Rock trio Zinc hit gold with variety and improvisation

Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@live.ie

The Black Gate Cultural Centre on Francis Street in Galway City may have only opened this year, but so far it has hosted vintage clothes sales, literary events and cinema nights.

And the venue, which also serves food, wine and beer, is coming into its own as a music venue, as shown by recent concerts from Cuar and the Canadian songwriter Jenn Grant. But Zinc’s show in the venue this Saturday, July 8, promises something different.  The Galway-based instrumental rock trio will be playing an entire set of improvised music, which is a rare thing indeed. However, as Zinc’s guitarist Aengus Hackett explains, it’s something they’ve wanted to do for a while.

“Improv is something we’ve always explored in the rehearsal room,” he says. “We always wrote music through free improv, then we tended to pick bits out of what we recorded.  We’d work on the details and work everything out to a tee. Our first album reflects that. Everything composed on the record, but it had a spontaneous vibe to it as well. We always loved that and we wanted to explore it further.”

Zinc consists of Aengus, Andrew Madec (bass) and Simon Kenny (drums). Their sound brings to mind the American band Battles, who are known as pioneers in what is called post or math-rock. Words like ‘math’ and ‘improvised’ might not sound something you’d associate with accessible music. but this is truly toe-tapping stuff.

“Especially live, it takes things in a direction that listening to a record or talking about it mightn’t,” Aengus says. “It can scare people away sometimes But, there’s a band called And So I Watch You from Afar from Northern Ireland. It’s mainly instrumental music that they do, and I saw them in the Róisín recently and they were fantastic. It takes you into a whole other place that vocal music can’t.”

Perhaps one way to describe what bands like Zinc and ASIWYFA do is to say that if you like rhythmic music you can dance to, then you’ll like this genre too.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.