Last Night A Mixtape Saved My Life

The history of musical genres and categories is very rarely linear. The story of pop is dotted with quirky terms coined in reference to specific phenomena, later extended to entire trends, and often eventually absorbed into the vocabulary of artists, audiences and critics with a meaning entirely different from the original one. Typically, the first steps of this winding path happen "live", alongside the musical events they describe. But there are also retroactive labels, and the case of "Zolo" is without doubt among the most peculiar. You could call it the genre — pardon, the non-genre — most bizarre in all of pop.

A first peculiarity is that the exact moment of birth is perfectly documented. On June 25, 1995, on college radio KPSU 1450 AM in Portland, Oregon, at five in the afternoon, the show "The Zany Zolo Muzik Hour" debuted under the guidance of host Terry Sharkie. For an hour every Thursday, it broadcast a mix of some of the most eccentric artists of the preceding twenty-five years: Sparks and Xtc, Todd Rundgren and Gentle Giant, the Residents and Devo, Tuxedomoon, They Might Be Giants, Lene Lovich and a vast array of other names, some lesser known, some more so. Nothing especially different, one might say, from the eclectic playlist of any music radio show aimed at devoted listeners — but what was surprising about the show wasn't its breadth: on the contrary, it was the strange coherence of its choices. Ranging across opposing styles and distinct musical eras, Terry Sharkie guided listeners through the discovery of an oblique yet recognizable territory, a long-running trend that, hidden in plain sight, ran through the fringes of countless scenes across previous decades, and even touched a few points sitting right at the center of the map.

The definition of the grouping, which Sharkie put into writing in 1997 on the webpage "Zolo Synthesis", identifies Zolo as an "assimilation of boingy guitars, wobbly keyboards, polka-dot percussion, hiccupping falsettos, jerky staccato beats, and lopsided rhythms". An "aural expression of the abstract, asymmetrical and multicolored imagination it accompanies, and which existed in scattered forms for many years before being codified under a name". As for the name, it apparently comes from a series of brightly colored construction toys put on the market in the Eighties (or so testifies the webmaster of the Zolophile page, who goes by the nickname Tyrant Tula), whose look is easily linked in spirit to the wacky aesthetic of "The Zany Zolo Muzik Hour".

Sharkie's show, which in later years would change its name to "Sforzando Cappricci Extravaganza" (sic, or so it seems), won over enough fans to avoid fading into oblivion, and even spawned further web and radio offshoots — among them the show "Newave Zolocoaster" for Austin, Texas college radio station KVRX, which aired between 1998 and 2002. No longer the domain of a single individual, the term Zolo is used by its followers to describe a hodgepodge of seventies and eighties sounds spanning everything from classic rock styles to freak-pop novelty songs, dazed-out progressive rock, camp-inflected rock posturing, right through to post-punk oddities that resist easy categorization: zigzagging new wave, dadaist and lopsided minimal synth, avant-prog, proto-industrial…

Once again it's Sharkie who sheds light on the connecting thread: "There are two prevailing methods in contemporary musical styles. At the center is the well-optimized approach that characterizes the totality of music aimed at mass acceptance [...]. Alongside this is a deconstructivist approach, which can encompass anything from improvisation to brutalism to ambient, passing through industrial, darkness, pranks, and every other form of music outside the norm. The missing link in today's musical world is an arty approach, one that works through elevation, decoration, and re-upholstering, as opposed to minimization and mutilation".

Serving as a further trait d'union between this galaxy of styles and its retrospective demiurge is a shared taste for eccentric, over-the-top looks — traceable both in the geometric makeup of New Zealand's Split Enz and in the exuberant hairstyles of B-52's, or in the clownish antics of Cardiacs. As Chad Allen, creator of "Newave Zolocoaster" and of the blog Zoloscope, recalls: "One day I went to the KPSU studios to meet Terry in person. He was wrapping up his show and was dressed in a casual form of Zolo attire: pointy shoes, cuffed jeans, and a loose t-shirt with a cutout neckline and cropped sleeves. His eyebrows were shaped into sharp spikes, and his haircut was sculpted, tall and abstract".

Terry Sharkie, aka Zaragon across his many web projects, has for some time now shifted his devotion to the Zolo cause into the background, focusing instead on building the remarkable online archive JazzRockSoul.com, a YouTube channel of musical commentary and listening sessions, and maintaining an impressive RateYourMusic profile. The torch of spreading the Zolo gospel has nonetheless been picked up by new disciples. Among them, Chad Allen's already-mentioned Oblong Boys are probably the first artists to have self-identified with this bizarre non-genre, but nowadays Bandcamp counts hundreds of releases tagged by the artists themselves under this style. For some years now, moreover, "Zolo" has been a tag on RateYourMusic, and numerous themed lists have appeared on the platform (the most comprehensive being those compiled by user mkrasna). One term from the rich and idiosyncratic vocabulary introduced by Terry Sharkie, "Zonk" ("Zolo + punk"), even went on to inspire a burger joint — which explains the origin and meaning of the expression on a dedicated page of its website.

Oddities aside (assuming that, being the very raison d'être of the whole movement, they could ever really be removed from the discussion), it's fair to say that today the niche of devotees is larger than ever, and the category has proven surprisingly useful in contextualizing musical experiences that have always been seen as borderline cases straddling multiple territories, often not even particularly adjacent ones.

The playlist alongside this piece attempts the impossible task of finding synthesis within such a centrifugal galaxy. Taking its cue chiefly from Sharkie's 1997 selection, and supplementing it with acts added by internet fans in the years since, it tries to offer a historical overview stretching from the depths of the Seventies right up to the present day. The absence from streaming services of key albums by Cardiacs, Fred Frith, Stump and others forced some significant omissions, and toward the end we've taken the liberty of including a number of artists whose "Zolo-ness" has yet to be confirmed by the community of fans — but who nonetheless seem emblematic of how the movement connects to trends of today as well.

The hope is that listening will lead to the discovery of new names (with Yellow Magic Orchestra and Curved Air, many listeners are probably already familiar, but does everyone know Family Fodder, Fibonaccis and Nimal?) or to a fresh perspective on names already well known to pop fans. It's likely that, until now, few would ever have dreamed of linking Stranglers and Godley & Creme, but among the many magic tricks this label pulls off, there's also that of behaving like one of those visual illusions that stay hidden right up until the moment — bang! — you see it, and suddenly can't help but notice it every time.

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20/12/2025