For Fans of Frank Zappa

Zappa's 1971 film has always been dismissed as a psychedelic mess, which is exactly why it repays attention. Shot on early U-matic video and blown up to 35mm, it was the first feature filmed this way -- a technical provocation matched by the content. The Royal Philharmonic is asked to play straight-faced while the Mothers perform elaborate sketches about life on the road. It predicts music video, avant-garde performance, and the mockumentary by decades. Difficult viewing, yes. Essential Zappa, also yes.

Released in 1969, Hot Rats predates the fusion genre it helped invent, and it still sounds more coherent than most of what followed. Zappa essentially abandoned lyrics (one exception: Willie the Pimp, sung by a then-unknown Captain Beefheart), cleared the stage for virtuoso playing, and recorded a record that still functions as a gold standard for electric improvisation built on through-composed backdrops. Ian Underwood and Sugar Cane Harris are the equal of anyone Miles Davis was recording with at the same moment.

Recorded with the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt just months before his death, The Yellow Shark is Zappa stripped of every pop or satirical element: pure contemporary composition, brilliantly performed. Pieces like Dupree's Paradise and G-Spot Tornado (already familiar from Jazz from Hell in MIDI form) are revealed here as genuine orchestral works that would pass unmarked in a Boulez program. Fans who approached Zappa through his rock records sometimes reach this album last. They should reach it first.

No Zappa track appears in Disco Elysium, and it doesn't need one. The game shares his operating principle: use genre conventions (noir detective fiction, RPG systems, political satire) as a delivery mechanism for ideas that would be unwelcome presented straight. The dialogue is as densely researched and as funny as anything Zappa wrote. The political content is as pointed and as unwilling to flatter any faction. It is the first game that feels like it was designed by someone who owned We're Only in It for the Money.