It's a reminder not just of the power of letting go, but also of listening. “I kind of genuinely think that listening is an ethical act,” says Damien Lennon, of Zeropunkt.
Sure, they play for themselves but it doesn’t mean they don’t think of the audience, said Damien Lennon.
People take a chance turning up to see an improv group, said Fergus Cullen, sat forwards now in his chair.
“If something starts to sound bad, in the moment, I’m like how can I make it feel better,” he said. “Because there’s people here to see it.”
What’s bad, though? How do you judge that in a group that performs totally off the cuff, with atmospheric tracks made sometimes of electric drips, and sometimes of repeated riffs of dark scratchy strings, and of everything in between.
“Who says it’s bad?” said Jamie Davis, the drummer, looking towards Cullen. “You might think it sounds bad.”
It’s a challenge, said Lennon, nodding, the other side of the table. “That’s actually the really hard thing to do in the moment.”
There are four members of Zeropunkt, the free music, category-free, spontaneous composers.
Lennon on bass, bass VI and effects, and Cullen on saxophones, keys, vocals and electronics, and Davis on drums and percussion, and Hugh O’Neill on trumpet and electronics, too.
“You’re not always necessarily on the same page about whether something is good or not,” said Lennon.
Look around during a gig at body language, and one person might look unhappy while another bops along.
Everybody side-eyes Cullen, and snorts and chuckles escape around the table and the conversation gets louder, sentences and half-sentences flowing over each other.
Okay yes, says Cullen. “There was one time we did a gig in Kilkenny and I just had to say to them [the audience], this is absolutely shit, if you want to go home, you’re absolutely welcome to.”
“He was freaked out,” Cullen said, nodding towards Lennon. “That was Kilkenny wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, I wasn’t happy about that – ,” said Lennon, measured.
“– I love that,” said Davis, laughing louder now. The crowd seemed amused, he said.
“– there’s trial and error too,” said Lennon, making his case.
“I didn’t say they could have a refund! I said you can’t have a refund, but you can go home,” said Cullen, in mock defence.
The table falls quiet again.
“I saw Marshall Allen from the Sun Ra orchestra playing years ago in Los Angeles,” said Lennon.
Allen, arriving off a flight from Philadelphia, was already in his 90s, Lennon said. He came in, walked on stage and threw his jacket down, picked up his saxophone and started to play, frenzied.
“There was a moment in that gig where it dipped,” said Lennon. “It was kind of tinkering along, and there was this motif that was being circulated. And I just kind of thought, this is the dud, this is the dud.”
“But they didn’t give up. They just kept probing it until they found the thing in it, and it just clicked and it was just amazing,” he said.
“So there is that idea of oh, this is just shit. But there is also that idea of, well, we just need to ride it out, you know?” he said.
Davis kind of nods, as if thinking on that switch from precarious to magical. “Well, that’s happening all the time in a way, isn’t it?”
Zeropunkt’s latest album, Starry Dynamo in the Machinery of Night, is just back from production.
It’s the sixteenth compilation for the group, if you count the records put out by its predecessor, the group ¡NO! .
Its members have been involved, separately and together, in free music for years.
Lennon had moved out of Ireland in 1992, living in France for more than a decade, he said, where he played in Versaille with a freak absurdist freeform band called Ach Baby, named after the U2 song “Achtung Baby”.
“Nobody got the joke because we were in France,” said Lennon.
Versailles at the time was quite a rightwing monarchist Catholic town, he said, and that environment fed a closeness among nonconformists. “There was a weird underbelly there of kind of oddball artists who ended up in the same place.”
Later, he moved to the United States and gave up music for a while, he said. He was working in bars and restaurants, including Cafe Steinhof in Brooklyn where he would see many big hitter musicians.
“I was kind of intimidated,” he said.
But he picked it up again, working with a friend – an acolyte of the Psychic TV realm – on some ambient sound and sound design for theatre in New York, and playing freeform alt folk with a neighbour.
Davis, meanwhile, played with, among others, an improv band called Illuminati. He had a background in jazz drumming too, he said.
Cullen has been part of the free-music scene in Ireland for decades. “I’ve been doing it for about 20 years or more now actually,” he said.
He used to play in a band called the Electronic Sensoria Band, or ESB for short.
Both he and Davis – the Zeropunkt drummer – played at times with Damo Suzuki, the Japanese singer and one-time vocalist with German Krautrock band Can, who later travelled the world playing improvised gigs with underground psychrock artists.
By 2013, everybody was back in Dublin.
They had gradually all met each other through work, and other bands. Davis had heard of Cullen, he said.
“Read about me in the newspapers and magazines and books,” said Cullen.
“Seen the documentaries about crimes,” said Davis. So he suggested an improv group together.
Back then, when the group was ¡NO!, it included Graham Montgomery, who Davis had met in the library in Dún Laoghaire, over the CD collection.
The latest record, though, has O’Neill on trumpet and electronics. “That makes a difference in previous sound and previous releases,” said Lennon.
Their new record, Starry Dynamo in the Machinery of Night, is five tracks, following an intimate gig at Cleere’s Bar and Theatre in Kilkenny.
They didn’t splice it or move the tracks around, Lennon said, as they have in other releases. “It’s maybe a bit more organic in the flow."
The nature of free improv means that the group’s records are all pretty different, said Davis.
Future Present Continuous, released in March 2020, is more low-fi, sound art with vocals. Clap Your Hands And Say No, released in October 2020, leans into guitar.
We feel like we can do anything, Davis said. “We’re totally free to do whatever we’re doing.”
“There’s no way you would think it’s the same group,” said Lennon.
That does create its own issues. “You butt up against that problem of categorisation,” said Lennon.
He remembers years back when he played with a free improv band in France and was trying to shop a record around to stores.
“They were immediately like, where do we put it?” he said. “And I was like, just put it on the shelf.”
“Put it in the local charity shop, when no one’s looking,” said Cullen, with a half smile.
“Put a Coldplay cover on it,” said Davis.
Cullen said that the issue of categorisation and the wider music industry largely doesn’t matter to them anymore. “We’ve been doing it for so long, we’ve made absolutely nothing out of it.”
This is turning into The Mighty Boosh, said Cullen. “What’s your ambition? I want to be the greatest trumpet player in Yorkshire. Yorkshire is a state of mind.”
“Well, Hugh, is the greatest trumpet player on the Iveragh Peninsula, I would think,” said Lennon.
They’re not pretentious, said Davis, and their attitude and practices have changed.
He used to record everything, not wanting to miss the best moments perhaps, he said. “I was just kind of so excited by it, you know.”
He looks at it a little differently now, though, he said. “If you get precious about stuff, you repeat it. You hold onto it as if it is some bar to reach.”
“If you just let it go, you do something fresh every time,” he said.
Zeropunkt is playing three gig gigs to launch its latest album.
The first two in Dublin, at Think Punk in Inchicore on the afternoon and evening of 30 May, and one on 27 June in Kilkenny.
They would love to get in an audience with a mixed and younger crowd, said Cullen.
How the group plays, what they end up playing, how they start is shaped by how they may be feeling that day, but also by the venues and the sound, said Lennon.
Sometimes you play loads, sometimes you step back, said Cullen.
“You have to be able to hear each other,” said Davis. “It’s about not filling up all the space and balancing everything. You’re all part of it.”
“I kind of genuinely think that listening is an ethical act,” said Lennon. Nobody listens much these days, he said. They’re too busy shouting.
Lennon tries to listen better with his youngest kid than he did with his oldest, he said.
Cullen said he feels trained to tune in to sound, attentive to the radio or to voices passing by. “Even if it’s only for a minute.”
People have to listen differently at their gigs to others perhaps, said Lennon. “There are no choruses, nobody recognises anything, there’s nothing to sing along to.”
The health of the free improv scene is really intertwined with venues, said Lennon on Wednesday, at the cafe at the back of Lilliput Stores.
Next door was once The Joinery, where the trio used to play, he said.
They would also play at Jigsaw, Block T, the Complex and the basement in the Twisted Pepper – all gone now.
“We’ve closed many, many places,” said Davis, solemnly.
Even before the Twisted Pepper became Wigwam, the scene there was changing, said Cullen. Everyone started to colonise tables with laptops. “I think we started to feel old at that point.”
They would go around tables and invite people downstairs for a gig of experimental music, he said, but would get roughly the same response. “I’m on my laptop, leave me alone!”
That event was also free. Bad plan, said Lennon. “That was ill-advised.”
“Yeah,” said Cullen. “That’s why our CD is €500. A pop.”
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