Surf Masada (Tribute to John Zorn)

Hard to imagine – but here’s an Instrumental Surf Music tribute (à la The Ventures under the influence of Capt. Beefheart and Electric Light Orchestra) to John Zorn! Golems of the Red Planet are a collision of lifers, iconoclasts, and joyful saboteurs drawn from the outer edges of art rock, jazz, surf, and the happily unclassifiable. Guitarist Harvey Gold, a founding force behind Akron’s legendary Tin Huey, brings decades of boundary-pushing work with Half Cleveland, Sally Spring, The HiFis, and his solo release It’s Messy Vol. 1. Bassist Mark Allender—true Zornophile—emerges from The Pointless Orchestra and a string of idiosyncratic solo albums. Drummer Bob Ethington has anchored everything from Unit 5 and Glenn Lazear to The Robert Ethington Quintet. Cellist Matt Reese adds a melodic wild card honed with Trial of Lucy and Flying Carpet People. Together, they form a band whose collective résumé reads less like a CV and more like a map of creative resistance. Golems of the Red Planet were formed from the mud of radically diverse musicians drawn to John Zorn’s Masada—compact, fiercely elegant compositions built to be exploded by other artists. The Golems’ twist was to use surf music as a launching pad, not a destination, filtering these Ashkenazi Jewish folk modalities through reverb, propulsion, and a gleefully warped sense of possibility. “Starting point” is the operative phrase: while Surf Masada occasionally dives headlong into genre pleasures, the band’s true instinct is insidious expansion. Eclectic to the core, the Golems treat surf as a language they’re fluent in—but never obedient to—reshaping it with wit, muscle, and a lifetime of beautiful bad ideas.