More outsider heavy metal madnes from her majesty! Rossini is one of a crapload of self-released discs that Great Kat has been putting out recently, and like the rest of 'em, I'm obsessed with this shit. As I've mentioned in other reviews of Great Kat material, this current incarnation of the boisterous speed metal siren feels like it walked right out of one of Nick Zedd's post-y2k films, so over the top and knowingly silly that it goes beyond a mere musical experience into the realms of oddball comedy and a very singular strain of fetish material. I have no doubt that Great Kat knows exactly how absurd and outrageous the combination of hyperspeed speed metal, classical music, scantiliy clad cheesecake shots, and berserk energy actually is, and that she's rather hilariously pushing this sound an look as far as she can within what has become something of a cottage industry for the woman over the past thirty-five years.

Like all the other newer EPs and videos, this stuff is maniacal. A ten-minute EP of gonzo speed shred. Total bombast, cranked to the max. Here, the classical pieces being hyperwarped into her fretboard overloads are Beethoven’s "Pastoral Symphony No. 6 ", "Eroica Symphony No. 3", "Für Elise For Guitar, Violin and Piano ", and "Bolero Mosh" (yeah), as well as Rossini’s "William Tell Overture" (transformed into something so ecstatically spastic I can barely keep myself together) , Czardas' "Gypsy Violin", and Paganini’s "Caprice No. 24". The production on Rossini is actually a step above many of her other recent discs; I'm assuming that Great Kat is still using sequenced drumming and backing orchestration to accompany her guitar amd violin performances, but it all sounds much more organic and natural than usual. This is still completely fucking berserk, though. The violin arrangements are multi-tracked into a kind of cocaine-dusted blissout, screaming fretboard shredding and virtuoso violins colliding into bizarre grandeur, with each song racing to an abbreviated, ADD-blasted duration of a minute and a half. I think that this EP, despite all of its outward absurdism, is one of the better showcases of Great Kat's unique style and skill (as well as her ability to piece tjhings together on her own in post0production), whereas some other fairly recent TPR Music discs have had more of a programmed, almost industrial feel to the percussion and symphonic sections that carries a colder, more clinical vibe.