Zu & Nobukazu Takemura

The Sala Vanni is one of those wonderful little venues that need to be defended tooth and nail. It's a small concert room carved out of one of the many rooms adjoining the Chiesa del Carmine. Few shows, but always top quality. And tonight the standard stays sky-high: on the bill are Zu and Nobukazu Takemura. Italy's most international band (in sound as much as in collaborations) meets one of the great masters of glitch and of all electronic music at the turn of the two millennia.

Opening the night is Takemura solo. His choice to sit in a way that lets him keep an eye on Zu at all times turns out to be a smart one. In practice, his position on stage is to our right, almost with his back to us. This lets the audience see the screens of his two laptops, a Hewlett Packard and another unidentified one, which only reinforces the impression that the era of Macintosh supremacy is truly coming to an end. On the Japanese artist's screens, the interface is curious to say the least. White dominates, with lots of small rectangular and square sections, often coloured, and little else. Without being experts on the subject, one can guess it's custom-built software.

Over the years Takemura's sound has grown ever more glitch, ever more fragmented. Now, in this intro of pure, unadulterated electronics, it's even more noticeable. He wanders through tiny fragments of Kraftwerk and distant microwaves, but with your eyes closed, at certain points, you could almost say he's taking apart Star Wars' C1P8 droid.

After a few minutes Takemura picks up a guitar and the three members of Zu take the stage, almost immediately conjuring up a powerful sonic maelstrom. Bass played with a screwdriver, sometimes the handle and sometimes the tip, frenzied drumming with thunderous snare hits. Luca Mai, the saxophonist, watches for a while, then dives into the vortex.

The volume is deafening, there's no escape, but the music has the irresistible allure of chaos, the kind you can't look away from and that inevitably ends up sweeping you along. A single track lasting about an hour, a sonic apocalypse that's now dense, now ethereal, especially toward the end, when the atmospheres turn more cerebral and rarefied, the phrasing grows shorter, and even Takemura works more on background radiation than on noise. Just before that, though, you could almost catch the scent of the old "No New York", in Zu's rhythmic inventions and sax lashes, to which Takemura had always known how to add, as needed, either his noisier streak or his more melodic one. Some call it jazzcore, but tonight it's something else too, a dimension all its own.

The encore, a fifteen-to-twenty-minute track, decreases in power while growing in inventiveness. Massimo Pupillo, a truly commanding stage presence, comes in stimulating the strings of his bass by striking the palm of his right hand against two metal bars wedged between the strings and the body, then it's the screwdriver again. The finale sees Zu busy glitching with their instruments, creating tiny shards of sound that blend perfectly with those coming from Takemura's machines. Distances dissolve, the differences between instruments vanish, between brass and silicon, between drum and string. In the end, everything is one.

We'll close with a note that feels almost obligatory tonight. With this performance, once again, Zu confirm not only the beauty of their music but also a remarkable musical intelligence and culture. It's these qualities that allow them not just to collaborate with the most disparate acts, but to enhance them and be enhanced by them in turn. If only there were more artists like them.

The quartet will soon release an album: you've been warned.

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