Torture Garden

Torture Garden may refer to:

Torture Garden (fetish club)

Torture Garden (or TG) is a fetish club in London, UK. The club started in 1990 and is now Europe's largest fetish club, featuring monthly at the Mass Club in the converted St. Matthews Church, Brixton. It features dance floors, musical acts, performance art, fashion shows, and an S&M 'dungeon'.

Initially threatened with closure by the police, it is now described as "legendary" and "a capital institution" by Time Out magazine. It has also been described as "a combination of a fetish, S/M, body art, Modern Primitives, straight, gay, performance art, body ritual, fashion, techno/industrial/atmospheric music, multimedia, and cyberspace club".

Atmosphere

The co-founder of TG described the experience as "like entering a scene from a movie", and said that "we are basically about the celebration of sexuality and fantasy in a safe environment". A lack of intimidating or threatening behavior is characteristic of the club, in contrast to most nightclubs. One journalist reported the "welcoming, liberating, anything-goes atmosphere".

Torture Garden (album)

Torture Garden is an album by John Zorn's band Naked City featuring Yamatsuka Eye on vocals. The album is a compilation of the "hardcore miniatures" that were also released on Naked City and Grand Guignol. Unlike other Naked City albums, there are no breaks between the screaming, the seemingly random saxophone blasts and grindcore. The album was originally released on Shimmy Disc in 1989. Following controversy over Naked City's album covers it was re-released in 1996 on Tzadik Records with Leng Tch'e simply as Black Box. The tracks were also released as part of Naked City: The Complete Studio Recordings in 2005.

The name for the collection comes from Le jardin des supplices, an 1899 decadent novel by Octave Mirbeau.

Reception

The Allmusic review by Bradley Torreano awarded the album 4 stars stating "Songs blur together but never get boring, no lyrics are actually sung, and few songs last longer than a minute. It also never takes itself seriously, a nice relief from Zorn's heavy-handed ambient collaborations. This would make a great introduction to the noise/jazz efforts that this group of musicians pioneered in the early 1990s."