Any one of avant-garde composer John Zorn's projects could have made it onto this list (Moonchild and Painkiller in particular), but it's his genre-hopping group Naked City that is, without a doubt, his weirdest and most influential group. The supergroup to end all supergroups, its lineup is made up of saxophonist/arranger Zorn, bassist Fred Frith (of Henry Cow), drummer Joey Baron, guitar genius Bill Frisell, keyboardist Wayne Horvitz and (at varying times) vocalists Yamasuka Eye (of Boredoms) and Mike Patton (of Faith No More/Mr. Bungle). Naked City was Zorn's tribute to thrash metal and grindcore, drawing on the extreme speeds and sounds of those genres with the aim of creating something new. He fused the blastbeats and distorted guitars of those styles with... Well... Every other genre you could name. Every track jumped from style-to-style, and the majority of them were unbelievably short. Critic Scott May explains that Naked City's tracks are ""jump-cutting micro-collages of hardcore, country, sleazy jazz, covers of John Barry and Ornette Coleman, brief abstract tussles - a whole city crammed into two or three minute bursts", with the quick-change technique inspired by cartoon composer Carl Stalling. The effect was, intentionally, akin to flicking the dial on a radio repeatedly and getting genre clash after genre clash (they even released an album called Radio). Check out the video of the group's live performance of Speedfreaks for evidence of this. Zorn eventually disbanded Naked City to compose for other groups instead, but their importance has loomed large over his career since. Naked City's music is organised chaos - perfectly composed music that constantly sounds like it's about to fall apart, but never does. It's also undeniably fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkrfVZGmLL8
