Published on Sep 16, 2005
To call this disc a total collaboration between legendary
conductor Pierre Boulez (helming the Ensemble Intercontermporain)
and composer Frank Zappa is a bit of a misnomer, as only three of
the seven tracks feature Boulez and orchestra. Yet the
collaboration should have produced some of the strongest efforts to
support Zappa’s claim of being a serious composer. Instead, it
provides some of the weakest.
The title track – commissioned by Boulez – is an absolute mess,
taking various cacophonies and trying to pass them off as music.
Maybe this was truly in the style of Edgard Varese, a composer
whose works I’ve admittedly never studied – but to the casual
classical listener, this is going to come off sounding worse than a
disc filled with white noise. Whatever story is supposed to be
going along with the music contained herein, I’ll never comprehend
– and, frankly, I no longer want to.
“Dupree’s Paradise” – an orchestral working of an older Zappa
track – has a little more success, but even this one does not live
up to one’s expectations – and, though I admit my knowledge of
classical music is limited, I’d have had higher expectations for
Boulez. (Then again, from what I’ve read about him, he’s always
been a bit of a radical in the stuffed-shirt world of classical
music.) The same can be said for “Naval Aviation In Art?” –
listenable, but nothing special.
The remainder of
The Perfect Stranger comes to the listener courtesy of the
“Barking Pumpkin Digital Gratification Consort” – in layman’s
terms, Zappa and his newest toy at the time, the Synclavier. This
keyboard-like device allowed Zappa to program in his music and have
it produced in any instrumentation he chose. Of these remaining
four tracks, the best that can be said about them is that most of
them are brief – “The Girl In The Magnesium Dress” and “Love Story”
being the most listenable of the bunch. “Outside Now Again” – a new
take on the track from
Joe’s Garage – seems to be just a jumble of noise that never
materializes into anything special, while “Jonestown” – a track I’m
figuring was supposed to reflect the horrors of the massacre
instituted by Jim Jones in Guyana in 1979 – never reaches that
level of menacing horror that I believe Zappa meant it to.
In the end,
The Perfect Stranger ironically becomes the perfect
description of Zappa in this project. Reducing his music to
unrecognizable sludge, Zappa gains no points in his attempt to be
seen as a serious composer (despite the headway he had made with
projects like
Orchestral Favorites), and his early noodling on the
Synclavier almost served as a warning that Zappa may soon decide he
no longer needed a backing band to create his music in a way he saw
fit. In that regard, Zappa came dangerously close to becoming a
stranger to the audience who had followed his every move for nearly
two decades at this stage.
2005 Christopher Thelen and “The Daily Vault.” All rights
reserved. Review or any portion may not be reproduced without
written permission. Cover art is the intellectual property of the
Zappa Family Trust / record label, and is used for informational
purposes only.