Yoshida, Takeda & Massimo Pupillo

Last night at Turin’s Ziggy Club, a ritual charged with overwhelming emotion unfolded, one that nearly shattered the venue’s walls and stripped away every certainty held by those in attendance during just over an hour of gripping sonic violence.

A tidal wave of sound, generated by the Japanese duo Tatsuya Yoshida (drummer of Ruins) and Risa Takeda (keyboardist), and reinforced by the powerful bass of Massimo Pupillo (Zu), struck the small Turin club with relentless force. The venue, long known for championing alternative and niche music, became the setting for a performance that built continuously in both intensity and emotional impact.

At the beginning of the concert, only the duo occupied the stage, serving almost as a prelude to what was yet to come. Here, the syncopated and polyrhythmic patterns unleashed by Yoshida’s fiery drumming collided fiercely with Takeda’s virtuosic keyboard work, without a single moment of respite.

The audience gathered before the stage was swept away by an inexorable sonic current, driven by Yoshida’s breathtaking stop-and-go drum patterns, executed with astonishing precision. In immediate response came Takeda’s lightning-fast keyboard phrases, generating a dense and intricate architecture of sound that seemed to be born and hurled directly at the listeners, who stood suspended in both aesthetic and ecstatic contemplation.

Yet the best was still to come. Pupillo then stepped onto the stage, bass in hand, delivering a further surge of power to the performance. Monumental, granite-like sonorities emerged, submerged in a sea of wild distortion that did not merely accompany the Japanese duo’s music but actively shaped and defined it.

Immersed in this complex labyrinthine magma, echoes of noise and acidic synth textures reached us, supported by off-kilter rhythms and thunderous, metal-infused bass strokes. The symbolic escape suggested by Takeda’s rapid-fire progressive keyboard lines remained tethered to the ground by the material force sculpted through Pupillo’s bass. The sensation was one of being unable either to ascend or descend - suspended in a perpetual storm, trapped within a gargantuan labyrinth of sounds and textures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYVdoPjQZFM

The end of the performance caught us completely unprepared. It was difficult to realize that the catharsis had come to an end, replaced by an all-encompassing sense of disorientation born from the expressive and emotional urgency displayed on stage. What remained was the impression of a precise and pressing need for uncontrolled noise- noise that simultaneously constructs and dismantles form - a necessary diversion from a reality that too often feels static and trivial.