You Too Can Zu

Zu
Album: Carboniferous
Song: Carbon

Mathrock rhythmic complexity?  Check.  Wacked out free jazz baritone saxophone?  Check.  Kickass heavy metal bass?  Check and mate.

Zu rocks the house and then some.  An Italian trio, they've gained international celebrity in certain subterranean quarters of the musical world.  They've joined forces with bands as disparate as Fatomas and The Melvins, and have recorded and toured with Mike Patton of Faith No More fame.  Today's track is a live recording with Patton, but please take the opportunity to listen to the song on their solo studio album, which is at least three times cooler.

As an aside, let's take a close listen to the elephant in the Bose speaker.  What is music anyway?  How do we define it?  All of us recognize Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as music, but some of us would argue that John Cage's 4'33" is merely conceptual and not at all musical.  Similarly, while we all consider The Beatles' "Let It Be" music, some of us might listen to Zu or Lightning Bolt or Art Zoyd or any number of like-minded bands and hear nothing but noise.

When I was in grad school and conducting seminars for first years, my introductory class consisted of an exercise in both listening and in broadening musical horizons.  I played an example of the classical canon -- Mozart or Schubert or Bach -- and asked the students to identify the uniquely musical elements of the composition; invariably they would arrive at a list including melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, timbre, form, and an emotive / aesthetic component.  I then played compositions which were identifiably musical but which did not conform to our original definition.  Gregorian chant, for example, which lacks an harmonic dimension.  Or Scelsi's Quattro Pezzi Per Orchestra, each movement of which is based on a single note and which therefore lacks a melodic dimension, or at least a melody in any traditional sense of the word.  As a group we then narrowed our definition of music -- and by extension expanded the possibilities of what might rightly be described as music -- to texture, timbre, form and aesthetics.  It's important to note that this definition is based not on the way sounds are manipulated, but rather on the inherent qualities of the sound itself and our emotional response to it.  And we therefore had provided ourselves with the tools to analyse modern composition: the skill with which the composer configured and reconfigured texture, timbre, form, and aesthetics.

Cage's 4'33" was my litmus test for the ability of my students to expand their musical horizons.  When they came to a group understanding that the composition is not in fact a meditation on silence but rather a deep insistence to listen, to become aware of the music inherent in our surroundings, when they had the epiphany that 4'33" conformed in all ways to our mutually agreed upon definition of music, I ended the lesson.

So, is Art Zoyd music?  Damn straight.  Is Zu music?  Yup.  Is Lightning Bolt music?  Or course it is.  You may not like it.  You may despise it.  You may have to resist the urge to jab steak knives into your ears.  But it is, without any doubt, music.  And that, my friends, is the final word.