Painkiller Are Back

One of John Zorn's heaviest, harshest projects returns, transformed

Painkiller circa 1991: L-R John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Mick Harris

John Zorn was a New York avant-garde composer and improvising musician with a small cult following when, sometime in the late 1980s, he began to develop an interest in the thrashy, ultra-aggressive sounds variously described as hardcore, grindcore, and thrash. Not the relatively palatable stuff like Metallica (who were already playing arenas by that point) or even Slayer, but the wild, extreme sounds of Napalm Death and various Japanese acts. This interest manifested in his own work, particularly the ultra-aggro Ornette Coleman tribute album Spy Vs. Spy (which I wrote about here) and his genre-hopping band Naked City. Earache Records, Napalm Death’s label, had licensed Naked City’s Torture Garden (the 42 short, genre-leapfrogging tracks that were also sprinkled across the band’s self-titled debut and Grand Guignol).

In the spring of 1991, Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris came to New York and connected with Zorn. The two headed to Bill Laswell’s studio in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood and together, with Laswell on bass, they recorded 12 tracks ranging in length from 11 seconds (“Handjob”) to 4:43 (“Devil’s Eye”). The music was a furious, booming blend of thrashy punk and squalling free jazz, entirely improvised but with a few overdubs here and there, mostly shrieking vocals from Zorn and Harris. The short blasts were superficially exciting, but it was the longer tracks like “Portent”, where Laswell and Harris were able to lay down an aggressive but subtly shifting groove for several minutes at a time, that really showed what Painkiller could be.

That first, 25-minute blast was released by Earache as Guts of a Virgin. The intended cover art was an autopsy photo of a pregnant woman, her abdomen sliced open and the fetus visible. But when I bought the cassette, the cover was just a picture of the woman’s almost beatific face — she looked like Mary in a pre-Renaissance painting — with text overlaid that read: “The original photographs intended for use on this sleeve were seized upon entry into the United Kingdom by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise and were destroyed for allegedly contravening the Obscene Publications Act.” (The full photograph, which is bleak and horrifying, could be seen on the cover of the Japanese edition.)

Later that summer, Painkiller reconvened. They laid down tracks for their second release, Buried Secrets, in August and October 1991. By this time, guests were coming to the party. Justin Broadrick and Christian Green of Godflesh appeared on two long pieces, “Buried Secrets” and “The Toll,” and guitarist Keiji Haino and vocalist Makigami Koichi pitched in on a cover of “Marianne,” by 1960s Japanese psychedelic rockers Jacks. (The latter wasn’t released until the late ’90s, when Zorn compiled almost all of Painkiller’s work to that point into a 4CD box.)

In between those two sets of sessions, Painkiller headed to Japan for a short run of gigs, one of which was documented on Rituals: Live in Japan, which was released on the Toys Factory label and has never been reissued.

It’s a shame Rituals is so hard to find, because it really adds to one’s appreciation of the whole Painkiller gestalt. They didn’t have their regular soundman, Oz Fritz, with them, so the sound is a little thinner than usual — Laswell is low in the mix and the drums have the clickiness of death metal — but they play two full sets, the first lasting about 40 minutes and the second 30, with Haino guesting on guitar for roughly half that time. Those pieces are the best ones; I got to see Haino and Zorn duet at CBGB one year around Christmastime, and it was one of the most searing things I’ve ever experienced. This comes close to that.

In June 1994, Painkiller returned to the studio to make a full-length album, Execution Ground. It was released on one of Laswell’s labels, Subharmonic, and on Toys Factory in Japan. Instead of a series of short blasts, the first disc consisted of three epic pieces — “Parish of Tama (Ossuary Dub)”, “Morning of Balachaturdasi”, and “Pashupatinath”. The shortest of these was 13:43, the longest 16:05, and they were heavier in every way than the first two records had been. Laswell’s bass was huge and noisy, prefiguring the blown-out waves of Sunn O))); Harris’s drums were floating in reverb, with a concussive kick; and Zorn’s sax was treated as well, hovering over the blasted landscape like a screaming vulture. And there were moments of eerie quiet, papered over with sound effects out of a horror or dark sci-fi film. This was Painkiller making a truly stunning artistic statement. And the second disc was an even bigger surprise: two 19-minute “ambient” remixes of “Pashupatinath” and “Parish of Tama”, built up with sounds from Laswell’s vast storehouses to create something eerie and unsettling.

The Japanese edition of the album was a three-disc set, augmented by another live set, from Osaka in November 1994, at which the trio played at length again, and were joined for the final 20+ minutes of their set by Boredoms vocalist Eye, whose unhinged screams and throat gymnastics were a perfect match for Zorn’s squalling sax. (The final track, “Black Bile/Yellow Bile/Blue Bile/Crimson Bile/Ivory Bile”, was a nine-minute sax-vocal duel.)

The following night’s set was also recorded, and while Talisman: Live in Nagoya wasn’t released until 2002, it’s a pretty incredible document. It opens with the longest Painkiller performance on record, the 32-minute “Batrachophrenoboocosmomachia”. One of the most fascinating things about the group’s discography is the opportunity it provides to hear Mick Harris get better and better. His nickname in Napalm Death was “the Human Tornado”, and he’s often credited with inventing the grindcore blast beat, but on Execution Ground and the live albums, particularly this one, he gradually becomes a hell of a groove player, and a thrilling improviser.

There have been a few Zorn/Laswell performances with other drummers (Hamid Drake, Tatsuya Yoshida) that have been released as Painkiller albums, but I don’t count those, so there will be no discussion of them here. I interviewed Laswell years ago and asked him about that, and he said, “We tried a lot of things probably without much planning, certainly with no preparation, and in retrospect it’s always different. Mick with Painkiller is Painkiller, and anything else is probably not Painkiller, it’s just me and Zorn playing with somebody. I think the Painkiller idea was always when Mick was there. We had some good concerts with Yoshida from the Ruins, probably musically a lot better, but it still wasn’t the same thing as the kind of really raw, primitive, visceral Mick Harris thing.”

(Harris wasn’t there the one time I got to see Painkiller myself, on May 13, 1995 at the Knitting Factory in New York. He had gotten sick, so Ted Epstein of Blind Idiot God had to step in on drums at the last minute. Epstein was a plenty hard-hitting player himself — Blind Idiot God were an instrumental trio that shifted on a dime between crunching hard rock and deep, trancelike dub — but I remember the performance being more contained somehow. Laswell concurred in our conversation, saying, “I remember that, and Ted was probably much more equipped as a drummer, but it wasn’t the same thing. We did a tour around that time — I think that was the last date of about six or seven gigs in America, and Mick started falling apart in the Midwest and by the time we got back to New York he was just wasted.”)

But now, out of nowhere, Painkiller are back. Samsara, their first album in 30 years, was released at the end of November on Zorn’s Tzadik label, and supposedly another album will follow. It’s very different from anything they’ve done before, thanks to the circumstances of its creation.

Mick Harris hasn’t been playing drums for a couple of decades at this point. He’s been focused on electronic music, working as Scorn, Lull, Monrella, Fret, Quoit, and probably five or six other names I don’t even know about. His work runs the gamut from deep, oppressive dub atmospheres to dark ambient music that’ll soundtrack your worst nightmares to blasting industrial strength drum ’n’ bass. So when Zorn reached out to suggest a collaboration, he put together a batch of rhythm tracks and sent them over. Eight appear on Samsara. Zorn took the tracks into the studio and soloed over them, only listening once or twice each to preserve the improvisatory feel. Finally, the music went to Laswell, who added dubbed-out bass lines and probably some of the atmospheric washes that seep through several tracks.

The pieces are just called “Samsara” I through VIII, which gives the album the feel of a single cohesive work, and indeed the mood is relatively consistent throughout. Some pieces are slower, some are faster, but the beats are always jackhammer strength, which inspires Zorn to slide from speedy but smooth bebop extrapolations to furious free jazz screeches as well as his trademark Donald Duck squawks. Laswell finds a place for himself somewhere in the middle, and he too does things he’s well known for, gluing the music together with filter-heavy, almost amniotic bass.

But even though it’s the three musicians I think are key to Painkiller, it doesn’t really feel like a Painkiller record. It’s closer in spirit to one of the late ’90s albums Laswell put out when he was experimenting with drum ’n’ bass — Oscillations and Oscillations 2, both on Sub Rosa — or a Mick Harris project (more Fret than Scorn) with guest sax from Zorn. It’s good, and I’m sure I’ll listen to it a lot this winter, but the project has traveled very far indeed from its origins as three men in a room (or on a stage), blasting away. Up to you whether you think that’s a good thing or not.

That’s it for now. See you next week!