Secret Chiefs 3 - Xaphan:Book Of Angels Vol 9

Once upon a time I was in about Yr 11 in High School (that's the 2nd-last year before Uni for non-Aussies) and accidentally happened upon a couple of tracks by a band called Mr Bungle. The horrifying perversion was balanced by music so utterly brilliant my tiny mind was blown to bits.(Actually I was too scared to buy the CD for some years, because of Mr Patton's scatological lyrics, but anyway, go home taping!)Said album featured Trevor Dunn on bass and stuff, and over the years his Secret Chiefs 3 project has made a pretty big impression on lots of peeps - although not so much on myself.It was also produced by a bloke called John Zorn, who at the time I knew mostly from a string quartet that Kronos had played. Hoo boy, he was responsible for some more pretty scary music too, with some really scary album covers folks!But he also had an amazing project called Masada, updating Jewish music for the (free) jazz world, and gradually this project blossomed into many other facets, such as Bar Kokhba (still one of my favourite albums ever, first of the 'chamber' versions of the Masada songbook), and gradually he's given these compositions over to all sorts of other musicians to do their thang with them.So after some years in which there've been some not-well-understood feuds between them (I believe), Zorn & Dunn are in a sense working together again, with material taken from the more recent second Masada songbook. And by gum, these are easily the best versions of the new Masada material, and compete well with the earlier stuff too.Dunn takes the Masada music into a mysterious Middle Eastern carnival world where wailing voices and instruments compete with Bungle-like riffs, crunchy bass synths and more. Essential stuff.