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TZU

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Which – of course – brings us to 21st Century Melbourne, Australia and the forward-thinking, genre-defying hip hop band who bears his name, TZU. Back from a somewhat lengthy hiatus after the release of their terrific third LP Computer Love in 2008, they’ve returned at last with their new album, the mind-bending and epic concept album Millions Of Moments.

Sitting in the Mushroom Music offices with MCs Joel Ma (AKA “Joelistics”) and Phillip Norman (AKA “Seed MC” or “Countbounce”), our conversation is a fluid and strange thing that moves from one topic, say, Alan Moore graphic novels, to the effects of bath-salts, and how it may have caused some lunatic in Miami, Florida to chew off 70 per cent of a homeless man’s face before being killed in a hail of cops’ bullets.

According to Ma, the reason for getting back together stemmed from a pretty simple need – the need to make music. He’d been traveling quite a bit; living in China, roaming through Mongolia and spending some time in Paris and Berlin, whereas Norman had been up in Darwin, “smelling the roses and making babies”.

“Making music, that’s the bottom line,” Ma explains matter-of-factly. “And we came back. We didn’t really know what the nature of TZU was going to be, but we decided to [try and] make some music. The first sessions we had were very much without an outcome in mind; the idea was just to come together and play! And although this album is really different to those first sessions, it was the feeling in that session that, ‘Ah, this is cool, we can still make music together and we can be creative’. Then it was, ‘Let’s do an album’.”

Norman nods his head and concurs vigorously. “That’s what makes us tick,” he adds. “But seriously, if coming together and jamming and making music didn’t feel good, we wouldn’t have made another album. But those initial sessions were really fun, and it made it worth pursuing!”

TZU has always been a band that doesn’t do what it says on the tin – because more often than not, that tin read, “hip hop”. And TZU, while engaging in music that embraces hip hop sensibilities, are so much more than that. Take their new record, Millions Of Moments, for instance. It’s an utterly crazy and demented concept album, a bit like collecting the works of science fiction masters Neil Stephenson, Iain M. Banks and William Gibson and then hurling them into a Cuisinart, blending those themes of alternate realities, out-of-body experiences and perceived consciousness with a steadily pulsing soundtrack of new wave, synth-pop, trance, driving metal and – yes – hip hop. It’s an exceptional piece of work, that breaches the boundaries of what “hip hop” really means.

Essentially, the album takes place in the indeterminate future, where the protagonist, a young woman by the name of Persephone, test-trials a consciousness-altering drug called Chronos, which propels her through the time-space continuum into the minds and bodies of an odd assortment of folk. For instance: a ghost in a pub, the last man on Earth, an 18th Century stalker with an obsession for opera and an escaped cannibal convict in Tasmania. You get the picture. It’s weird, and it’s fun, and it’s completely mental. When I ask where the idea for the drug Chronos came from, Ma tells me it came from his travels in Asia. “I was constantly in front of screens,” he tells me. “Laptops and phones and being outside the environment I was in. Like being in Mongolia on a train and still being in front of my laptop! Chronos became this idea of being addicted to experiences that aren’t yours – the idea of Chronos is that you’re inside the consciousness of someone else in a different time period, so you’re not actually an active participant of that person’s experience … you’re just a passenger to what’s happening to them.”

A bit like Being John Malkovich, then?

“Exactly!” Ma exclaims. “Watching things happen, and understanding the conscious – the way their minds are working and as to why they’re making those decisions; and that gave us liberty to write [Millions Of Moments] in the first-person … it was really fun to get into those minds and to write in that [first-person] perspective.

“So how do you do that, with a thought-pattern or some sort of narrative for the whole record; that was the whole idea. But Chronos is administered through the eye – it’s a drug, but not a drug. It’s taken like a drug, but isn’t it also just acting on the brain patterns that are already there? Is it ambient consciousness or is it … I’ll let you figure out all that stuff!” he finishes with a laugh.

When I tell the lads that their new album reminds me of the darker synth-wave tracks from the mid- to late-‘80s, they’re very pleased, and explain to me that they’re intensely willing to explore any new territories they may come across in their music. Norman laughs when he tells me that TZU don’t even have discussions about what genre they are.

“It wasn’t that we didn’t want to make a hip hop record,” he explains, “as much as it was that we just followed our noses into the sound of the record. It wasn’t like trying to alienate ourselves from our past or anything like that – it was simply…” he pauses for a moment, trying to find the right word. “I reckon the reason this album particularly is very un-hip hop, at the heart of it,” he continues, “is that there’s always been this side of the band where we get together and do all the out-takes from our old albums in these slow, sort of instrumental jams. And in every album, there’s probably three or four slow, psychedelic songs that never got released; unfinished, quite electronic and a bit nerdy!

“When we came together for those first few weeks [of recording], that was the side that – you know, if there wasn’t going to be any outcome from this, let’s do what we’ve always wanted to do. ‘Set up at your station with your synths and your samplers and let’s jam!’

“That was the spirit of it, and that’s what led us to not do a hip hop record; we’ve really got to indulge that side of us.”

Ma looks at his mate and giggles. “Yeah,” he smiles. “There’s always been a brooding krautrock band inside of us!”

He turns serious. “I suppose every group gets told what they are by lots of people,” Ma explains, “and sometimes you feel like you are that, and sometimes you really feel like it’s missed the mark. But to circle back to one of the reasons why we got [back] together and wrote the record and wrote music again – was because the chemistry of the four individuals over ten years…there’s a real propulsion to challenge each other, and introduce each other to new music and we never were a group that just found a formula and stuck to that. It was all about what was next, and what was exciting!”

So now that Millions Of Moments has been released, and they’re gearing up for their album launch, I have to ask if the live show is going to measure up to the epic-ness of the music. Are we in for some bells and whistles, fellas?

Ma assures me that that’s the case. “We’re working making the live show as ambitious as the record! We’ve been working with a visual artist, a lighting guy – it’s going to try to incorporate some of the abstract ideas from the story and the album into a live show!”

Somehow we end up talking about the futuristic consciousness-hurtling drug called Chronos. I’m curious to know – is it an illegal drug? To which Ma replies, “I suppose it’s similar to bath-salts … or, what’s the other one?”

“Meow-meow?” offers Norman.

“Yeah. People can’t really get a grasp on whether it’s illegal or not, because no one can actually prove what it’s doing!”

Like that guy in Florida who chewed off that homeless guy’s face, I mention. Ma breaks off into a story he has about the future, and how latent chemicals in mobile phones and other pieces of commonly used electronics could possibly have the effects of bath-salts – but the effects wouldn’t be known until years later! Then it would be a zombie apocalypse of epic proportions!

Norman’s more curious about the Florida cannibal – “What happened again?” he asks. Ma tells him how this dude was naked on top of another homeless guy, chewing off his face. “The cops found him on a bridge, and they tasered him – and he just turned and growled at them!” Ma tells him. “He rushed them, and they shot him.”

“Did he die?” asks Norman.

Yep.

“Fascinating shit,” says Norman. We all laugh.

Fascinating shit, indeed.

BY THOMAS BAILEY