Favourite Haunts

When TZU announced they were going on hiatus four years ago, it was easy to suspect that it might have been the end of the band altogether.

“I think we all thought that,” says Joel Ma (aka MC Joelistics). “It was never really explicitly discussed but it was the general vibe. It's sort of like being married and then going, 'Let's just be friends for a while'. Which doesn't usually work out well, but in our case it did!”

There were no big issues or bad feelings, just that after eight years playing together and touring together, “We got to a point where we needed to focus on other things in our lives,” Ma continues. “The break was just a chance to catch up on all this other external life maintenance stuff.”

And so, after two years of doing all of that life stuff, like having babies, travelling the world, making solo albums and producing music for other artists, the four members of TZU – Ma, Pip Norman (aka Countbounce), Shahab Tariq (aka Paso Bionic) and Corey McGregor (aka Yeroc) – started hanging out again.

“It was this really soft approach to getting together and hanging out,” says Ma. “That was the basis of a really good friendship between four guys who went, 'Let's get together again.' And what do we usually do when we get together? Well, we generally play music. So it wasn't a case of consciously going, 'Let's write a new record'. There was no grand plan, we just decided to take two weeks to hang out and write music in the studio, and not have any other stuff going on.“

“And not have any outcomes for it either,” adds Norman. “It wasn't like, 'This has to produce a record'. It was just, 'Let's just write and if that works we'll see where to go from there'.”

“And if felt really good,” concludes Ma. And so, ten years after they started out busking on Brunswick Street, the four members of TZU were making music together again.

Lyrically, the band steered steered purposefully away from the personal stories that they had come to be associated with. They have described Millions Of Moments as a concept album, although the concept is more of a broad narrative that holds the album together. The idea of a time-travelling spirit who inhabits various characters through time and space emerged from the band's desire to tell other people's stories.

“We didn't stick to it like a burning compass in our mind's eye but I remember saying to Joel, 'I don't want to write about my life. I don't want to be in the first person,'” says Norman. “And that's often what's associated with hip hop is that you're representing yourself, it's very first person and it's very real. And I was very excited about narrative, and other people's lives and made-up lives and lives from different eras and that was definitely something that we set out to do.”

Ma recalls with enthusiasm, “I totally remember you saying, 'Let's write convict stories as well'. We even swapped some books and shared like a bunch of stories and source material to draw from. And I just went, 'Yeah, I love this idea of storywriting'.”

In particular, Ma found that there are some spots on Earth where ghosts just seem to linger, leaving an imprint of energy, like a photonegative, on a place. And so ghost stories, colonial history and stories of haunted pubs were woven into the fabric of the record.

“All those old folk songs are really dark and awesome stories and really great little dramas and scenarios. We were excited about working with that stuff,” Ma says.

In TZU's downtime, Ma released a solo album (Voyager), continued to write poetry and short stories and recently spent two months working on another musical project in Berlin, a place that he reckons is definitely haunted. “There are heaps of ghosts in Berlin. The café where I used to drink coffee, the façade of the building looks really nice, and then in the courtyard there's all these bullet holes in the wall. That whole history is right there, and it's hard to fathom that sometimes.”

Beautiful, the latest single from Millions Of Moments, is a colonial ghost story because, says Norman, “Once that banjo line came up, it was clear that it was going to be a ghost story. What else could you write over that banjo line?”

“I remember when we were writing that song, lyrically, “ Ma adds. “There was a pub that we played at near Wollongong and it had the most haunted vibe that I'd ever come across. And they had a story about how they'd had a mining accident years and years ago, in the early 20th century, and suddenly this small town had all these dead bodies on its hands and they'd filled up the morgue and they had to store some of the bodies in the basement of the pub. It's brutal and amazing and gothic and scary, and the pub itself felt really like that to me as well. And so when we sat down to write that song, that was one of the stories I kept referring to. Every pub in every small town has some story that is going to keep you guessing. “

Sonically, the album is based around synthesisers and samplers and sees the band delving further into the '80s future-electro sounds that they began exploring on Computer Love four years ago.

Indeed at one point, the new music was so different to the old TZU material that the band even considered releasing it under a different name. “It was going to instrumental, it was going to be no lyrics at all and we were going to name it something else,“ says Norman.

“Because we are totally aware that it's really different,” adds Ma. “If you were to listen to Position Correction and then listen to Millions Of Moments, there's a progression that you can really follow, but this is clearly the furthest step away.”

The difference in the sound has posed its challenges for the band in putting together their live set for the Millions Of Moments tour.

“We've been talking about how we'll try to incorporate the old stuff into our new set. Or how we will try and incorporate the new stuff into our old set. And it is going to be a bit tricky but it's still all us and still all our own music, so how hard can it be?” asks Norman.

Are they still a hip hop band? “I reckon it's got elements of hip hop,” says Ma. But more to the point, he says, “This is us, this is what these four people made and this is where we are. And let's start a conversation. Undoubtedly there'll be strong opinions, but fuck, it's good. It's a good thing to do. So let's keep it TZU. That's what it is.”

TZU will be playing the following shows:

Friday 28 September - Pelican Bar, Frankston VIC
Saturday 29 September - Fern Tree Gully Hotel, Ferntree Gully VIC
Thursday 4 October - Grace Emily Hotel, Adelaide SA
Friday 5 October - Bar 120, Hillarys WA
Saturday 6 October - Amplifier Bar, Perth WA
Sunday 7 October - Prince Of Wales Hotel, Bunbury WA
Thursday 11 October - The Patch, Wollongong NSW
Friday 12 October - Transit Bar, Canberra ACT
Saturday 13 October - The Standard, Sydney NSW
Friday 19 October - Republic Bar, Hobart TAS
Saturday 20 October - Republic Bar, Hobart TAS
Monday 5 November - The Hi-Fi, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 10 November - Sprung Festival, Brisbane QLD
Friday 23 November - Queenscliff Music Festival, Queenscliff NSW