Official Release #63. This is Zappa's masterpiece of electronic music, conceived, composed and performed on his Synclavier, a computer system for music composition and recording. Civilization Phaze III is an astounding work, taking Zappa nearly ten years to finish. Released posthumously, this 2 CD set is a testimony to Zappa the composer, containing the pure fruits of his imagination and the hard work he continued until his death in 1993. Continuing the story of the piano people from Lumpy Gravy (and utilizing much of the same tape source material for it's interludes) the album fulfills on the promise of his Grammy-winning Jazz From Hell, the first album released of his Synclavier music.
Civilization Phaze III is the sixty-third album by Frank Zappa, released posthumously as a double album on October 31, 1994. It was the first studio album of new material from Zappa since 1986's Jazz from Hell. The album marks the third part of a conceptual continuity that started with We're Only in It for the Money (1968), with the second part being a re-edited version of Zappa's 1967 album Lumpy Gravy. Zappa described the album as a "two-act opera", but in lieu of traditional recitatives and arias, it alternates brief spoken word passages with musical numbers created on a Synclavier using a combination of sampled and synthesized sounds. Much of the sampled material in the second half of the album was originally recorded by Ensemble Modern and other musicians to Zappa's specifications.
Civilization Phaze III is the last album of new music Frank Zappa completed before his death in December 1993. It belongs to his corpus of "serious music." The composer has revisited the recordings he made in 1967 of various people talking with their heads inside a grand piano (with the sustain pedal depressed, it made quite a resonating room). These conversations were used in part in the 1968 LP Lumpy Gravy, but here Zappa (with the help of less limiting technology) restructured the comments of the "people living inside the piano" into a quasi-coherent plot. Basically, they are either outcasts or in self-exile from the outer world. They hide from a menacing reality. These spoken bits serve to tie together computer and orchestra music.
PHAZE I, the violent brainchild of David Potvin (LYZANXIA) and his brother Franck Potvin (LYZANXIA) as well as friend Dirk Verbeuren (SOILWORK, DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT), release its sophomore album, "Uprising", via Trepan Records/Wormholedath.