In the spring of 1991, John Zorn, the radically eclectic composer and saxophonist, hopped into a cab outside his East Village apartment. Already inside was Mick Harris, a young drummer visiting from Britain whose band, Napalm Death, had become the leading exemplar of grindcore, a caustic, velocity-crazed blend of punk and metal. Their destination: Greenpoint Studios, the Brooklyn headquarters of the prolific bassist-producer Bill Laswell, Zorn’s friend and collaborator.
There, in one day, the three bashed out a fully improvised record. Featuring Zorn’s convulsive alto sax over Laswell and Harris’s alternately blasting and lumbering rhythms — seasoned with vocal shrieks from Zorn and Harris — the album represented a new bridge between the jazz avant-garde and underground rock’s most forbidding extremes.
On Friday, Zorn’s Tzadik label will release “Samsara,” the first new studio recording in 30 years to feature the original lineup of the trio, collectively known as PainKiller. While the personnel is the same, much else is different this time around.
For one thing, the three musicians were never in the same room during the creation of the record. Harris — who has made electronic music for decades and gave up drumming entirely after PainKiller initially parted ways in 1998 — contributed synthetic beats recorded at home in England. Zorn overdubbed his saxophone parts at Orange Music, the New Jersey studio where Laswell shifted his operations in the late ’90s. And Laswell added bass last, via a makeshift mobile studio that his longtime engineer James Dellatacoma set up at his Upper Manhattan apartment.
The distance wasn’t just convenient but necessary during a period of profound personal struggle for Laswell. Since 2022, in addition to diabetes and high blood pressure, he has battled a blood infection, and problems with his heart, kidneys and lungs that have kept him in and out of the hospital, left him unable to walk and led to intense pain in his fingers, severely curtailing his playing. He and his team have also been fighting to stave off a possible eviction from Orange Music.
Yet the album’s eight tracks of immersive, richly textured beatscapes layered with volatile sax lines still feel unmistakably like PainKiller, joining the band’s catalog following “Execution Ground” from 1994, where the trio embraced desolate long-form dub and hallucinatory ambience.
“The important thing about PainKiller, and it’s still true today: It’s the most extreme sax-bass-drums group that ever existed,” Zorn, 71, said with good-natured relish, seated on a shady public green just north of the East Village one morning in early October.
In a phone interview from his apartment, Laswell, 69, highlighted the same quality as he reflected on the group’s return. “It was too long, and I’m glad it came back,” he said. “I hope something extreme can come out of it.”
On a video call from his home in Birmingham, Harris, 57, said he was “really chuffed” this past January when he received an email from Zorn proposing a new incarnation of PainKiller that would incorporate his electronics. “When Zorn first approached me, I thought, ‘Wow, is that actually going to work?’ And then my wife said, ‘Don’t overthink,’” he recalled. “‘If Zorn and Laswell think that this can work, Mick — well, not think, say it can work — you go with it. You can do this.’ So that’s good enough for me.”
Mutual trust and admiration have always been key to PainKiller. Zorn and Laswell met in the late ’70s, and worked together on various early projects as each established himself as a force in the New York avant-garde. In the ’80s, Zorn’s omnivorous musical appetite led him to the hardcore scene that was thriving at CBGB, in his East Village backyard. One day, he stopped into a neighborhood record store and made a request of the clerk: “‘Pick out five hardcore, heavy records that have been on your turntable for months.’”
The haul included a compilation of Napalm Death’s live radio recordings, made at the request of the veteran BBC D.J. and tastemaker John Peel. Hyperaggressive sounds quickly made their way into Zorn’s work — including on “Spy vs Spy” from 1989, which featured pieces by Ornette Coleman, and in the riotously eclectic group Naked City — to the dismay of some jazz purists, whom he said regarded him as “the devil.”
Harris was already a fan of “Spy vs Spy,” enamored by its “barrage of sound,” when Zorn, then a frequent visitor to Japan, caught up with Napalm Death backstage before a 1989 Tokyo gig and proposed a collaboration. During his ’91 New York visit, he learned that Zorn was friends with Laswell. (The drummer loved his noise-jazz supergroup Last Exit.) After a quick phone call from Zorn to Laswell, who shared Zorn’s passion for the hardcore underground, the trio’s initial recording date was booked.
Harris remembers the session, tracked by the engineer Oz Fritz, as a whirlwind. “John tells Oz, ‘Just run the tapes.’ And John just said, ‘Yeah, Mick, just do what you do,’” he recalled, laughing at the briskness with which it unfolded. “Before you knew it, it was done!” Bluntly evocative titles and grisly photographs — chosen, Zorn said, for their “dichotomy of beauty and violence,” in the mode of the philosopher Georges Bataille — framed both the debut and later PainKiller efforts as unsettling art objects.
James Plotkin, a multi-instrumentalist who collaborated with both Harris and Zorn in the ’90s, and has played in influential experimental-metal projects such as Khanate, attended the first PainKiller session and felt inspired by what the group represented. “I was looking for music like that, and it didn’t exist,” he said. “Once somebody opens the door to something like that, that type of crossover, anything can happen.”
The idea for “Samsara” — a title that aptly signifies a cycle of birth, death and rebirth — arose earlier this year, following a renewed email correspondence between Zorn and Harris. Zorn initially asked about reviving the trio in its original instrumentation, after learning that Harris had started dipping a toe back into drumming. Harris declined, saying he wasn’t yet ready to record on the kit. But after watching an intense 2018 live clip of Harris’s solo-electronics project Fret and consulting with Laswell, Zorn quickly amended his offer.
“When he plays the drums, it’s very much his character,” Zorn said of Harris. “The way he sounds is how he is — very intense. And to do that with electronics as well, it’s like, wow, this is Mick. This is his stuff.”
Zorn improvised over Harris’s tracks without previewing them, to get closer to a live-in-the-room feel. Laswell did something similar, taking several spontaneous passes through each piece, adding both rhythmic lines and more textural contributions, which Dellatacoma wove into the tracks. Laswell said that while his finger pain made playing the bass painful, “I did it somehow.” “I used a lot of effects,” he added, specifying that he embraced distortion in light of his limited facility. “It opened up a new direction.”
Yoko Yamabe, Laswell’s partner and manager, said in an interview that throughout Laswell’s period of poor health, turning away from music has never been an option. “He’s all about nothing else,” she said, adding that for Laswell, music is ever-present, like “sky or air.”
Zorn, who has also made two searching duo albums with Laswell in the last several years, said that their recent collaborations were in part a gesture of care for his longtime friend. “I love the guy, and it’s hard to see anyone go through that,” he said, adding, “I want to get his blood pumping; I want him to feel involved.”
Laswell sounded confident that PainKiller’s latest direction — set to continue in 2025 with another new album by the trio — was true to the project’s initial spirit.
“It’s still the same choir, same voice and same statement,” he said, “and most important with that idea is the same power.”
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