Interview:

A lot can be said about the spiritual significance of music. We all read about music of the spheres, planets, and tones. But what is our life experience as musicians, and why can’t we let go of music, at any cost? Someone we like a lot once said: “Music is the healing force of the universe” [the title of Albert Ayler’s 1969 release on Impulse! Records]. Recently with Zu we started a label calling it Homeopathic Records. Why? Well one of our best friends also happens to be our homeopathic doctor. He used to be a hardcore-punk guitar player, that’s how I met him in the early 1990’s, then he studied and still studies about homeopathy and every natural medicine. Sometimes I would go to a visit with him, and after the visit, he would drive me home listening to Naked City or Hüsker Dü at full volume in the car. We started to ask ourselves: why in modern therapeutic approaches, music is always used as the thing we hate the most? That’s the New Age ding-dong, sounds of the wind, cheap synthesizer, and generic cheese. Why the music that has helped us throughout life been totally different, and ranked from John Coltrane to Nomeansno? We started to think that in Western medicine, allopathy, you cure a symptom with the opposite, whilst in homeopathy “like cures like”. So it could be correct to think that if you are angry, maybe it is good to listen to some angry music. If you are confused, maybe it can be helpful to listen to some noisy music. If you are sad, then just listen to Nick Drake. I mean, for me at least, if I am in a funny mood, and I happen to listen to Louis Armstrong’s “It’s A Wonderful World”, I feel like killing everybody, but enough said about that. How does spirituality translate into music? First of all, one of the basic foundations of any spiritual path is acceptance. We can not accept the world or other people, unless one is fully ready to accept oneself, good and bad, angelic and demonic, and even worse than evil, our normal side. This means that truly spiritual music should not only stand for the angelic, quiet, and detached side that everyone has, or at least seems to be looking for. Truly spiritual music probably holds together all the contradictions of our human existence. I believe this will probably end up more similar to a Shakespearean character than a New Testament character. Even more frightening than this, is that music has to hold together our five year-old boy, our fourteen year-old Metal kid, and so on, until the end of time. I have to accept that a part of me still likes Gene Simmons’ stage gimmicks with Kiss. This is hard to accept, and probably translates into absolutely nothing in music. Yet this acceptance makes it easier for the music to appear when finally the jack is plugged in and the amp is cranked up to eleven. We are not thinking about how we should be in life, but how we should be in music. We recently listened to our latest CD and that part of the brain wanted to go for it! Music will be an expression of a whole, and mysteriously it will make us whole while playing it and listening to it over an over, just as any good and sincere spiritual path. So even if we are a one-trick-pony, bashing our instruments with the same idea, talking the same talk; we will just do it better every time. Music will be solid because it comes from a solid layer. It is not some debris we find in a hole. It resembles an old fossil that we did not know we had. The idea of Homeopathic Music contains in itself the basic element of chaos, translated into noise, without canceling any error, as a complete resemblance to life. We no longer live in a cosmos where everything is singing together to the glory of Him. Our experience is contradictory, so our music will be full of contradictions.

“Truly spiritual music probably holds together all the contradictions of our human existence.”
– Massimo Pupillo, bassist in Zu