"The Yellow Shark" was the last album, released before the death of Frank Zappa. Tom Waits called the Opus as one of his favorite albums and says: "The work is impressive, a stage festival of structures and timbres. It testifies to his utter madness and virtuosity. Frank can be of Elmore James equally inspired as Stravinsky. He is unconventional by and by. "
These concerts were mixed before they were performed. Zappa conceived and developed a special six-channel PA system for the events: the audience would be (electronically) surrounded by the musicians, the better to hear the polyphony and what it might be like to be the fifth member of a string quartet. (The instruments' sounds are not processed or limited in any other way.) All of this has been necessarily lost in the mixdown from 48-track digital to simple stereo, but the result remains an instrumental recording of astonishing---if entirely unnatural, as such things are usually defined---vividness. The result sounds not so much "artificial"---as most of Zappa's previous recordings have sounded---as both larger and more intimate than life, an effect similar to the sumptuous, extra-intimate miking of Keith Jarrett's solo piano concerts. This sort of surreal---literally, "super-real"---recording technique is uniquely appropriate to Zappa's music, but its almost four-dimensional quality here, in which the instruments seem on the edge of busting out of their own skins, is overwhelming. The deluxe booklet is stuffed with liner notes by Rip Rense on the rehearsals and concerts, with fascinating sections on each composition by Zappa and EM conductor Peter Rundel.