Zu
Live @ Ortosonico - Giussago (PV) 09.05.07

THE REVIEW

Truly a great venue, the Ortosonico in Giussago.

One of those places where you immediately feel good, like when you find yourself in your grandmother's old kitchen, where you're lulled by the traditions of country life and the familiar faces around you. A physical detachment from the frenzy, in an isolated farmhouse, where the concert hall is like a sort of good parlor for meetings, vaguely retro, where you sit comfortably to watch the concert on poufs under a beautiful coffered ceiling. The place, the environment, and the deliberately dim light, give Ortosonico an ancient charm and the feel of an intellectual circle, and everything around you, accompanied by a beer with two friends, helps to turn an ordinary evening into something special. Therefore, all the surrounding conditions are in place to freely let yourself be carried away by the listening of this "fast & furious instrumental jazz from Italy", as the poster says.

An assault. Zu overwhelms you, the audience is silent, absorbed, attentive, and incredulous at such technical prowess and power. The machine is devastating, with a smooth engine, where all the gaps are covered by the precise drumming of Jacopo Battaglia. A math rock (?) always controlled, in which the schizophrenia of the sax is the detonator for breaking down the boundaries of genres, where jazz core meets metal. Zu is Italy's answer to Mike Patton's Fantomas or even John Zorn, where the improbable becomes reality in a rhythmic melting pot that transforms some faces in the audience into perfectly incredulous idiots. The beauty is that from all this you derive the message you want, as the language is not supported by the univocal semantics that would be expected in the "song" form.

You get the impression that for realities like these, the CD is a limiting medium, because it does not allow you to fully capture the visual experience, which is largely dominant and allows you to appreciate the study and technical prowess expressed, but also the physicality or theatricality of the gestures, even if everything seems apparently improvised. We are simply facing an avant-garde form akin to Cage or Varese, what is defined on Wikipedia as "zuism", or the philosophy of post-everything, or if we want to see it from a different perspective, a precursor to everything.