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Rating: Perennial foggy nights in the Po Valley: I take the 3 PM train headed to Bologna, immersed in a spectral atmosphere, a damp cold that penetrates your bones and shrinks them into themselves, reducing them to an amorphous yet still alive mass... from the train car window, I see only a few trees silhouetted against the sky, the bare lungs of the Earth, while the countryside cottages appear as monuments of a time gone by.
The ZU, that’s the reason for my departure from my hometown, and another name, the DALEK, accompany them on this date, the first of two in Italy, which sees them literally sharing the same stage: Zu, in fact, are playing some sparse dates here and there, while Dalek are getting ready to head back to the States to resume playing concerts with the most unbalanced and heavy bands on the planet (like them, by the way).
Well... without starting a self-pleasuring cycle of futile bullshit, which I often tend to predict, let's move directly to the concert part: we enter at 10:30 PM, and our ears are already delighted by a Dub&Bass set by a certain Dj Okapi (friend of Zu).... literally stimulating for someone like me who loves the disconnection of sounds mixed with the beat, and I believe generally appreciated by the waiting crowd. We shuffle from one side of the venue to the other (which doesn’t particularly thrill me unless there's a concert...), approaching the little stand, with Oktopus from Dälek in great shape... I ask him how things are going in the realm of Ipecac and he tells me the stuff in the works is truly delirious, as typical of Pattone’s label... I buy a couple of pins, being the only affordable item (damn... a 7"=10 EUROS!!!!), I have all the Dalek CDs and I’m broke today, so I convince Paolo, who accompanied me, to buy the new Zu album (The Way of the Animal Powers), and we have a couple of laughs seeing the splendid new Zu shirt: strange design (I don’t remember) with fantastic text, which says "Tom Araya is our Elvis," which is nothing but the first track of the new CD... yiiiiHH!!
I run into some acquaintances and in the middle of conversations, the Zu are greeted by the decent-sized audience that has gathered... they start with a veeeery Doooommmetttone piece, Massimo's bass more earth-shattering than ever, and I’m already hyped, then they proceed with the most notable tracks from their discography (no point naming titles, I don’t know them, but I know them by heart anyway, as this is my fifth Zu concert), with the usual exhausting outbursts from Jacopo Battaglia, both vocal but especially inflicted on the skins (he always seems like a mad-hysterical manic... mah!), and the indomitable and piercing howls of saxophonist Luca Mai. Massimo’s amp hisses and gets nastier and nastier, vomiting extreme pulses and grinding impossible rhythms alongside the straightjacket-deserving drummer they have... it’s always a genuine pleasure to see them live and my ecstatic grimaces alternating with sudden head jolts are plentiful. Forty-five minutes of punk-turbo-speedy-jazz-freak-noise-abbestia-core oppression culminate with a wall of ambient reigning for another good ten minutes, proving that our guys, in terms of various experiments, aren’t second to anyone. Great!
I barely have time to bandage my auditory walls, and Dälek and Oktopus take the stage, starting their parade of old school hip-hop mixed with the darkest, most powerful foundations, continually disturbed by violent and obsessive noise. At times I don't even notice the beat, lost as I am in the sonic mix scarred by Oktopus's lightning-fast moves, fending between 2 iBooks, a mixer, and a series of pods from which pour out dilated nightmares mixed with genuine fists in tha face; the old Dalek doesn’t miss a rhyme and scrutinizes the crowd with the gaze of a vengeful one-eyed man... sometimes approaching his “dJ” to approve with a satisfied look and crossed arms the granite weight of his mixes. I always get excited with Dalek (3rd time I see them): they are one of the few Hip/Hop groups I truly respect for not acting cocky (so, screw gold chains and Jay-Z-style swagger, like “when I feel the need for a blowjob, immediately I have my cock sucked by one of my 600 black b****es telling me how big and cool I am”), still work as independents (under Ipecac), have broad and original artistic views, have supported legendary acts like Fennesz, ISIS, Damo Suzuki (Can), Melvins, Mike Patton, and a thousand others more or less known, but always outside the major circuits, and finally, because live they really put on a FREAKING AMAZING SHOW!!!
And as if that weren’t enough, the whole thing blends into a Megaband formed by the 2 aforementioned rappers + the 3 ZU + also dj Okapi, creating, for another half an hour, an improvisation (I believe...) where everyone gives their best in terms of brain melting (ours, in particular...), hitting us with a dose of metagenres that summarize 30 years of extreme music in a no small measure, and absolutely disintegrating for our already tested brain matter: avant-beat-ultra-lysergic-prog-jazz??? hyper-violent-scazzo-grind-dub-mafffia??? Doomy-bastard-hip-hop-chaotic-drone-nightmare???! BOHHHHHH... you decide, I can’t define anything, except the sensation felt once out of there: SATISFACTION!
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