Zen Circus - Welcome to the Zen Circus

“Canzoni contro la natura” is your eighth album: can we say that Zen Circus have by now become something of an institution on the Italian indie scene?

Well, let's put it this way: for years now we've been busting everyone's balls left and right with endless records and tours (laughs heartily, ed.).

But at the start of your career, would you ever have bet on such a long and rewarding path?

No. Even though we're all different ages, all three of us cut our teeth mainly through experiences in the centri sociali, where we used to watch lots of bands from the American punk circuit play: ramshackle outfits crammed into stinking tour buses. Back then we were just kids, or barely more than that, and simply imagining that one day we might be able to do a tour like those seemed like an amazing thing to us. We sweated to grow and start taking our music on the road. At the beginning of our journey as "Zen Circus" we were a sort of Armata Brancaleone on tour: we played in downright spartan conditions, sometimes seasoned with mind-boggling, almost surreal episodes. A caustic and hugely entertaining education in life.

Then, over the years, you managed to achieve some important goals…

We managed to achieve goals that were huge for us, like having on one of our records Brian Ritchie, Kim Deal and Jerry Harrison, heavyweights from legendary bands like Violent Femmes, Pixies and Talking Heads; bands we grew up on musically as teenagers, and that we've continued to love.

What would you consider your greatest victory?

At the end of the day, the biggest achievement is having managed, over the years, to turn our visceral love of music into a job.

The new album arrives after a short break, during which some of you got involved in launching parallel projects. Do you feel enriched by these "solo" experiences? Did unplugging for a few months and devoting yourselves to "other things" have any positive knock-on effects on the Zen Circus microcosm?

Of course. We needed a break, after six years of nonstop touring and recording. That's how my project "La notte dei lunghi coltelli" came about, along with Andrea's solo debut ("Il testamento"), and Ufo's well-received DJ sets. Getting back into the rehearsal room after a few months of separate lives gave us an enormous urge to play together. A desire that's always been there in the past, mind you, but that came back in recent months in a dense, explosive way. Parallel projects are always useful, in my opinion: you step out of your protected nest and look out onto a whole world still to be discovered, with no safety nets. A tonic from every point of view, one that strengthens you all round.

What were the premises behind the conception of "Canzoni contro la natura"? At times it gives the impression of being a kind of concept album about human nature. Is that the right impression?

"Canzoni contro la natura" isn't really a concept album: within its ten tracks there's a whole range of musical and thematic variety. A couple of songs pick up the thread started with "ATA" and "Nati per subire", while the other tracks unfold along lines that tend to build their own path, independent of the last two albums. The nature being examined is human nature. Mother nature is a fatalistic pretext to dig even deeper into the human soul; but it's not an environmentalist record, it's certainly not Zen Circus's "Green"!

Tell us how your songwriting process works: has it changed over the years?

We usually work like this: Andrea brings in some guitar riffs and the lyrics, then all together we build the song, produce it and arrange it, only stamping the "zen" seal on the lyrics once all three of us are satisfied with them. But most of the time Andrea's lyrics are already perfect as they are. At most, as a group, we'll just tweak the odd line.

In your lyrics, always incredibly rich, you show you have a whole world of things to tell, and you demonstrate that just as well in the new songs, like in the human degradation of “Viva” or the intergenerational confusion so well portrayed in “Postumia”. Do you feel like standard-bearers for a generation these days?

No, basically because we're not giving the audience answers, just an observation of the surrounding environment seen from our perspective. Situations are often described in the first person, other times they're painted through the creation of ordinary characters, into whom we inject our own character.

But how do you see this generation? Disoriented? Disillusioned? Resigned? Or does it want to change things?

Personally, I don't think there's a term to describe this generation. We're a thousand social, emotional and political currents blended together, within which cynicism, optimism, drive, moral lowliness, boredom, resignation and passion all coexist side by side.

Looking back, can we say that the choice to switch to singing in Italian was the key to your success? Do you think that if you'd kept singing in English, the response would have been the same?

By using Italian we managed to communicate in a more direct and fitting way, there's no doubt about that. It would have been harder to tackle certain subjects in English. Success would never have been the same, but the switch to Italian wasn't premeditated, and it began two albums before the full turning point. That said, we've still carried forward the idea of singing in any language. For instance, with the EP “Metal Arcade”, released in 2012, we used Spanish, Finnish, English and Italian.

Could using Italian cut off any ambitions on foreign markets?

Certainly, but right now we're focused on the Italian territory. In the past, to support the album “Villa Inferno” we did a wonderful two-week tour in Australia, with Brian Ritchie of the Violent Femmes on acoustic bass. It's not out of the question that in the future we'll feel like seriously trying to set foot outside Italy again.

I found your adventure as Nada's backing band very interesting: you showed you weren't afraid to take the risk of putting yourselves on the line in that situation. What did that experience leave you with? Ultimately, did it also help widen your audience?

It was one of the finest experiences of our career, we learned an enormous amount. Even though we'd completely rearranged the live set to our own taste (which also had to match Nada's taste), we were hired musicians, with all the work ethic that entailed. Wonderful, I really mean it. She and Gerri (her husband and manager) are two amazing people, after a few weeks we already felt like family. Playing a lot, everywhere, is always good for you: you have fun, it makes you more professional, it adds experience and also audience.

We're in the Sanremo season. After Afterhours, Marlene Kuntz, Subsonica, Mauro Ermanno Giovanardi (just to name a few coming from the indie scene, who went to the festival without really losing themselves along the way), do Zen Circus also think they might one day go present a song of their own on that stage?

I don't think so. It's definitely a fun experience, because you find yourself inside a crazy circus that you know you could never, ever truly be part of. Anthropologically speaking, it'd be a great week!

What have you been listening to over the past few months?

I've been going through these albums:

Converge – All We Love We Leave Behind

Black Sabbath – 13

Motorhead – Aftershock

Albert Ayler – Spiritual Unity

Iosonouncane – La macarena su Roma

Sick Of It All – Death To Tyrans

Aphex Twin – Selected Ambients

As for Ufo and Andrea, I couldn't give you a detailed list: we all listen to a lot of music. Ufo is a vinyl collector, I think he's up to about five thousand now.

What do you like about the Italian independent scene?

One really beautiful thing is the bond that tends to form with other musicians. During tours you need to be in a kind of "brotherhood" environment, the crew becomes your family. Constantly being on the road, you meet other bands, make friends and maybe start playing together, guesting on each other's records or shows.

Playing around Italy, you're constantly coming into contact with a lot of emerging bands. Are there any names you'd like to point out?

Progetto Panico, an Umbrian band whose first official album I just produced, which will come out in March. We invited them to open a few dates of the new Zen tour. Then, beyond the whole notion of "emerging band", there are Fast Animals And Slow Kids, Bologna Violenta, Iosonouncane, Mamuthones and plenty of others. There's also a really interesting hard scene in Italy right now — in the sludge, doom and experimental fields there are some fantastic bands.

Any names you'd like to collaborate with in the future?

Personally I'd love to collaborate with Han Bennink and Kurt Ballou. Another musician we love enormously is John Fogerty.

The new promotional tour is about to kick off — what are the next steps after that? Will there be room again for your side projects?

Now the touring caravan sets off again, who knows when it'll stop, maybe when it crashes into a traffic island (laughs, ed.). I think in the future we'll find time again for our side projects. Taking a break for a few months every now and then does the band a lot of good.

To wrap up this conversation, I have to say you seem very satisfied with the new record.

“Canzoni contro la natura” is the first Zen Circus record that all three of us are 100% happy with. We really love all ten tracks. On previous albums there was always one song that didn't fully convince one of us, which is a perfectly normal thing to happen. Approaching the writing of “Canzoni contro la natura” with a calm, relaxed attitude really benefited the album.

(26/01/2014)

Below, some of the things we talked about.

First question: how much of what you write is autobiographical?

Appino: A lot, in many ways. Consider that “Figlio di puttana” is the story of my family, of what used to happen in my house. The expression “vecchi senza esperienza”, which we later used as a title, was something Ufo's mom used to say all the time.

Ufo: And “hai una macchia nera sul cuore”, which we later used in “We Just Wanna Live”, is what my teacher at school always used to tell me, because I wasn't baptized.

Karim: The same goes for “Franco”, another lyric inspired by a guy Appino met while working at a flyer-distribution company, which pretty much all of us have passed through at some point.

Appino: I lasted five years there, Ufo two months.

I know you call yourselves a rock band, but there's actually a strong singer-songwriter spirit in what you do: did Zen Circus start out electric or acoustic?

Appino: At the start, when we began, we were doing grunge, noise stuff; things completely different from what we do today. A turning point was deciding to become buskers, to play in the street, where you're forced to rethink what you do in more acoustic terms, and that's maybe where the singer-songwriter side comes out, or what abroad they call a “folksinger”.

Let's touch on the subject of the Italian language: your albums, some in English, this latest one in Italian, are they “planned” in a given language, or is the choice a natural one, almost as if it came from a chain of consequences?

Appino: I should say that I love Italian singer-songwriter music, and I've tried to mix it with other styles I liked, and still listen to. As far as I'm concerned, it was a spontaneous process.

Karim: I agree, there's nothing calculated or strategic about it; for now we've always allowed ourselves to do what we like without overthinking it.

Let's keep talking about Italy: over here, traditionally, we love to complain. A classic line is “music just isn't what it used to be”; how do things really stand?

Ufo: In Italy we have great things going on. We have bands doing excellent work in Italian, for instance Il Teatro degli Orrori. Personally, I'm convinced that in our country there's a tendency to glorify the 80s and 90s, without realizing that right now we actually have better things than back then.

Appino: The problem that remains in Italy isn't about quality, it's about opportunities: it's hard to reach abroad, to get beyond our borders. It's an issue that comes down to production.

Let's talk about your relationship with success: how much do things like magazine covers, interviews, or record sales affect you? Do you feel more responsible toward someone, or something?

Karim: Honestly, none of it changes anything for us. It pushes us to be ever more professional, to raise the bar, but that's something we've always been trying to do anyway, it doesn't depend on sales or on the media.

We don't want to speak for anyone, everyone can think with their own head, and there will never be a chance that Zen Circus decide a certain lyric should be changed for the sake of some sense of responsibility. We're on our seventh album now, thankfully, at this point it would be stupid to start taking special precautions or making weird calculations.

Ufo: Whatever anyone tells me, freedom of expression comes first for me. So I write exactly what I feel like, there's no such thing as bad role models, and we have absolutely no desire to speak on anyone else's behalf, or to be handed that kind of responsibility.

On the same topic, in Italy, as soon as an artist has some early success, people like to say they could become the “voice of a generation”: how do you deal with the idea that this could happen to you too?

Ufo: If this generation actually had a voice to bring out... honestly, let's be serious, that's a load of nonsense, catchy phrases that newspapers and magazines occasionally need to trot out to impress someone. It's just as ridiculous as the political label that can get slapped on you, which always comes from the need to find points of reference at a time when, in politics, none can be found.

Karim: Which is also understandable, there's very little cultural debate and people cling to whatever they can find, but it's still nonsense.

Ufo: And then, you see, nowadays anything that isn't friendly, accommodating, gets labeled as left-wing; as for us, like I said, we don't want to speak on anyone else's behalf, we're completely sympathetic to anyone who refuses to be anyone's spokesperson. Consider too that maybe, in other times, we would have been branded as fascists, just like it happened to Rino Gaetano.

Karim: To put it briefly, we're social, not political: we don't want to have ideologies pinned on us.

You open the song “Egoista” with the line “col disincanto ci marci un po'”: who were you thinking of when it was written?

Karim: Appino wrote that line, it refers to the figure of the egoist, in general terms, maybe even himself, in a way. It's a line that pushes back against the cynical, calculated disenchantment that we ourselves sometimes indulge in.

Ufo: That's exactly it, an “exercise in cynicism” that gets used as if it were meant to tone up the spirit, but in reality it's almost always out of place, it's stupid: when it starts being used to play the superman, that's the moment to stop, to change the game.

Karim: And it's also a fairly common game, that of the a priori "contrarians": it's a tactic used to upend things, to cause disruption.

Ufo: Exactly. Sgarbi, Feltri… I've no qualms saying it, these figures ought to be weeded out, they're the ones who've spent a lifetime cultivating studied, calculated attitudes with the sole purpose of destabilizing people.