"'Naked City: The Complete Studio Recordings' is a five disc box set that contains all of the studio albums released by Naked City during their five-year history. The discs are accompanied by a book, 'Eight Million Stories: Naked City Ephemera', which contains a wealth of photos and art as well as testimonials from all five band members and numerous acquaintances, friends, fans and contributors such as Mike Patton, Yamatsuka Eye, Sean Lennon, Mick Harris and Eyvind Kang."
"Naked City was an avant-garde music group led by saxophonist and composer John Zorn. Active from 1988 to 1993, Naked City was initiated by Zorn as a 'composition workshop' to test the limits of composition and improvisation in a traditional rock band lineup. In their early style, songs were often performed at astonishingly fast tempos, typically switching musical genres every few measures. One critic described their tracks as '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'. This fast-change tendency was partly inspired by Carl Stalling, who frequently shifted his soundtracks for Warner Brothers cartoons in tempo, theme and style. The group expanded their sound for later releases, with mini-covers of classical composers, a one-track album of metallic doom, and another of ambient/noise textures. Zorn disbanded Naked City when he felt the need 'to write music for other ensembles, in other contexts, with new ideas'."
