Jasun Martz

Jasun Martz, who earned a degree in painting and sculpture from the University of Santa Barbara in California, formed the Neoteric Orchestra in 1976, but commitments with Frank Zappa�s band and his move to England prevented him from realizing his ideas immediately. It was in London that he finally managed to assemble the 40 members he needed and record The Pillory (All Ears, 1978 � Neoteric, 1981 � Ad Perpetua Memoriam, 1994).

The album, built around the sound of the mellotron and elevated by the presence of veterans such as Ruth Underwood and Paul Whitehead on percussion, Eddie Jobson on violin, and William Bottrell on cello, became a cult object but sold very little.

It takes nine minutes before the jumble of dissonances, percussion, �drones,� and random chords gives way to a choral march cadence. On this, the instruments improvise melodic figures in the style of Riley�s In C, but with a more geometric development and, above all, symphonic proportions (even including a dozen-person choir). The next movement is a series of Schoenberg-like metamorphoses for the string section (in reality, a mellotron). After eight minutes of chaotic noise, it�s time for an orchestral uproar. The symphony concludes with an apotheosis for pipe organ and choir.

Few albums in popular music have undertaken such a radical yet simultaneously evocative operation.

After returning to Los Angeles, Martz adapted by working as a session musician for Michael Jackson, Starship, the Far East Family Band, and again for Zappa.

With Jobson (violin) and John Luttrell (clarinet), he recorded the chamber sonata In Light In Dark In Between (Eurock, 1982).

The Sin Circle (another Martz solo project, but oriented towards rock music) released Everyone's an Idiot (Sin Circle, 1999),

The Pillory/ The Battle (Under the Asphalt, 2005), recorded with an orchestra of 115 musicians, is a double-CD seven-movement symphony (for a grand total of more than two hours) set in a distant future in which continents have come apart and now are beginning to approach again causing wars between their inhabitants. The theme does not do justice to the music, that is not only ambitious but powerful. The haunting first movement (22-minute long) evokes ancient Celtic landscapes: a sense of mystery and magic exudes from the dark and ominous melodies. The second movement (also colossal) opens in a chaotic and dissonant manner before a soaring march-like theme leads to a celestial choir of female voices lost in spacetime. Percussions and violins propel the swirling dance-like third movement, that signals a complete change of mood, although it ends in panzer-grade heavy-metal convulsions and drifts into the cacophony of the fourth movement. After the brief organ-driven requiem-like fifth movement, the listener is lulled into the slow decay of whispered drones and melodies of Ambient. The last movement (all 74 minutes of the second CD), subtitled "industrial/noise/ambient", takes about ten minutes to reach the point where one can discern the noises and another ten minutes before the noises coalesce into a distinctive sound, something like a sustained guitar distortion. At 24:30 the noise dissolves in a whirlwind of piercing squeals. The new silence is eventually broken by a loud organ drone but never quite manages to turn into meaningless sounds. Eventually (45 minutes into the piece) it turns into the electronic equivalent of the crackling of a fire, rapidly escalating into a full-fledged volcanic eruption. When that one dies out, random dissonances slowly disappear, creating a deeper sense of vacuum. The music seems to end, but is suddenly resurrected at 62 minutes by a burst of orchestral noise. Ten minutes of harsh, massive, unnerving turbulence follows, with longer and longer orchestral spasms, until a final blow relieves the pressure. Martz is one of the few composers of the post-everything age who understands how the orchestra can still be a vital tool for the digital composer.

Anthologies and compilations include: Pacnaa (2013), the 8-cd box-set Solo Exhibition (2017), Non Finito (2017), the orchestral Alchemy (2017), the experimental Corrosion (2017), Chroma (2017) and the rocking Antithesis (2017).