Back in the fall of 2014, Nick Zanca joined us in the Newtown Radio studio, armed with a sophisti-pop-filled mix in advance of his last Mister Lies album, Shadow (Orchid Tapes). In the five years that followed, he put Mister Lies on ice to explore collaborative work with the project Quiet Friend and otherwise settle into a personal hiatus, simply letting life happen in New York.
The new Mister Lies album, released last week, is a self-titled, self-released, and self-assured reset that was shared alongside an essay by Zanca at The Talkhouse. It finds the artist returning to his home-recording roots, embracing the power of memory and the present, and adding depth and subtlety, through dynamic field recordings, to his evocative and fluid late-night pop improvisations.
Like his last mix, Zanca taps into influences, only this time he’s dived below the surface of compositional work, headfirst into the textural and fragmental documentations of audio. Phonography opens with a recording of Pauline Oliveros outlining one of her deep listening exercises and then proceeds to flow through sound and music generated by, as he says, “sculpture, conversation, repetition, improvisation, travelogue, and natural phenomena.” Presented in this format, the mix offers a sprawling opportunity to exercise focused listening techniques, and to find nuances in the tonalites of the world, both here in this encapsulated selection, and in your everyday surroundings. A fascinating and erudite two-hour aural diorama (ending in our favorite lakeside scene), accompanied by a handmade collage cover by Nathaniel Whitcomb. Zanca adds:
“Field recordings and found sounds have always been a fundamental aspect of my musical practice, but I never consciously placed the origins of my interest in capturing the audible illustration of environment until revisiting my solo project after some time away. I found myself immersed in musique concrète and electroacoustic composition in the studio — sonic artworks that generally revolve around and build upon landscapes both natural and invented. This mix is an attempt to gather the fruits of these discoveries, blend excerpts into a dense collage and posit deep listening as an altogether meditative pursuit.”
Pauline Oliveros – Tuning Meditation (The Kitchen, NYC 1979)
Harry Bertoia – Clear Sounds (Sculpture, 1973)
Sarah Hennies – Foragers
David Hykes / The Harmonic Choir – Multiplication des voix au cœur du corps sonore
Costin Miereanu – Musique Climatique
Ernest Hood – From The Bluff
Wendy Carlos – Sonic Seasonings: Fall
Scott Fraser – Communiqué
Hiroshi Yoshimura – 小川にそって (Air In Resort)
Alvin Curran – Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri
Nuno Canavarro – Untitled excerpt from ‘Plux Quba’
Annea Lockwood – Tiger Balm
Koichi Shimizu / Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Reverberation (Syndromes And A Century)
Luc Ferrari – Petite symphonie intuitive pour un paysage de printemps
Pit Piccinelli / Fred Gales / Walter Maioli – Amazonia 6891
Pat Metheny / Lyle Mays – As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls
Egberto Gismonti – Maracatu, Sapo, Queimada & Grilo
Joni Mitchell – The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey
Yasuaki Shimizu – このように詠めり (その二)
Carl Stone – Shing Kee
Vanessa Rosetto / Matthew Revert – Everyone Needs A Plan
RIP Hayman – Dreams Of India And China
Tetsu Inoue – Inter Link
Aksak Maboul – Scratch Holiday
Jan Jelinek – Lady Gaga, you once said in an interview that you write music for the fashion industry. Is fashion as important to you as music?
Derek Bailey / Min Tanaka – Rain Dance
Satsuki Shibano / Yoshio Ojima – Caresse (3eme partie)
Holger Czukay / Rolf Dammers – Boat Woman Song
Julius Eastman – Gay Guerrilla
Moniek Darge – Turkish Square
John Martyn – Small Hours
S&S Radio broadcasts every now and then on Newtown Radio.