Tabs Out

Nick Zanca – Cacerolazo

4.11.22 by Matty McPherson

Of all the tapes I spent the most time listening to on an MP3 CD in my car from last year (with extra heavy bass and drum control), Nick Zanca’s Cacerolazo happened to rank up there probably at number one or two. I was curious about Zanca’s work on Wendy Eisenberg’s exceptional Auto and had absolutely no fucking idea who/what a “Mister Lies” is/was. When I talked to Zanca about what I thought the tape had sounded like weeks before it came out, I noted how moments of the Cacerolazo composition (split in three parts) inadvertently struck me as post-Feels Animal Collective mixed with the 2012 GYBE composition Mladic (a piece which ends with a most empathetic field recording not far removed from the time of Zanca’s). This struck Zanca as pretty fucking baffling and part of the reason I never filed any review until now is because that’s not quite what the tape sounds like.

However, the music concept of that A-side is fucking airtight. The logic behind Cacerolazo I and II are inductive, cutting through various voices, drums, and bizarre detuned guitar patterns (nick, it’s those guitars in Cacerolazo I that sounds like Bees or some shit from 2005 era AnCo) trying to arrive at SOMETHING. As I was almost always driving at 75-90 mph past 9pm when I heard this, I was invigorated by that sense of direction and scale. Elements of Zanca’s DAW sound design border on a Dolby Digital Atmos test demo, which is 100% my shit (and a sound space that Asemix explores slyly and with finesse). It may sound “mid” to you, but you truly cannot anticipate how the drops or sudden whiplash will tumble and leave you quivering with ecstatic shock–at least they did for me consistently with Cacerolazo II’s synthetic strings and uncanny sound collages. That it all is laying a groundwork for Cacerolazo III ties it neatly with a bow. In that part, what Zanca is trying to inductively arrive at he does, brilliantly segueing from a boundless cymbal rush crescendo straight into a public sphere; the cacerolazo. How Zanca arrives at it (in a manner similar to the bridge from Eisenberg’s Futures) unearths a moment of lucidity, a suddenness that reveals the tape is above all a situated sense of place and humanity. 

After a window of silence that seems to be an accidental reference to vinyl pressings of Laughing Stock, we move over to Side B’s longform “Boy Abroad”. It could have been subtitled “meeting people is easy” (there’s some rather True Love Waits ‘96 bleeps n’ bloops hiding throughout the recording) for all that matters, functioning as Zanca’s recording diary and utilizing a litany of the same DAW techniques of Side A. The main difference is that it meanders in this era, considering the impact and meaning of the Cacerolazo to those around Zanca. When I talked with Zanca in August of last year, he did not remember a whole lucid ton of that 2013 tour–outside of the Cacerolazo and listening to Laughing Stock. That’s not a bug nor a feature, it’s just life! It takes time, even when you’re recording or experiencing life, to reflect and reinterpret what occurred. As a result, Zanca’s return to this timeframe across its nineteen and a half minutes, tracing back the radiance and sketching more focused snippets of memories, is a terrific realization. This piece of reflective, personal audio is able to exist in two time frames–one tied to the snippets of dialogue and banter from 2013 and one tied to that present moment of an individual tracing themselves to the now, wondering just how they got here and the feelings left behind from that moment. Due to the nature of the recording in this time and place, Zanca emphasized this was a political statement. Truly, it functions and should be emphasized as a situated one, of a single individual coming to a greater consciousness. I feel that it achieves that more so than anything else, especially in its final few minutes. Here, a swirl of voices give way to a synthesizer crescendo that suddenly drops us to frigid winds and a coastal bell, a snippet of sanctuary and clarity. The two Zancas seem to meet there for a moment before it cuts to black, here in the present. 

Cacerolazo is available from the Full Spectrum and Nick Zanca Bandcamps. It comes with a nice Full Spectrum Sticker.

Related

Anthony Amelang – Traumland

4.8.22 by Peter Woods

There must have been something in the Midwest’s water in the late 2000s, a weird little critter of some sort that pushed the noise scene into making and listening to a geographically specific brand of dark synth drone. And while some of the folks making this dense industrial sludge had been honing this kind of music for years, it seemed to coalesce into a moment of visibility and interest right around 2008 or 2009. The pristine (and degrading) landscapes of Ryan Opperman’s Klinikal Skum, the low-end oscillations of Hive Mind, and the slowly evolving terror of (the aptly named) supergroup Nightmares exemplified a uniquely midwest approach to synth-based soundscapes that drew equally from early industrial, contemporary power electronics (a field all of the artists listed dabbled in as well), and the compositional techniques of drone. Put succinctly, this music may have sounded like power electronics but it felt like drone.

A decade on, Minneapolis’ Anthony Amelang must be drinking from the same water source because “Traumland,” a recent tape released on No Coast/No Hope, would fit right in to that moment. Amelang fills every single space and crevice on this C40 with dense and textured layers of pristine synth worship, creating a dark atmosphere that simultaneously feels otherworldly and manifested from within the depths of one’s memory. But what separates Traumland from other midwest industrial drone is the subtle yet direct framing of the album within power electronics. While others may have buried their PE influences deep inside synth textures, Amelang centers the genre and allows the drone to follow.

This tension between wanting to drift into a synth-laden soundscape and go full on PE by yelling shit through a flanger provides the narrative arc of the album. The opening track, “Sublimation,” sets the stage for this dilemma with a quick fade into a throbbing industrial lull that provides the foundation for the deteriorating high end textures that drive the track forward. Amelang then suddenly shifts gears by launching into a blast of white noise on “Jake’s Video” and builds the rest of the piece around a (heavily flanged) spoken text before burying a more aggressive vocal approach on “Each Body Alone” in a bed of low end oscillations. This back and forth between lulling drones and confrontational howls continues throughout the rest of the tape, shifting various influences from the forefront to the background and back again before landing on the straight ahead PE assault of “Uniform Touch.” Amelang then concludes the tape with “Bizarre Parallel Movement,” a perfect mirror of the opening synth dirge.

Taken as a whole, the work on Traumland feels right at home alongside other Midwestern dark synth classics while adding something unique to that legacy. The signature sound of this niche musical community, one that trades in a dedication to saturated drones and pristine production, is here in full force but grows in its full-on embrace of its power electronics influence. And while I’ll fully admit to being drawn into the album through the blast of nostalgia it provided, it’s the evolution beyond those memories that keeps bringing me back.