John Zorn’s Tzadik label is said to have removed their catalog from Spotify. I haven’t used Spotify myself in several years, so I can’t verify that myself, but I have no strong opinion about it one way or the other. I currently have subscriptions to Tidal (paid) and Qobuz (a one-year comp), both of which still carry Tzadik releases. Qobuz was in fact the first streaming service to feature Tzadik music, years before anyone else. And the album I’m discussing in this piece sounds incredible there — louder, richer, fuller, and more rockin’.

And make no mistake, Electric Masada’s At The Mountains of Madness, originally released November 22, 2005, fucking rocks. In addition to Zorn (who plays alto sax and conducts), guitarist Marc Ribot and keyboardist Jamie Saft, Electric Masada, a sextet that seems to only have existed for about a year, included Ikue Mori on laptop and electronics, Trevor Dunn on bass, Joey Baron and Kenny Wollesen on drums, and Cyro Baptista on percussion.

It was part of a much larger project that began with the Masada quartet (Zorn, trumpeter Dave Douglas, bassist Greg Cohen and drummer Joey Baron), a group that recorded 10 studio albums between 1994 and 1997 and toured a lot.

The original quartet’s music was based on a “Jewish scale” — which as Sasha Frere-Jones points out in an in-depth ArtForum profile, is also known as the “Egyptian scale” or the “Ethiopian scale” — but it also has elements of Ornette Coleman’s 1959-60 Atlantic recordings with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell. Zorn has continued to write compositions using that scale (more than 600 of them, in fact), and have them recorded and/or performed by a number of ensembles, including the Masada String Trio, Bar Kokhba, and other groups.

There are only two Electric Masada recordings, both live. The first was taped at Tonic, as part of Zorn’s 50th birthday series of shows in 2003. At The Mountains Of Madness came a year later, documenting the aforementioned European tour — the first disc captures a performance in Moscow, the second in Ljubljana.

I came to Zorn’s music through metal; specifically, Torture Garden, the 1990 Naked City release that combined all 42 of the “hardcore miniatures” from the group’s self-titled debut and 1992’s Grand Guignol into one berserk blast. It appealed to the Napalm Death fan in me, and when he followed that up with PainKiller (featuring bassist Bill Laswell and ex-Napalm drummer Mick Harris), I was enraptured. To this day, I like Zorn’s bands (Simulacrum, Moonchild, Chaos Magick, Bladerunner) but don’t have much use for his more composerly work.

Electric Masada allowed Zorn to present his music in a sprawling, raucous context. The performances can be extremely long, sometimes passing the 15-minute mark. And primarily due to Marc Ribot’s playing, which is sometimes in a noise-rock vein but more often straight-up metal, this is extraordinarily aggressive stuff. Each of the two concerts runs close to 80 minutes, and I can only really compare them to three of my favorite live albums: Miles Davis’s Agharta, Deep Purple’s Made In Japan, and Santana’s Lotus.

You see, this is not typically Zornian music. There are very few jump cuts or sudden interruptions/swerves. Once this machine gets up to speed, there’s no stopping it. The bent, swaying Masada melodies are performed by Ribot, Dunn and Saft as hard rock riffs over double drum thunder, and then Zorn comes dive-bombing in with a sax solo full of his trademark squeals and furious cries.

In a 2009 interview with JazzTimes, Zorn said the group’s music “is pretty out there. It has elements of [my game piece] ‘Cobra’ in it, it has elements of my conduction kind of stuff. Plus, [Marc] Ribot and [Jamie] Saft really take it to a little more of a rock area, and there are always some structural elements of classical in there. Some people want to try and define it and say it’s related to Third Stream.”

He seems to have chosen only ten compositions from the overall Masada songbook for the group. Seven of them (indicated with asterisks) were also recorded and/or performed by the original quartet. At The Mountains Of Madness features two performances each of “Abidan*”, “Hath-Arob*”, “Idalah-Abal*”, “Karaim*”, “Kedem” and “Metal Tov”, and “Lilin*”, “Tekufah*” and “Yatzar” are performed once each. Another piece, “Kisofim*”, only appears on the Tonic recording. And while there are occasional changes of mood — Ribot’s guitar feature on “Karaim” owes more to surf music than metal (remember, Dick Dale, the King of Surf Guitar, was Lebanese, and a lot of that fast-picking stuff is drawn straight from Middle Eastern music), and there’s a moment midway through Saft’s solo that sounds remarkably like early ’70s Can — the overall vibe is much more consistent than one usually gets, or comes to expect, with Zorn.

I can’t say that I hear the classical elements he calls out, but he wrote the stuff, so OK. What I hear is an extremely high-powered rock band with some saxophone solos. Again, the connection I make is to Agharta, which was a high-volume, high-intensity blend of funk, metal (before there was such a genre) and R&B, with the horn solos owing more to soul than jazz, riding as they did atop simple vamps. But like that album, there are quiet passages too; “Abidan” is a gentle interlude that reminds me of 1950s instrumental hits like Santo & Johnny’s “Sleep Walk.”

But just listening to these performances gives you an erroneous impression of what’s going on. Actually watching Electric Masada at work reveals the degree to which Zorn is conducting and controlling the action, and it’s much more than you might think. Here’s a video of a different European performance with a slightly altered lineup (I don’t think Ikue Mori is present). Watch Zorn start and stop the players, gesturing to each member of the ensemble to tell them when to come in and when to fall out. It’s wild.

But regardless of methodology, what matters is the result, and At The Mountains Of Madness is an absolute avalanche of an album. If you’re in the mood for ultra-heavy jazz-rock fusion with a Middle Eastern flair, it’ll absolutely steamroll you.