Golems Of The Red Planet - Surf Masada - Tribute To John Zorn [CD]

Hard to imagine - but here's an Instrumental Surf Music tribute(à la The Ventures under the influence of Capt. Beefheart and Electric Light Orchestra)to John Zorn! Golems of the Red Planet are a collision of lifers, iconoclasts, and joyful saboteurs drawn from the outer edges of art rock, jazz, surf, and the happily unclassifiable. Guitarist Harvey Gold, a founding force behind Akron's legendary Tin Huey, brings decades of boundary-pushing work with Half Cleveland, Sally Spring, The HiFis, and his solo release It's Messy Vol. 1. Bassist Mark Allender-true Zornophile-emerges from The Pointless Orchestra and a string of idiosyncratic solo albums. Drummer Bob Ethington has anchored everything from Unit 5 and Glenn Lazear to The Robert Ethington Quintet. Cellist Matt Reese adds a melodic wild card honed with Trial of Lucy and Flying Carpet People. Together, they form a band whose collective résumé reads less like a CV and more like a map of creative resistance.Golems of the Red Planet were formed from the mud of radically diverse musicians drawn to John Zorn's Masada-compact, fiercely elegant compositions built to be exploded by other artists. The Golems' twist was to use surf music as a launching pad, not a destination, filtering these Ashkenazi Jewish folk modalities through reverb, propulsion, and a gleefully warped sense of possibility. "Starting point" is the operative phrase: while Surf Masada occasionally dives headlong into genre pleasures, the band's true instinct is insidious expansion. Eclectic to the core, the Golems treat surf as a language they're fluent in-but never obedient to-reshaping it with wit, muscle, and a lifetime of beautiful bad ideas.