Zs played Studio Soto – 12/5
As previously reported, Brooklyn’s own Zs played a rare Boston show last Wednesday at Studio Soto with support from TAPS. Read on for review and photos.
It’s not often enough that I trek out to a venue that isn’t a good old fashioned rock club to see a show. Shame on me, because when I do the experience is invariably a good one. Case in point: a mesmerizing evening at a South Boston arts space last week. Studio Soto resides in the neighborhood of Fort Point, and was marked from the outside only by a a rather out of place floor lamp glowing pink on the sidewalk. The ominous clang of TAPS’ soundcheck was audible above the howling wind on the otherwise abandoned street. Mildly creepy, sure, but a little atmosphere never hurt anyone.
Inside the cement floor and glass-walled space, TAPS kicked off the show with a brief but outstanding set. The drums and electronics duo performed what was essentially one long, evolving composition. A spooky clattering of dropped microphones and sampled blips gradually built toward a Lynchian industrial pulse, climaxing in frantic start-stop blasts of furious percussion and noise manipulation. It was something like the post-rock, sampler-based answer to Lightning Bolt, and it was fantastic. A 20 minute performance afforded TAPS ample time to put on a genuinely arresting show.
Across the room lay the equipment setup for Zs: a saxophone, a guitar, a drum set, a bevy of effects pedals and a table adorned with a Macbook and a set of mysterious glowing circuitry. There might have been semblances of your standard rock band palette, but make no mistake, Zs are far from your standard rock band. The group currently consists of sax/drums/guitar trio Sam Hillmer, Patrick Higgins and Greg Fox, and their live show, much like the compilation they’re currently touring behind, is an exhilarating mind- and genre-bending experience.
Score – The Complete Sextet Works 2002-2007 covers every facet of Zs, from ghostly ambience to propulsive long-form jams. Though the songs and the lineup are quite different for the Zs of 2012, they’re still playing to both extremes of the grand musical spectrum. The set began with a textured noise piece, minimalist but painstaking in its construction. Hillmer, Higgins and Fox pored over their respective setups, carefully conjuring the most minute of sounds and subtly laying the groundwork for the more conventionally structured piece they were building to. Hillman eventually took up his sax, while Fox left behind his mad scientist’s table of circuit boards in favor of his drum kit, and the trio launched into the first of the set’s forceful, percussive almost-rock songs.
Higgins’ fuzzed-out harmonics and unconventional riffs battled with Hillmer’s effects-heavy saxophone blasts for the listener’s attention as the performance shifted from tranquil to frenetic. Fox’s drumming, alternately embodying driving krautrock simplicity and math-y syncopation, held it all together as the band converged into a unified, hypnotic groove. But lest anyone get too comfortable, even the repetitious passages were rife with constant subtle twists and turns before coming to a halt. Hillmer took a brief interlude to introduce the band, then started in on a second set of quiet abstractions evolving into noisy avant-jazz-rock bliss; a similar pattern taken to slightly different but equally satisfying places.
Within an hour it was all over and done with, but in that span Zs managed to cover more ground than a less ambitious band might approach over the course of its entire career. Their sound is unlike just about any other band out there today, and they played one of the most outright fascinating sets I’ve seen this year.
