Despite his protestations to the contrary ( ''all material contained herein is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be confused with any other form of artistic expression''), despite his whimsical titles and his joky, deliberately misleading sleeve-notes, this is Frank Zappa's 'serious' music, and seriously the best of it should be taken. Zappa describes its style as ''preposterously non-modern'', but for the biggest and most 'serious' piece here, The Perfect Stranger, 'post-Varese with frequent gestures of acknowledgment towards Messiaen' would be closer to the mark. It is dramatic and explosive music, an inventive sequence of hard-edged, sharply coloured and precisely imagined sounds, and if one could say as much of quite a lot of what is emerging from Boulez's IRCAM these days, that would be to reckon without two qualities that are not all that common in today's music: an aggressive rhythmic cogency and a certain wry irony not far beneath the surface. Zappa is indeed an entertainer and a showman—it would not be too misleading to think of him as a composing Billy Connolly (Connolly himself is a playwright of some talent)—and he has a gift for communication that many of his contemporaries could learn from.
Most of the other pieces are slighter (Naval aviation in art? is 'simplified modern'—brief, Ivesian events strung on a sequence of slow-moving chords; The girl in the magnesium dress might be subtitled 'Milt jackson goes atonal'; Outside now, again spins an endless but not very interesting melody for, apparently, vibraphone and synthesizer in unison over a repetitive steady pulse), but Dupree's paradise is something else again, a bizarre but highly effective commingling of Bernstein with Messiaen, this time, or even Maxwell Davies with Copland. It has great impact, not a little wit and is brilliantly scored, basically for wind, two pianos and percussion. It is the work of a real composer, with sharp and open ears and a lively imagination.
The performances are very vivid, the recordings no less so, making considerable but creative use either of close microphoning or of amplification. The pieces played by the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Boulez were recorded, of couse, at IRCAM; the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, where the Barking Pumpkin Digital Gratification Consort were put on tape, sounds scarely less well-equipped.'