With the collaboration of percussionist Ches Smith, John Zorn creates a magnificent and dreamlike series of parallel tracks, a "modern reconstruction" and a set of faux 78rpm albums purportedly from 1923, as an homage to pre-dada absurdist, Romanian writer Urmuz (Demetru Dem), using the studio and card-file composition to create a bizarre and astonishing set of 8 x 2 pieces.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2018 Country: USA Packaging: Cardboard sleeve, sealed Recorded at EastSide Sound, in NYC.. on September 27th and 28th, 2017.
2. The Piano Lid Serves As a Wall 3:52 3. With Wet Clothes and Disheveled Hair He Wandered in the Dead of Night in Search of Shelter 3:02
4. Then Again, Who Amongst Us Can Complain 3:40
5. A Rain of Threats and Screams 3:43
6. The Pelican or the Pelicaness 3:06
7. After That the Funnel Became a Symbol 2:55
8. Desperate from Having Been Left Without a Bladder 1:28
9. Disgusted with Life 2:50
10. The Piano Lid Serves As a Wall 3:56
11. With Wet Clothes and Disheveled Hair He Wandered in the Dead of Night in Search of Shelter 3:05
12. Then Again, Who Amongst Us Can Complain 3:48
13. A Rain of Threats and Screams 3:50
14. The Pelican or the Pelicaness 3:11
15. After That the Funnel Became a Symbol 2:57
16. Desperate from Having Been Left Without a Bladder 1:20
sample the album:
descriptions, reviews, &c.
"With The Urmuz Epigrams Zorn returns to his roots, using the recording studio as an instrument to create an intensely personal suite of compositions in the style of his legendary File Card compositions and Zoetropes. Dedicated to the visionary Romanian writer Urmuz whose small, scattered body of work predated Dadaism by decades, The Urmuz Epigrams is a suite of surrealistic miniatures more akin to philosophical aphorisms than actual music. The pieces are presented here in two iterations, as a set of "rare 78rpm records" complete with surface scratches and limited dynamic range, and as a modern reconstruction of same with the full blown studio sound presented in all its perplexing glory. Some of the craziest music in the Zorn catalog!"-Tzadik
"Urmuz (Romanian pronunciation: [urˈmuz], pen name of Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău, also known as Hurmuz or Ciriviș, born Dimitrie Dim. Ionescu-Buzeu; March 17, 1883 - November 23, 1923) was a Romanian writer, lawyer and civil servant, who became a cult hero in Romania's avant-garde scene. His scattered work, consisting of absurdist short prose and poetry, opened a new genre in Romanian letters and humor, and captured the imagination of modernists for several generations. Urmuz's Bizarre (or Weird) Pages were largely independent of European modernism, even though some may have been triggered by Futurism; their valorization of nonsense verse, black comedy, nihilistic tendencies and exploration into the unconscious mind have repeatedly been cited as influential for the development of Dadaism and the Theatre of the Absurd. Individual pieces such as "The Funnel and Stamate", "Ismaïl and Turnavitu", "Algazy & Grummer" or "The Fuchsiad" are parody fragments, dealing with monstrous and shapeshifting creatures in mundane settings, and announcing techniques later taken up by Surrealism.
Urmuz's biography between his high school eccentricity and his public suicide remains largely mysterious, and some of the sympathetic accounts have been described as purposefully deceptive. The abstruse imagery of his work has produced a large corpus of diverging interpretations. He has notably been read as a satirist of public life in the 1910s, an unlikely conservative and nostalgic, or an emotionally distant esotericist.
In Urmuz's lifetime, his stories were only acted out by his thespian friend George Ciprian and published as samples by Cuget Românesc newspaper, with support from modernist writer Tudor Arghezi. Ciprian and Arghezi were together responsible for creating the link between Urmuz and the emerging avant-garde, their activity as Urmuz promoters being later enhanced by such figures as Ion Vinea, Geo Bogza, Lucian Boz, Sașa Pană and Eugène Ionesco. Beginning in the late 1930s, Urmuz also became the focus interest for the elite critics, who either welcomed him into 20th-century literature or dismissed him as a buffoonish impostor. By then, his activity also inspired an eponymous avant-garde magazine edited by Bogza, as well as Ciprian's drama The Drake's Head."-Wikipedia