reaching the same fevered clarity.

After that long descent, “Blasphemy,” “The Powers” and “Dreamplay” arrive not as relief but as concentrated afterimages. Their shorter forms make every turn feel more immediate, as though the larger psychic event has fractured into symbols that continue flashing after the main vision has ended. “Dreamplay” is an especially appropriate final title because the album has followed dream logic throughout: identities change, time contracts or expands, and incompatible environments touch without explanation. Yet Inferno is never vague. Its strangeness is created through exact decisions made by three musicians capable of executing Zorn’s most sudden demands while preserving heat, danger and personality. Hell here is not simply loudness, speed or dissonance. It is the suspicion that everything connects, followed by the more frightening discovery that the connections may be real.