Feeling irremediably bourgeois? Complacent? Tired of cycling through the same three emotions day in day out until that car/plane/helicopter crash finally brings relief in hurtling flames, jagged shards of glass, and the small insurance pittance your family must subsist on until they too are struck down in a school/post office shooting?

This may surprise you, but you are not alone.

Dozens of Americans have found relief with Zorn, the miracle breakthrough in life amplification. Zorn is not a pill; nor is it a cult; nor is it the mild electrocution therapy that in the past has promised so much but never delivered. Zorn is a unique aural blend of computer music, Japanoise, avant-jazz, new classical, and cartoon cut-ups-- a cutting-edge synthesis of Eastern and Western traditions. Clinically tested, loaded with dangerous additives and absolutely 100% guaranteed to approximate the feeling of a condom full of methamphetamines leaking in your stomach. Zorn doesn't just help you cope with life; it helps you cram existence into your orifices, comfortably and discreetly.

And Zorn is a name you can trust! The people who brought you the high decibel shattering glass of Kristalnacht; the fragile yet brutal prison rape music of Elegy; the anarchic game compositions of Cobra; the drunken, tough guy swagger of Spillane; the searing Semitic lament of Bar Kokhba; and the dark torture fetish erotica of Naked City now bring you Songs from the Hermetic Theatre, the newest installment of genital-bludgeoning life improvement strategies. It's simple.

Hermetic Theatre is the no-hassle, easy-to-follow, four-step program for achieving that tenuous, bi-polar, paranoid, quasi-hallucinatory handle on living. Let's walk through it!

1. "American Magus" (14:03). A tribute to the legendary American ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, "American Magus" is Zorn's first foray to electronic composition. Drawing on the sharp, pins-and-needles electronics of Fennesz and Pita, and the reckless noise collage of Merzbow, "Magus" layers incessant cascades of whistling sound over washes of sheer static. There is no silence to be found in this piece, just endlessly mutating frequencies tripping over one another in fast-forward. Careening glitches serve as the piece's only semblance of percussion, tracing the disturbingly lovely melodies like the shadow beneath a butterfly.

2. "In the Very Eye of Night" (11:16). The second composition opens with the voice of filmmaker Maya Deren, to whom the piece is dedicated, discussing time, film and femininity. Electric bass and bass drum drone darkly beneath soft aquatic sounds. High-pitched glass bowl and wooden flute squeal in the far corners, rising while the percussion approaches like thunder. Organic where its predecessor was gleefully synthetic, the watery "Night" is no less intense: rumbling in the bowels and the stomach, approximating birth.

3. "The Nerve Key" (9:29). Unbearably jittery, "The Nerve Key" is Zorn's first composition of computer music. Where Mille Plateaux's provocative Clicks & Cuts 2 highlighted the warmth and ambience of glitch music, "Nerve" recasts the genre as alien and alarming. "The Nerve Key" is computer neurosis, spastic and anxious. The sound of the machine on the edge of a nervous breakdown. If played at high volumes, it could very well damage you, your stereo and everyone you hold dear.

4. "Beuysblock" (16:13). "Beuysblock" is a junk symphony, featuring Jennifer Choi on violins and Zorn on some sixty different "instruments," such as wax paper, moustache scissors, Polaroid camera, blood, rubber stamps, $82 in cash, staple gun, hair, vacuum tubes, newspapers and dirt. Choi's gorgeous, spare violin lines open the piece, layered one on top of the next. The various items (virtually unrecognizable) combine in various incarnations of household noise. A piano adds plaintive lines beneath the junk orchestra as if to add a massive question mark to the proceedings. Alternately fascinating and vile, the haphazard scraping, swishing, clanging, sawing, blow-drying, collapsing, humming, bubbling and bleeding attain the center, while the traditional instrumentation is reduced to background noise. "Beuysblock" is a world turned upside-down, music turned on its head and forced to yield to the clamor of everyday life.

See how easy it can be! A new life for the price of a song. And after Hermetic Theatre, you will receive more Zorn: a new dose approximately every 55 minutes. How can you possibly resist?

Zorn: Songs from the Hermetic Theatre. The antidote to dying miserably.

WARNING: Zorn may be habit-forming. Zorn is illegal in NJ. Zorn users may be pretentious assholes that hang out in converted kosher wineries, smoking overpriced cigarettes and gabbing about Kabbalah, Marguerite Duras novels, and foreign films. The City of New York cannot be held liable for any occurrence of pretentiousness, obscurantism or Eurotrashery associated with Zorn use.

-Brent S. Sirota