'We were outside the station at Yahata in Kitakyushu and there was this festival going on — this group of old guys playing in a band with all these young people dancing. It was a strange scene — what kind of festival is this? That's where the album title 'Nanka Festa' ('Something Festival') came from."
Certain themes start reappearing while I'm talking with drummer Kenta Toya: confusion, disorientation and the sense of normality becoming subtly distorted or clouded. His Fukuoka-based avant-rock trio is named z/nz (pronounced "Zutto Nazo," which translates as "Total Mystery"), and the unconventional twin-guitar dynamic of bandmates Risato "Tori" Fukumoto and Sachiko "Sassy" Matsumoto adds a sonic layer to the band's sense of dislocation.
"I first saw (Tori and Sassy) in their previous band, Me I Sashimi," Toya explains. "The way they were playing was all wrong from a conventional perspective,. They don't know chords; they created their sound just from listening and then creating harmonies by ear."