Sunday night’s Zorn fest at the Barbican confused, confounded and astounded in not-quite-equal parts, and left me with a semi-rhetorical question - why, and how, did John Zorn come to be using as his latest musical starting point the life and/or works of Aleister Crowley, and was this at all an effective starting point?

I know this is a disingenuous question that I could answer with a few Google searches and conversations with more well-informed friends, probably, but I’m choosing not to, because the ‘why?’ was my first response to the music itself. Therefore I’d rather try to answer it myself, as a listener with a small working knowledge of both Zorn and Crowley.

To backtrack a little, Sunday saw the live premiere of two new Zorn compositions. One was Moonchild, a sort of noise/rock song cycle performed by Joey Baron, Trevor Dunn and Mike Patton. The other was the lengthily titled Evocation of a Neophyte and How the Black Arts were Revealed unto Her by the Demon Baphomet, which was performed by a group of singers plus harp, percussion and bassoon. Inbetween the two performances we were shown a Kenneth Anger film of Crowley’s paintings, shot lingeringly in the style of Tony Hart’s Gallery, while Zorn mixed a live soundtrack (heavy on the atmospherics) over the top. Man, he was bad at noses, that Crowley guy. And eyes. And hands. And breasts.

The film - and, unfortunately, its soundtrack - are a bit of a come-down after Moonchild, which is a dizzying, brilliant piece of art. At first, sitting neatly in my comfortable seat with maximum leg-room, I’m a million miles away from any kind of ritual, transcendent space and - more importantly - even further away from any chance of participation in the music that’s unfolding. This is wholly OK, because there’s a lot to process musically, but I do keep thinking that I should be feeling more involved, what with the Crowley thing and all - what with the notion that this performance constitutes a ritual, or, at the very least, some kind of acting out of the conflict in the novel itself, which deals with a battle between different facets of magic. This is the problem already with using a concept like Crowleyian magic(k) for a piece of music like this. Whatever your knowledge of the novel, or of Crowley himself, you’re likely to be making some kind of word associations at this point; expecting something; holding out for some maximum effect.

Luckily, my preconceptions tend towards the following tags when it comes to Crowleyian doings: camp, hierarchical, delusional, destructive, funny. A sense of sick fun that holds within it the power to get inexplicably out of hand, to the point where its protagonists are not sure how it got so, and have to invent something on the spot to explain themselves. All of the above apply to the music, but because it’s music and not impenetrable writings or bad paintings it’s much more oblique, powerful and timeless than its source material. It’s also much more reasonably ordered - Moonchild is (flexibly) scored - and offers more of a taste of (a short-term immersion in) a system than full adherence to the system itself.

So I prefer music to magic - but that’s not really what I’m trying to say. What I am trying to say is that as Moonchild progresses, I find myself genuinely lost within it, to the point where my sense of time doubles back on itself and I feel like I’ve lost some minutes somewhere in another era. There is nothing intrinsically unfamiliar about the performance itself. Patton crouches, bounces, gargles and screams; Dunn plays heavy, queasy bass; Barron pounds the drums with a quicksilver menace, managing to be simultaneously mammoth-sounding and avain - a kind of inverse Boredoms-music, dedicated to dark rather than light. Each movement follows a trajectory of creeping menace followed by thundering tantrums, or vice versa, and includes at least one sonic peak, a kind of noise-gasp where everything sparks together, the circuit is closed, there’s triumph for a moment before the questioning begins again.

But these limitations make for fascinating listening, as you find yourself navigating the piece’s vocabulary with more and more ease, and finding within what are essentially avant-rock/hardcore ’songs’ some genuine moments of warped reality. Talking of reality, it could be argued that this performance of Moonchild is as realistic a picture of (my idea of) magic as I could have hoped for: 99 per cent devising ways of calling into the void and hoping for some answer that there’s something beyond, and 1 per cent hearing it calling very occasionally back at you - and being shit scared when it does. All kinds of rock music, with its aura of scattershot testosterone, are well known as vehicles for boys wishing to dive into the dark side, but tonight’s reading of the subject matter was weirdly inspired. I started off the set sitting up straight, hands neatly folded, and ended it knocked almost backwards in my seat. Had I not been at the Barbican I might well have rolled upon the floor in excitement or set fire to myself by accident like I did that time at the Lovecraftian chaos ritual.

The Bpahomet thing – while set for an enticing grouping of singers and musicians – had almost the inverse effect, to the point where I wondered if it was perhaps intentional. Was Zorn now trying to show us the flipside of Crowley’s influence: his preciousness, his not-very-weird-at-all weird Englishness, his ridiculousness? Was he trying to create a set-piece that could in fact have come from some upper class 1920s ritual by way of 1970s TV terror (ie the age of the extended vocal technique and microtones being used in scores for BBC teatime programmes: those were the days, eh) and am-dram horror? I guess probably not, but as the white-frocked soprano uncertainly aah-ed and whispered (“I summon theeee”), and the choir did likewise, and the big drums and bells went boom and clang, it was hard not to shake the fustiness and mustiness from my head. It was music to hear behind heavy velvet curtains, echoing around heirloom furniture. It was as dilettantish as any posh sorts messing with Satan are likely to be. As summoning of demons go, it was one of the least terrifying I have ever witnessed.

Which brings me back to the question I started with, which is why Crowley? Have I answered that yet? In my own head, yes: the rococo terror of the second piece coupled with the primal intricacy and energy of the first sums up to me both the awful silliness of Crowleyian magic and the undertow of genuine force (I resist here the tendency to say force of ‘evil’ because that’s a whole ‘nother can of chaos – let’s just say ‘force of force’, because that’s more accurate) that characterises both what I know of Crowley and what I know he means to others of the generations that came after him. However, I’ve no way of knowing at this stage whether this is Zorn’s intention at any point. There’s part of me that feels he’s almost taken Crowley at face value here, which is shocking because I thought only weirdoes in the early Eighties did that, but also really beautifully audacious and funny. There’s also part of me that senses the fascination with a home-made belief system, and the translation of that into musical form. I’m also reminded (by the paintings) that Crowley’s own artistic output was so impenetrably amateurish and wrong, but also so singular and idiosyncratic and obvious, that he can serve as a good jumping off point for better, more accomplished art. The awful music committed in his name, of course, devalues that point somewhat, but I think it works in relation to Zorn. Fundamentally silly, or fundamental? The composer’s devil salute to the audience after the obligatory classical congratulatory love-in at the end leaves me none the wiser.

Posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006by Frances May Morgan