Glasgow Jazz Festival: Zu @ Platform, 1 July

If there’s one thing Glasgow does well, it’s throwing festival curveballs. Last month we had a screening of Night of the Living Dead as part of the Science Festival, tonight we have Italian avant-doomsters Zu at the Jazz Festival. Gracing the stage before them is Edinburgh’s Wounded Knee who, with just his voice, an echo pedal and a colourful imagination creates a sublime symphony of hums, murmurs and chants that range from Buddhist-like mantras to native American throat singing. It leads to an atmosphere of calm introspection in the small auditorium, the audience seemingly transfixed by a set that continuously shows how much beauty can be achieved from the most minimal of setups.

Zu make it clear that this performance will be anything but subtle. The room is swathed in a thick mist of white noise for five minutes before they enter, and when they do the noise itself becomes engulfed by Massimo Pupillo’s devastating bass, driving forth riffs that are as absorbing as they are slow; and they are very slow. Luca Mai’s saxophone is unfortunately a little drowned out under the rhythm section, but his intermittent blasts and freewheeling still adds a prickly texture.

When the doom drops off the radar, Zu’s more unorthodox tendencies take over – Pupillo focussing on his pedals as he forms waves upon waves of hypnotic, claustrophobic noise. It doesn’t seem like Jacopo Battaglio’s departure has affected them much either, with his replacement Balazas Pandi a stylistic typhoon of jazz creativity, dismantling and reconstructing the kit mid-performance for greater range. After swaying bewilderingly between the poles of doom and jazz for a full sweaty hour, they depart in yet another cloud of pulsed feedback, leaving us a little confused but strangely satisfied.