ZZT - 'Not For Home Listening'

With a bio that reads simply "ZZT are Zombie Nation and Tiga" we needed to find out more. The latest present from Turbo Recordings; who tell us: they are not friends and this is no game. To date, as a duo they have claimed responsibility for Lower States of Consciousness, The Worm, and ZZafrika. Their debut album Partys Over Earth came out earlier this month includes a track of the same name and the first single Vulkan Alarm (videos below). Zombie Nation catches up with Peter Banco for Pulse to discuss whether they will tour, how it all started and more.


Pulse: I understand that the ZZT project first came about around four years ago. How did it start, was it something that flowed from releasing your own productions on Turbo? Zombie Nation: I’ve known Tiga for around ten years, way back in the days of Gigolo records; we met in Munich and Miami but when he played in Munich he fell in love with the place. He stayed for longer, and we always said we’d do something together. We gave it a try and from the first moment the energy was right and we had a lot of fun.

Was it a conscious decision to create the ZZT name for the work, as opposed to Zombie Nation & Tiga? Is it a new identity for a new sound? Initially we didn’t think about anything, as the songs could have ended up on his album or on my album. We didn’t think of it as a collaboration project. I was suspicious about giving it its own name as I thought it would be better to promote ourselves.

Now I see that it was the best thing, as it gives us our own freedom to step away from our normal work and be able to feel free to do whatever we want, without expectations. 

In that time, a few ZZT releases came out. What was the decision to go from a few tracks over a few years to do a full ZZT album? We always have limited time to work in my Munich studio; sending stuff back and forth doesn’t work. The way we work we need to be in the same place, it needs to be hands on and because of our schedules it takes time.

We jam for five to ten minutes with synthesisers and record it and then stuff happens which turn out to be the best pieces. We usually only have two to three days together and the pressure’s on to create something! There’s no playing around, it’s all about the music and it works. After a while we ended up with quite a few songs collected. We would make two or three songs and we would release the best one. After some time we had these songs that weren’t the biggest but it was enough for an album.

I understand most of the work on the album was done in your studio. What sort of gear did you use, and how did that shape what you personally wanted ZZT to sound like? I have quite a few toys that I’ve collected over time. I learned after the first session I needed to have the synthesisers connected and be ready to press ‘record’ because if we did something nice I’d have to go through the cables to try and record it. But that’s my responsibility, as a host, so we can just play and it’s all ready to go.

The sound is great, it sounds really rough and not prepared, because its the energetic moments that are recorded and they are the tracks. We started with something relaxed and the track ends up being, well, something not so relaxed.

Any future plans for taking ZZT on the road? The question is if we could count on the spontaneity (in the record studio) when we are playing live. It’s like with a band, you play the song and then go sideways into a jam, we certainly have talked about it and we want to do it.

We’re not 100% there yet because we haven’t said "yes we’ll do it." I’ve set a deadline of 1.5 weeks for us to decide if we will do it, because it’s a lot of work to set it up. We want it to be fantastic, but even with our own projects we play a lot of shows…maybe mid-next year would be a realistic time for us to do some shows.

Live shows are the right thing to do; these tracks we've created are the type that you want play in a club or at festivals, they’re not for home listening.

Finally, there’s a lot of Mercedes-Benz destruction going on with the promo for ZZT. Is that you or Tiga? Why the hate? It just came together like that! Tiga and his brother took the car to a crash course in Montreal, and it evolved from there. They ended up with that car, and I complained because it’s not a special car in Munich and I see them all the time.

Maybe we’ll have to move onto another model or something!

Tracklisting Partys Over Earth:

01 Where Is the Captain?
02 Rock the Peace
03 Partys Over Los Angeles
04 Nickel Und Dime
05 ZZTMF
06 Zig Zig Zag
07 Zzafrika
08 The Worm
09 Work
10 Lower State of Consciousness
11 Vulkan alarm
12 ZZT Has Left the Building

Listen to Zombie Nation on Pulse Radio  

Listen to Tiga on Pulse Radio