Luckily for Zappa, laughter at his music was never anything to be ashamed of, and with the Synclavier he had finally found a way to wield a pocket symphony capable of creating songs he believed no human performer could ever replicate in a thousand hours of rehearsal time. (In interviews he proclaimed that if he’d had a Synclavier as a teenager, he never would’ve bothered starting a rock band.) “Right now we have a president from hell, and a National Security Council from hell,” he explained in a promotional video for his new album on which he’d showcase everything he could do with the new instrument. “So we should have Jazz From Hell, also.”
Compared to the warm analog Moogs and ARPs that dominated popular electronic music in the ’70s, Zappa’s MIDI tones on Jazz From Hell exist in a disembodied negative space. Live sampled instruments emerge from silence only to instantly vanish again, their tactile tone adding to the overall uncanniness. While some critics deemed this digital sound too cold and lifeless, the album’s half-rendered hooks and keyboard-locked rhythms now seem shockingly ahead of their time, predating much of the experimental electronic music that would come to define the 2010s. In its playful plasticity, Jazz From Hell prefigures the chintzy ideas of Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, Fire-Toolz, and even 100 gecs.
Throughout Jazz From Hell, Zappa becomes the brain-scrambling maestro he always wanted to be, calling back to the lush, snaking melodies of earlier instrumentals like “King Kong” and “Peaches en Regalia.” The album’s time signatures shift so rapidly that anything resembling a downbeat tends to catch you off guard. But that disorientation is precisely the point; “What are the physical limits of what a listener can comprehend in terms of rhythm?” he asked Sound on Sound in 1987, explaining how his songwriting process usually revolved around testing music theory concepts to see how far he could push them. “How big is the ‘data universe’ that people can take in and still perceive it as a musical composition?”
For all its complexity, Jazz From Hell is hardly a serious listen—it squiggles and dashes about like stock music that’s broken out of its cage, begging to find new ways to be played with. “Night School” launches the album with a pep rally whose bassline bounces as enthusiastically as workout music on the Wii Sports island. The song shares a name with an absurdist political talk show Zappa had been pitching around that time, and its punchy synths could easily make for a twisted version of a newsdesk’s “this just in!” theme.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
