Christians is an improv project that appears in various configurations led by Surrey guitarist Jeremy Stewart. The Irreversible Word (titled after a quote from Roland Barthes’ structural analysis of narrative codes) was recorded at Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie)’s dilapidated church studio in Anacortes, WA. This allowed Christians to take on the guise of a classic Pacific Northwest power trio, with Stewart joined by Stanley Jason Zappa on bass and drummer Nick Skrowaczewski (both of whom appeared on Fort Evil Fruit’s Golia / Shiroishi / Sikora / Skrowaczewski / Wedman / Zappa tape HelMel). The trio translates the sonic vocabulary of metal, blues, and punk into the musical language of free improvisation.

Recorded in the same sessions as Christians’ 2024 release S/Z (Fort Evil Fruit), The Irreversible Word thus can also function as a companion piece to the former album, which was described by Byron Coley in The Wire as “splendidly fiery… close to the ideal of what fusion can be.”

As with S/Z, The Irreversible Word circles obsessively around a theme from Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. In the process of putting together S/Z for release, Fort Evil Fruit’s Paul Condon surprised Stewart by asking “I wonder if the repetition of the Stravinsky theme is connected to having a Zappa in the band?” Mystified, Stewart replied that it was not, whereupon Paul produced a series of links to numerous places in which Frank Zappa, too, had quoted The Rite of Spring across the breadth of his recorded output. An enigmatic coincidence indeed.