Zu - Jazz-core transmutations

Let's start our chat from the origins: Zu formed at the end of the '90s as an offshoot of Gronge. Tell us about the genesis of the project…

Luca: Gosh! What a biblical way to start! With Gronge we're going back to the 80s…

Massimo: the future members of Zu, so the two of us and Jacopo (Battaglia, the longtime drummer, ed.), were friends even before Gronge.

Luca: In fact, Massimo and I played together in the early 90s in a project called Sinatra, then Massimo was called up by Gronge because they were short a bassist, and from there he stayed on as a permanent member. Massimo then brought in Jacopo for the drummer's role: I don't remember whether Gronge lost their drummer, or whether they decided to stop using a drum machine — anyway, internal band dynamics. Then they brought me in too. In that line-up it was the three of us plus Tiziana Lo Conte on vocals and Alberto Mattaroccia, who handled the samples and worked as the sound engineer.

As time went on, Tiziana decided to step away from the project because we were starting to make somewhat more elaborate music, spending most of our days inside the rehearsal room. What was coming out began to take on a rather "odd" turn, making it harder to sing over it in a way that fit a conventional song format, so Tiziana stepped aside and the three of us remained. From there we spent two years always in the rehearsal space, eight hours a day, every day, and only after two years did the name Zu come about. One day Massimo proposed the name, which means "closed," precisely because we were always shut away in the rehearsal room.

Was all this happening in Ostia?

Luca: No, in Rome, on Via degli Zingari, a room belonging to Gronge that was also shared with other bands of the time, a historic space within the Roman underground scene.

Gronge still exists, though...

Luca: Yes, I believe so, but we no longer have any kind of relationship with them.

At a certain point, the figure of Roy Paci appears...

Luca: Let's say Zu have always been a launchpad (laughs, ed.) for artists who in some cases went on to become much more famous than Zu themselves!

And made more money in the process...

Luca: Exactly!

Massimo: And not only that, some have even gone so far as to claim that they were the ones who founded Zu. We met Roy shortly before going into the studio, at one of the gatherings organized by Radio 3, meetings between improvisers, closely tied to jazz. They had called us in, they knew us, they'd labeled us "the terrorists." At that gathering we were split into small groups, and we ended up in a group with Roy, and we hit it off. It was the period just before "Bromio" (Zu's debut album, ed.), and we invited him into the studio to record with us. "Bromio" then came out almost a year later, and we started playing our first live shows, which he was also part of. Then it became fairly clear, and after all these years it can be said, that...

Luca: ...that there was an obvious incompatibility...

Massimo: ...let's say he had musical ambitions of a different kind from ours, different methods, a different ethic. We were very much about being "hard and pure," and we haven't changed all that much over time.

Luca: Our models were Fugazi and the Ex, they were the main pillars of our early days, and it's no coincidence that our first tour as Zu was actually with the Ex.

How did you come into contact with those bands?

Massimo: They were all groups we had dealings with because they'd passed through Forte Prenestino, where I used to live. We'd go to the shows, and those shows reflected our human and political attitude, in relation to what we intended to do with music. We spent over ten years, almost fifteen, doing everything do it yourself, during which we handled everything ourselves. Now we have a friend who helps us book dates, because we can no longer really keep up with everything, given the sheer amount of work involved. But back then those bands passed on to us an attitude about how to do things.

Speaking of attitude, Massimo, needless to say your way of playing bass is anything but ordinary. I'm curious to know which bassists you drew inspiration from at the start of your career, which ones helped shape your sound. You've already partly answered by mentioning Fugazi and Ex…

Massimo: Well, my sound was built up over years of listening to very different things, ranging from Arvo Part to Einsturzende Neubauten. I never tried to emulate anyone in particular.

More or less I could mention Charles Mingus for completely changing the perspective and function of the instrument, Arvo Part for the relationship between melody and harmony. Time Machines by Coil for the texture and layering of sound, Tracy Pew of the Birthday Party for narrative sense, Rob Wright of NoMeansNo for energy.

An international outlook

Massimo: As you said, it's an outlook. A lot of the music we grew up listening to came from other countries. Of course there are also some remarkable Italian things that we appreciate. Plus we never had the language issue, since we're instrumental. But for the most part our path is the result of our innate curiosity, our not really feeling any borders.

So would that be the recipe you unknowingly applied? Many hugely important Italian bands from the indie/alternative scene have had the ambition to break into the international circuit without ever managing it, despite major success at home…

Massimo: When we came out with our music we were pretty unique. On the first record you can still hear that we like certain things, you can spot some influences, they're clear, also because you have to start from somewhere.

But we processed those influences through a lot of study, a lot of work, we metabolized them, we made them our own, we brought them out in a personal way. One of the limits of many Italian bands, especially in the 90s scene, was that they stayed too derivative: I'm not saying they copied, but they always had very obvious, strong reference points.

Do you mean – for example – that Marlene Kuntz, at least in an early phase, were too Sonic Youth? Forgive the reference, but it's the classic textbook example. It's a fact, though, that some of our most beloved bands within our borders, like Afterhours or Verdena, simply don't exist abroad. Other niche acts, like Zu or Uzeda, instead manage to build a following that ends up being even bigger than the one they have at home…

Luca: I think in our case it was also a matter of sound, the result of having so thoroughly "devoured" a certain kind of music coming from the United States. Forte Prenestino was a hotbed for everything the best independent labels put out, everyone passed through there, and we went to see all of them, and we kept asking ourselves how they managed to get that huge, monumental sound, while Italian bands kept churning out a thin little "jingle" of a sound.

It's an aspect that a lot of bands back home never worked on. You'd listen to Sonic Youth, whose stage we also shared, and they had a sonic density that some people in Italy wanted to recreate, but it wasn't easy. That's exactly one of the things that pushed us to go abroad, to work on our sound, broadening it until it became what you can hear today. To create for ourselves the opportunity to work right away with bands that were struck by what we were doing, right from our very first shows. For instance, at one of our earliest live outings we opened for Half Japanese, and they immediately asked us to be part of a compilation. When they told us, we were over the moon, we hugged each other, as if we'd achieved a lifelong goal, and at that moment it really was an important goal, a very important one for us.

Massimo: Also because we never really had "goals". Actually, at the start we just wanted to make one record, in fact we spent two years writing it, it felt like we had to pour our whole lives into that record. We never had the kind of ambitions you see in so many other bands.

You know what usually happens? A band gets "big" – say – in Rome, and then goes to play in Padua and finds an audience of barely forty people, so they stop going, they stay in Rome, where their ego gets fed. Italian bands that toured around Italy with hefty fees and a crew in tow, when they tried to put together a European tour, would find themselves playing in Paris in front of 25 people, and didn't have the humility to say "We need to throw ourselves into it more, go further out, start getting our name around". So they'd rather give up, choosing a more comfortable, numerically satisfying situation, safe within familiar borders. For us, on the other hand, success was never really an ambition.

And you can tell as much just by listening to your records: never calculated, nothing radio-friendly, without any kind of compromise…

Massimo: Unfortunately not…

What we do see, though, is a coherent path…

Massimo: It's just that we've always conceived everything in a different way…

On the first Zu demo there were still some sung parts. Was there a particular reason that later pushed you to choose the instrumental path as your only means of expression?

Massimo: We chose this path because we discovered that we could say everything through sound. Because sound goes beyond words. While words are decoded by an area of the brain tied to the intellectual sphere, sound bypasses that. When sound "penetrates" you, it touches the deepest areas. On top of that, there was also the fact that we wanted to avoid creating hierarchies among the instruments.

Luca: For us, all the instruments carry equal weight. Sometimes there are solo passages: the sax might take the foreground, but other times you'll find the drums there, and at times the sax becomes the driving force while the drums take on a "lyrical" presence…

Massimo: …the drums have always "sung" a lot in our music, they've always been a very melodic instrument too.

Luca: Yes, Zu never had that approach where the drums are supposed to stay in the background and just keep time.

Massimo: There's also the fact that we play in a line…

…I imagine that's a choice that's both aesthetic and practical, to make it easier for the musicians to interact with each other on stage. Sometimes all it takes is a glance, right?

Massimo: Everything you do carries information: when you see three instruments lined up on stage, you immediately sense that they're on equal footing: each one holds the same level of importance.

Luca: On top of that, the choice was also made to help the sound hit all at once, as a single impact.

Among the turning points of your career is the release of "Igneo", one of the albums your fans are most attached to. For "Igneo" you brought in Steve Albini as producer. Is working with him really as singular an experience as so many people claim?

Massimo: We spent five days in the studio with Albini about fifteen years ago. I think if we never went back to him, there must be a reason…

But could working with him have been, in some way, a small boost at that stage of your career, partly because of his international credibility?

Massimo: We definitely weren't chasing his fame, or its reflected glow. We were trying to reach a sound that we probably still hadn't found. And unfortunately, to be completely honest, on “Igneo” we didn't manage to capture it. Neither we, nor him.

At the merch table I saw records from some of your side projects and from “friendly” bands, but from Zu only the “Jhator” CD and the “Jhator” and “Carboniferous” vinyls…

Massimo: All the albums up to “Carboniferous” have been out of print for a while now…

A real shame, because I'm sure you'd sell plenty of the “older” CDs. At the very least “Bromio” and “Igneo” deserve their fair share of space. Is a reissue campaign planned?

Massimo: It's not that simple. In theory it could be done, but it's always risky. Say we decided to press a reissue of one of our early albums, for, say, a thousand copies. We would sell them, but slowly, over time - those records could end up sitting at the merch table for years…

How many copies has “Carboniferous” sold so far?

Massimo: About ten thousand copies, a good result given the times.

Can you actually live off music, perhaps also thanks to your many side projects?

Massimo: Yes, partly thanks to a very frugal lifestyle. We've always lived this way, and today not much has changed.

Showing that it's possible to make a living from one's art is an encouraging message for the many young musicians setting out on their own path…

Massimo: If the examples that inspire you to start playing are things like Lo Stato Sociale, that's one thing, but the examples we had were different. And anyway, as far as I'm concerned, living off my art doesn't make me any cooler or a better person. The point is that doing things properly takes time. You can do it as a hobby, maybe while you're at university, but past a certain point there's no way to keep a project like ours going unless it becomes a full-time job.

Starting out is fine, but once you're up and running you can't rehearse after a day's work anymore - everything demands time. Take, for example, the writing of our latest album: it took six months. Not that we spent six months in the studio - we certainly didn't have the budget of “The Wall” - but even if we spent two days in the studio and then another two days three weeks later, during those three weeks we thought of nothing else. We'd be there listening back, taking notes, figuring out what to improve, how to fit parts together. And then there's always everything else that revolves around it to keep up with.

Everything is made even more complicated by the fact that the three members of Zu don't live on the same continent…

Massimo: I've been living for a few years now in a small village in Peru, after a spell in the Himalayas together with Luca. Tomas, the drummer, is Swedish, and as we mentioned earlier he's recently also joined the line-up of Motorpsycho, with whom he recorded their latest album, “The Tower”. We have to find strategic spots where we can meet up. We've rehearsed in Berlin, we've rehearsed in Italy, in Wales - technology can help you out these days, but it's still not that simple.

Over time you've built up an international network of people who admire you, host you and help you out by making their spaces available.

Massimo: Friends, a kind of extended family.

Parallel paths

Massimo: Constantly seeking out new expressive avenues keeps the enthusiasm alive, and for us that enthusiasm is still the same as it was at the start. For us there's no such thing as a small stage versus a big stage: it's great to play with musicians you like, who push you to challenge yourself again, who lead you to discover new musical paths. Resting on our laurels simply isn't an option for us.

And yet reviving Roman folklore, recovering popular tradition, would seem like a path very far removed from that of Zu...

Massimo: Actually it all started as a joke. Giampaolo, the singer, was driving the van during a European tour, and he brought a guitar along. Backstage he was always singing these songs, which we didn't know.

Luca: We used to play an Alvaro Amici record before shows, and that's where the idea of redoing those songs came from.

Massimo: Giampaolo has a beautiful voice, he's got that kind of mood, and we decided to record some tracks.

That experience paved the way for other projects that followed in its wake, take Mannarino, take Muro del Canto...

Luca: Mannarino borrowed heavily from Ardecore, but we're not interested in dwelling on that - still, we do notice what happens around us...

Having observed the situation from the inside, why is it that Roman folk - and Italian traditional music in general, I'd say - can't achieve the same international standing as, say, Irish or Balkan music?

Luca: In my view, it's a matter that stems from social factors. The Italian music that manages to be highly regarded abroad is mainstream music, take Laura Pausini. Popular tradition, on the other hand, the kind more tied to working-class or rural communities, has been left in a corner - when it does get revived, it's purely for commercial purposes, take for example what the "Notte della Taranta" in Puglia has become. That said, there are some interesting and noteworthy situations. For instance, Sardinian choral singing: consider that we've run into Tenores ensembles at festivals in Russia - they regularly appear at many international world-music festivals, like the ones held in Morocco.

So there are pockets that hold out...

Massimo: The Tenores tradition has stayed the same over the centuries, it's remained pure. If you listen to Irish music from the last century and then listen to traditional Irish music made today, you'll find it's not the same thing.

Luca: We used some recordings made by anthropologists on the EP "Goodnight Civilization"...

Massimo: …anthropologists who filmed women engaged in the so-called lamentations, in Puglia, at the start of the last century. Then you listen to the taranta, and you get a feeling of drift toward a form of pop. That's how folk tradition gets lost, and it all turns into one big Sanremo.

Luca: Everything gets a bit trivialized, and deliberately so. Sanremo was a watershed between what was the Italian singing tradition and what got imported from the United States. But there are recordings of Sicilian or Calabrian songs that are truly beautiful, great examples of Italian folklore.

One artist who works with this kind of approach, but remains little known, is Alfio Antico, who's good at blending tradition and contemporaneity: some things come off very well, others a bit less so, at least for my taste. Either way, he can be considered someone carrying the tradition forward while staying connected to the present. But what manages to stay truly close to tradition happens in Sardinia, perhaps because being an island it manages to stay purer. In Sardinia, a certain improvised poetry built on tercets and quatrains still survives, they even hold festivals for it. Elsewhere, improvised stornello tends to disappear, it doesn't exist anymore.

You've also made converts in the jazz-core field, just think of Fuzz Orchestra. Bands that followed in your wake but also actively helped widen the circle. Maybe partly thanks to some of them, Zu today can benefit from a more "expanded" scene, one that perhaps also draws more attention. Do you feel, in some ways, like the fathers of this movement?

Luca: What you're describing, I started hearing around 2004-2005, a moment when there was a particular buzz, shows were always packed, there was a hunger to search for something in music, to make it into something different from ordinary listening. There was a moment of openness. We saw derivative acts, bands that openly modeled themselves on our path. At certain points we may have even smiled about it. But that doesn't mean you go around feeling like the founding father of some movement or other. A few days ago a promoter told me we should feel important. But that's not the point. We do things, and whatever we make we let go, without strutting around like a peacock. In other worlds, that feeling of being the father of something or other is probably felt more strongly.

You've collaborated with musicians who manage to move between the underground world and one that aspires to the mainstream — Massimo is finishing up a project with Stefano Pilia, someone who manages to combine Afterhours, Massimo Volume and In Zaire with a whole host of projects, some of them quite experimental…

Massimo: When I'm in Italy I'm based in Bologna, where Stefano lives, in a house with a few musician friends who own a former barn turned into a recording studio. That's where we recorded Cortar Todo by Zu and did the first takes of Jhator. With Stefano we found ourselves playing together, we listened to a lot of music together, we recorded the songs for our project with two guitars, it'll be called after our two names, it's coming out soon, we're finalizing the artwork details.

Is it true that the project with Eugene Robinson was born as a soundtrack for a horror film, which the production rejected because it was too sinister?

Luca: It might have scared the families (laughs, ed.), but three years ago an album with Eugene came out of that.

Robinson later did a project with Pierpaolo Capovilla, you did a split with Teatro degli Orrori a few years before that, there's something cyclical that keeps coming back…

Massimo: They're trajectories. Giulio Favero, the bassist of Teatro degli Orrori, was our sound engineer for four years, so we heard their first demos, which Giulio used to bring us on tour…

Jhator

Let's get to the new album, which marks a strong discontinuity with the past, even though the seeds of change were already present in earlier works. An album that's ascetic in many ways. Could it have been influenced by your recent experiences, by your time spent in the Himalayas and Peru? How did you arrive at a work so far removed from early Zu?

The future?