Zu hail from a musical catechism of free Jazz and Metal and have found themselves in a constant state of experiment and collaboration. And when I say constant, I mean constant. For the last ten years they’ve practically never stopped touring with over 1000 shows under their belts and fifteen albums. Their latest, Carboniferous is a heavier affair than their previous assaults and they’re releasing on Mike Patton’s label Ipecac for the first time after touring extensively with Patton’s band Melvins. The album Igneo was enginereed by Steve Albini and collaborations have included Nobukazu Takemura, Damo Suzuki, Eugene Chadbourne, Mats Gustafsson, Joe Lally of Fugazi, Altered States , Steve MacKay of The Stooges and many, many more.
But today Zu are hungry for food and I find myself leading them forth to good Japanese fare. Whilst picking our way through Okonomoyaki and Gyoza we talk of all things Zu…
Massimo Pupillo
BCR: So the first thing I want to talk about is Carboniferous, the new album – it seems a lot harder than your other albums – although I don’t have all fifteen…
Massimo Pupillo: We don’t have as well
BCR: So was it conscious that you wanted it to be more metal?
Massimo Pupillo: No, it just came like that. For us it’s always the same thing – we become conscious later.
Jacopo Battaglia: We become conscious a few months after the record is released. We never sit down in our life and tell ok, now we’re gonna be more metallish than before.
BCR: So it wasn’t Mike Patton’s influence?
Massimo Pupillo: I think the music was the same even if we were on another label.
Jacopo Battaglia: There are bands that start more aggressive or more harder and then they mellow. And for us it was the opposite.
Massimo Pupillo: I wouldn’t say that we were mellow before. But it’s also due to the recording. Live this band has always been a hard experience but the people were like “oh, no you don’t sound like the record, it’s shocking, you should record what you do live” but we were not able to do it. In the studio we never could catch the sound of what we do live. Now finally the sound of the record is similar.
BCR: I wonder how you go about recording – a lot of it sounds like a “live” studio recording – do you do a lot of overdub or is it a live jam?
Jacopo Battaglia: This is the first time we had this attitude of spending more time in the studio, adding layers – usually the records before were recorded in three days, one take for each song and that was it. Now we took about a month and then about five days to mix it, trying different sounds. Most of the time we spent trying to find the right sound for each song.
BCR: Is that why the record is so dense? The whole thing feels a lot more dense, a lot more solid.
Massimo Pupillo: Yeah, yeah it’s because of the composition and the recording. Like when we started recording, the sound person who worked with us said “if you make a movie and you want to make a horse pass by and you record a real horse it’s going to sound like another thing. But if you want to do something in the movies that sounds like a horse, you take two coconuts”. That was to push us to overdub and experiment with layers of sound. Actually doing it this way, a more artificial way makes it sound more like the live thing.
Jacopo Battaglia
Jacopo Battaglia: It was supposed to be called Coconuts And Horses but we changed it to Carboniferous…
BCR: A lot of the albums I’ve heard tend to have something of a narration or a focus and the first track on Carboniferous is called Ostia – the name of your home town – with the rest being rocks and geology. Is this a story?
Massimo Pupillo: Yeah that’s exactly the idea, the only thing is that it’s not rocks, it’s fossils – our own personal fossils. Personal life fossils. Musical fossils. Going back to when you started listening to music.
BCR: Is that why you named the first song after your home town?
Massimo Pupillo: [Massimo gestures to a friend sitting with us at the table – BCR never gets his name] He’s partly responsible for naming it Ostia. In Ostia our friends that live in a squat where he lives, they do a lot of illegal rave parties where we used to go. When this song came it was like an homage to them so we call it our home town.
BCR: Is that scene still going on? I know you’ve said before that it’s not punk rock anymore, it’s just techno…
Jacopo Battaglia: Now it’s more a culture of revival. Most of these British bands that nobody follows anymore, they come and do it in Italy because they will have an audience. It’s all about revival, also all the techno, Detroit style – it’s like cycles. Metal in Italy – maybe all over the world is coming back – but in Italy there’s a taste for making revivals. Bands that don’t exist anymore are reforming.
BCR: At least if they’re looking at Metal over there again – I know it took a long time for you to get recognition in your own country – how is it for you there now?
Massimo Pupillo: It took a really long time. We had more audience in Tokyo than we had in Roma. There’s always this thing of looking outside, from England or US. We did the whole round and came back. It’s good.
BCR: 1000 shows later…
Massimo Pupillo: Yeah, something like that, hah.
BCR: It’s so impressive that you guys kept up this schedule. Not only doing a record a year, three in 2005, two in 2006 and then touring 120 shows a year – that’s fucking insane.
Jacopo Battaglia: We know.
Massimo Pupillo: Don’t tell our families. Look at us!
BCR: You’re all really about 23 aren’t you?
Jacopo Battaglia: Ha, yeah – I’m 12.
