Zs

In the opening years of the 2000s, Zs assembled in Brooklyn, occupying a rigorously trained post-minimalist avant-garde sphere while also meshing with the noise-oriented D.I.Y. spirit of the city's rock community. The players first encountered one another at the Manhattan School of Music and launched as a quintet before promptly adopting a collectivist structure centered chiefly on saxophonist Sam Hillmer, guitarist Ben Greenberg, and drummer Ian Antonio. Like earlier ensembles including the now-established Bang on a Can, they aimed to dismantle the formality of notated composition, reshaping their saxophone-centered group into an exacting, unyielding outfit whose revolving sonic blocks generated expansive noise fields, and the reverse.

Five EPs comprised their earliest releases, each penned by a different member, beginning with guitarist Charlie Looker's untitled two-track 2003 debut. Hillmer and fellow tenor saxophonist Alex Mincek supplied the follow-up, also issued that year under the name Zs, which started to establish the band's interlocking mechanisms. The visceral drive that would define their identity and distance them from conventional recital settings only emerged with the 2005 Karate Bump EP. Hillmer and Mincek's adoption of extended percussive saxophone techniques produced a fluid tonal rhythmic lattice over which noise could be overlaid. Pointing to mounting frustrations, the musicians redirected their energies toward self-organized concerts and performances alongside associates, while the music itself grew more collective and settled into a trance-like core.

Mincek had already exited when the band issued its first full-length, 2007's Arms, whose selections spotlighted Hillmer's saxophone in isolation, introduced a stronger guitar presence (though founding guitarist Charlie Looker departed soon after), and included several pieces built around chanted vocals. Unexpected notice followed when longtime provocateur Howard Stern played tracks from Arms across successive days, his associates offering quips at Zs' expense (Stern: "It's mood music...if you're in a mental home"), an episode that nonetheless introduced millions to the recordings and, as the band later observed, prompted an on-air exchange concerning John Cage. New Slaves appeared in 2010, a sweeping noise-drone statement that gathered the group's minimalist exactitude alongside a newly expansive spatial dimension.