Part 1

“I like those notes Adrian. Sounds more unresolved…" 

DAY 1

 

It’s early December in Preston—a Tuesday wrapped in sticky, pre-holiday sun. The nearby Workers Deli Cafe—despite claiming the provision of both "wholesome lunches” and “gourmet food"— remains completely unburdened by customers.  An equally unsettling quiet has swallowed the rest of the street. The neighbouring KLG and Jodon Motors seem inert, not perceptibly engaged in either the "new car servicing” or the “all mechanical repairs” they so enthusiastically claim to offer. Driverless trucks are eerily beached in the horseshoe driveways of sheet metal fabricators and fleet management services. Weathered concrete husks with names like ‘Actrol Parts’ and 'GSA Industries’ sleep by the roadside, mastering invisibility and absorbing noonday sun. And buried inside this ghostly assumption is a small brick doorway. This is Headgap Recording Studio, where No Zu’s second album is unfolding like an instantly mutating organism, consuming the surrounding mood and converting it into fuel.

 

Staring into the wall of tinted glass in front of him, Nic Oogjes hovers over the talk button, mixing console spread beneath his fingers like a gigantic grey wing. A three note bass phrase rasps over a thudding kick drum—thickened by the sub-bass from a vintage Yamaha synth, percussion scattered wild and high in the mix. It feels alive, almost carnivorous. It’s music that has endured the loose-fitting label of 'Groove-Based’ dance music for the last four years, but during construction has the complexity of it’s scaffolding exposed. What is being conjured today is closer to an ebbing mass of sound, twisting lithely just within it’s creators’ grasp.

 

MITCH: “What bit?”

NIC: “Where you go 'da-da-da-da-dah’…with the cowbell.”

Even while watching him work its hard to imagine exactly how Nic Oogjes understands rhythm. As I watch him shuffle behind a small moat of keyboards, vocal effects units and samplers in the control room, I start to suspect that his understanding is somehow visual. From the world external to his skull, it looks like he’s telegraphing changes in the song based on landmarks that noone else can see. As Andrew Noble and Mitch McGregor’s drums and percussion thrum through the control room monitors, Nic raises fingers and bows his head— like a signal operator channeling the flow of junctioning trains. 

“1,2,3,4”

“change”

“next groove”

“keep going”

“now Andrew by himself”

It’s also an understanding of rhythm borne of practice. The cumulative, mushrooming structure of No Zu’s songs are clearly prefigured for the live environment, something that becomes clear in the tracking of the percussion. Percussionist Mitch sways and lurches, exacting a manic, tendon-rending savagery over skin, wood and metal. The one time I slink into the studio during a percussion take I remove my shoes carefully, not wanting my footfalls to be picked up by the room mic, positioned like a small gold nerve towards the back of the studio. 

MITCH: “Do you want headphones?”

ME: “Nah I should be okay, I’m pretty deaf..”

MITCH: “You sure?”

ME: “Yeah it’s sweet…”

The noise from the cowbell sounds sort of like a wildly sparking industrial welder, heavily amplified. I retreat after the take. Back inside the control room, Nic, mixer Nao Anzai and I watch as Andrew and Mitch scar patterns over the surface of their instruments. 

“Are the songs different every time?” I ask Nic, looking through to the studio.

“No, we rehearsed the grooves…” he assures me, “but it’s definitely merging into it’s own thing…” The tape purrs softly on its reels between takes. Nao Anzai, lowering his head towards the mic on the desk, murmurs: “Ready? Rolling”, and scratches into an A4 notebook before raising his eyes to the action pulsing from behind the tinted glass.  

 

Part 2

 

I mostly remember the last time I saw No Zu live. It was at 8pm in late November last year—when fragments of a Sunday afternoon crowd had finally knitted together and drunk through their hangovers. It was when Melbourne Music Week’s festival hub started turning into a lidded ball of steam. I remember the bodies thickening at the front rail, the familiar weight of an unbroken storm. It felt like people might be ready to move, but hadn’t quite gotten caught up in the mood; hadn’t lost enough of themselves. I remember No Zu drifting onto the stage. They looked like kids you might find sitting on milk crates at the back of the Greensborough Coles, listening to Albert Ayler on a Sony Mega-Bass boombox while power browsing Susan Sontag and coming up on liquid acid—kids I’d never seen. I remember their fury of limbs, multifariously meshed, leathered, ponchoed and singleted—an invitation extended to somewhere more truly ‘other’ than the considered otherness of the gigantic geodesic dome overhead. An invitation to somewhere more exotic than the stage dressing’s fern and wood pastiche would allow. I remember something cosmic leaking out of the beat, something in the music’s pulse that hummed like a magnet, bending bodies instantly in its wake. I remember all of this from the end of a long chain of the festival hub’s $10 pints— but nonetheless, I remember being utterly mesmerised.

 

DAY 2


 

In the jaundice of late Wednesday afternoon, the words 'Achievement’ and 'Excellence’ shine like rows of distant white teeth through Thornbury High School’s chain link fence. CYC Poultry’s lemon walls and red flag emblazoned with the words 'Meat Sale’ are drawing a similar crowd to the scratched, white brick workshop of Australian Metal Polishing—Noone. Only Darabin Budget Timber and Hardware seems remotely active, with their roller doors mostly open to the bronzing afternoon. 

 

But inside Headgap, things have changed since yesterday. I slide into a studio filled with a triumphant salvo of horn flourishes. 

ME: Wow, it sounds different…“

NIC: Yeah it’s changed quite a bit even from yesterday”

No Zu are adding “lots of trumpet tracks” to a new jam called 'Zeus Zam’. Adam, the trumpeter in question, strolls into the control room. Kane, the second horn player has spent the day emptying his lungs into a baritone sax. He’s now thoughtfully reposed, dragging a hand through his thicket of explosive curls. All overdubs are done on the fly. Adam takes a chair and finds the right voicing for any drop-ins Nic and Kane suggest. Adam re-enters the studio. The mix piping through the monitors is a different beast from the day before. A paper thin synth scythes through the song. The layers of brass are still being recorded and changed, high in the mix, rounding the mesmeric edge off. Eventually Adam reemerges. 

ADAM: I think it sounds pretty legit

NIC:     It sounds badass

ADAM: Badass is good

 

Mitch drops onto the couch beside me, throwing his wallet his 'Bad Motherfucker’ wallet onto the side table.

ME:       Are your arms fucked?

MITCH: Yesterday was worse

(Mitch turns his palms up and examines them)

MITCH: Congas. 

After listening back to some of the percussion tracks from the day before a grin spreads across his face. “Sounds like I’m playing ping pong in your fucking head…it’s got a little bit of 'Walk This Way’ about it…”

 

Just as the jams No Zu are knitting together are threaded with impulse and the unknown, the nature and time frame of the record remains a mystery. After a ponderous pause Nic nods. “It’s not for home listeners, more for the club”. A 12 inch dance record—or even a series—are floated as possible formats for the songs currently being tracked, but Nic’s not entirely sure on what he’ll do with the record. What he is certain of though, is how it will sound. Nao is recording No Zu hot to tape, in essence doing what he claims “the books say not to do”. The warm, analogue compression of their sound, their new, housier grooves, the sub bass triggers with the kick drum, lyrics like: “feel the conga beat” and “dance with it” and multiple references to Miami Sound Machine all conspire to convince me that Nic knows exactly what he wants from this record—despite what format it happens to end up in. Their new jams carve off a slice of abstracted 90’s house, smearing it over the bones of their 'Fela-Kuti-On-Barrel-Loads-of-Hallucinagenics’ type sound.  

The longer I lurk in the studio, the more it becomes clear that No Zu’s sound isn’t simply a staggering soundscape, but a dense web of elements, carefully coaxed towards its intended meridian. This becomes abundantly clear when they started talking about the “failed” Melbourne Music Week set intro. The word 'disaster’ is used, certainly not the word I was feeling at the time. But nonetheless, Nic’s attention detail provokes him to recall the beginning of their set, shaking his head and trailing: “I’m not sure if you were there but…” There’s something very particular about No Zu, and it’s a particularity obfuscated by the sweat drenched live show, by the manifold, outlandish characters within the band and by the trance-inducing nature of their music.

 

While I’m attempting (mostly unsuccessfully) to locate the genesis of No Zu’s sound, Andrew Noble is frowning on the couch, headphones on, bent over a small recording device, searching for a “lost Zu jam”. He finds:

- “a little funk jam”

- something called “Eurozone”

- A jam that “sound[ed] like Kraftwerk”

- “some weird, crazy shit”

But eventually Andrew’s search is abandoned and we both find what we are looking for. Nao stares at the screen in front of him, worried about how much tape is left. 

“It’s short” Nic assures him, “2 minutes.” He turns to me, smiling. “This groove’s stolen straight from Gloria Estefan. 'Conga’, you know that song?” Finally the new sound of No Zu feels closer at hand—in terms of taking the temperature of their sound, 1990’s Estefan is a useful touchstone. I’m still thinking about it hours later as I’m leaving and the band have pulled themselves around the studio’s kitchen table with familial comity. No Zu have augmented their organic rhythms with more synthesised beats, have become less drenched in myopia and more euphoric, adding more precise and considered horns lines to their rolling rhythms. It’s still rich with noise, seething with impulse and squalling with abandon, but they’re definitely in the midst of sculpting something more particular than the glorious sprawl of their debut album 'Life’. In the stagnant heart of industrial Preston, No Zu are making a dance record. 

 

For Cool Accidents