After rising to prominence in the “chill wave” electronic music scene in the early 2010’s and spending his early twenties touring the world, musician Nick Zanca, formerly known as Mister Lies, relocated to New York, ended his Mister Lie’s project and took time off from personal music all together. Leaning more into improvisational and concrete music, Nick produced for various artists like Wendy Eisenberg until he was spurred back into solo work by a destined finding during the winter of 2020. Zanca came across a long-lost field recording he made during his first Euro tour as Mister Lies in 2013, where he found himself surrounded by a "cacerolazo" in Istanbul, a form of protest where groups of people make noise by banging pots and pans and other household objects to call for attention. Reminiscent of the acts of support seen across cities like New York for healthcare workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The resulting interview takes place a week before Nick’s album titled Cacerolazo is released on Full Spectrum Records.

(Below is an edited text version of the full conversation contained in the audio.)

How’s your week been?

There are a lot of moving parts in life, right now I'm dealing with, without getting too far into it. It's like a when it rains, it floods, you know? But I'm stoked..I've been sitting with this particular body of music since really the beginning of the year, and I turned it out very quickly. Took me like, two months, or something, which is like, way shorter than any of the Lies stuff, or like any of the other records that I've worked on. It's just this very long gestation process, which will, you know, culminate in the release next week. I am generally just, you know, very excited about where things are headed, and gotten some good press assets and things like that. So far, it seems like it's been doing pretty well.

I’ve been really enjoying the Wendy Eisenberg record you produced. After a spell of producing for others, this is the first piece of solo work for you in a while. What’s it like to present something yourself after a long while of not doing so?

This is a definite new chapter for me, that feels very much attuned to what I would consider to be my musical lifeblood. The situation in which I came up in, the chillwave scene, when I was a teenager happened very fast and I feel like there was a lot of outside pressure to maintain this specific sonic identity that was more attuned to the audience that was consuming that kind of music, more than myself. So, to be able to do this now on my own terms, and have my own volition without really any outside influence... I mean, I haven't been working with the manager, a booking agent or anything like that since moving on from Mr. Lies, and it's just nice to permission grant for myself.

What has it been like engaging w/ the New York music scene?

I moved to New York, in 2014. And it was the same year that I put out a record, as Mr. Lies for Orchid Tapes. At the time, there was a lot of emphasis on bedroom, pop or whatever, you know, DIY sort of resources, but it was also at the same time being like, you know, co-opted by a lot of management and more big indie oriented things. I think a lot of my early experiences with the New York scene was just watching particular artists go down a very specific, creative trajectory.

I remember I saw, not even a year into living in the city, Mitski in the basement of the park church co op. And then I think the last time I saw her live was the Barclays show for Lorde that she opened up. Being kind of a window into that kind of trajectory is cool, but it also can be terrifying in its own way, you know, witnessing that firsthand; how an audience or a peripheral crowd engages with that. I really try to engage with things just on the basis of listenership and not really not really anything else.

What are your thoughts on being present as an artist, just making and creating, versus approaching something more research-based?

I don't think that it necessarily needs to be seen as a binary between presence and, research. I think, in general, they work in tandem. I think, generally speaking, I'm a firm believer in research. But I also definitely believe in this sort of duality of working intrinsically versus studying something, if you don't know how it works. That's prevalent in my experience with digital processing and Max MSP in particular, I approach it like a child basically, entirely based on feel.

I think presence is ultimately more important. You want to be able to catch any curveballs that come your way as an improviser would. But I also think that coming prepared enables you to roll with the punches, more smoothly.

I think about Stanislavski, who was a Russian theatre practitioner that all the American theater and musical theater programs sort of utilize in their curriculum, and his main text always assigned is An Actor Prepares. You want to be able to do the homework.

Looking at your latest work, Cacerolazo, how do you relate to the sonic photograph now? How has this experience influenced your concept of time?

Honestly my idea for this record sort of predates the record itself in a way. This one night in Istanbul coming across this protest. It was really the first and only real situation on that particular tour where we were coming into contact with something of humanitarian conflict or like a crowd of people, whatever you want to call it, that was just so much bigger than the sense of like television and playing a show every night and that's ultimately why you know, [it] stuck with me.

I had this idea in the back of my mind that if I ever find this recording after having lost it for a long time, I'm gonna drop everything that I'm doing and work on it. At the end of 2020, the next winter wave of the pandemic was happening and everybody was really starting to hunker down once again. I was cleaning our apartment, and I found this SD card. All the files were unlabeled but it was like literally the first WAV file that I clicked on and I was like “Oh man here we go.”

I was on autopilot almost the entire time I was touring Mr. Lies and putting those records out. Memory is obviously a bit foggy in places, so to find these documents and almost happen upon what it was like in proper time space as it was sort of progressing and stuff which was...for a while when I actually found all of the files for this I put off doing the archiving for a really long time because I was almost terrified of the conversations that would come up because I still have a lot feelings about coming up in that particular scene.

We’ve run articles on ethical sampling in the past. Considering the context of this recording, how do you contend with recording out in the world, especially as a visitor?

I would approach it just as that, as a visitor you know? As a guest in somebody else's house. You also have to have a reason to press record. Which is one of the funny things when I was sitting with all of this material. I don't know why I always had the recorder on at the time, it was as if I knew somehow that I would find this later.

I am much more sensitive to it now than I was at the time the recording was [created] used and I wouldn't blame it on anything else other than the fact that everything was sort of borrowed in the time of chillwave, sort of haphazardly without any sort of thought.

An early single of mine as Mr. Lies centered around this YouTube rip loop of the Baka people in Central Africa doing like water drumming and I was like “Okay this sounds like UK dubstep drum pattern or something like that.” That is not a decision I would at all make now.

That line of music, chill wave, it's pretty apolitical to begin with, but I don't think there was much thought being generated there if that makes sense.

What do you use when you’re recording in the field?

I swear by zoom recorders, pretty much since the beginning of you know, Mr. Lies, I've used them. Even if I could afford, like a suitcase set up with, the shotgun mic and the whole deal, I probably don't think I would go for it. It's like very sleek and sort of incognito. But it's also coming out of a sort of economy of means.

I often find that, particularly with the protest recording that there will be this phenomena that happens where the sounds can kind of exceed the fidelity of the thing that I'm also very attracted to. I've used them as room mics, even when we were doing the Wendy record, for a few of the sessions that we actually held like in [my] apartment.

Had any good craigslist gear swap interactions?

I mean, it's always funny. Because whoever is buying the gear, it's almost always like the antithesis to who you would expect. I remember one time, I think it was a Roland D-50 that I sold. I had a whole, sophisti-pop phase. The first album that I did with my band, Quiet Friend, was very Prefab Sprout or Scritti Politti. That’s still part of our DNA.

The guy that I sold it to looked me up after, he actually knew Mr. Lies stuff and tried to start asking me questions about programming and patches and stuff. Part of my attraction to early digital synths is just using the patches themselves. I'm not usually doing.., I mean, occasionally I'll step into programming and stuff, but [he was] like, “How did you get it to sound like that?” And it's like “I don’t know”.

I feel like, that's happening a lot behind closed doors, like around the actual exchange,

I know you do music supervision work for retailers. Within your art practice you capture spaces, what’s it like to make playlists for spaces vs. trying to capture spaces. How’s it different and how do they feed into each other?

I would say that they're two totally separate things.

When you're curating for a restaurant or a hotel it's completely in service of the corporate brand.

When I was first getting started, there was a huge learning curve. Songs that have super long intros out, for example, the very slow fade in of the guitar in ‘Burning Down the House’, by Talking Heads, that's out of the picture. The power of audio or music to make or break these hospitality spaces, it's pretty powerful.

There was one particular chain of barbecue places that I do in New York City, that were asking for soul music and stuff. And so it's like, okay, I'll throw James Brown in there that'll do it. So much as like, the loudest half second James Brown scream, and they're like, “Take all the James Brown out, immediately,”

A lot of the records that I'm producing outside of here are within the realm of experimental music and they demand more out of a listener, then a restaurant which is ultimately going to play the music as background.I hardly go to restaurants now because all of my attention is gonna be relegated towards the music that's playing. My brain is not wired to have conversations and do that at the same time!

How are you planning on presenting this music in regards to performance or a live context?

I am not, to be honest with you. This music is very studio headphone listening. It's concrete music basically. I'm really inspired by the French tradition of music concrete and all the production houses in like the 60s and 70s.

I think it was either Francoise Bayle or Michel Chion who coined the term ‘acousmatic music’, which is work that is meant to be heard, and not necessarily seen.

If I were to do presentations of this particular album, it would be you know, deployed in a space where the gathering aspect and the listening aspect are on the exact same plane which is hard to do increasingly.

I've been generally rolling with a lot of improvisers lately. There's Wendy obviously, but there's like a few others in the city that I occasionally just do sessions with. How I kind of want to present it and, you know, moving forward is sort of like a group interplay thing where there are, you know...it's never the same river twice, never the same players twice and going back to rolling with the punches, it's like, exactly that.

Seems like you have societal doom on your mind, how do you grow personally and artistically knowing that is a possibility? How are you dealing with doom? How are you still excited to grow as a person and make music?

I was having qualms about putting out the first Mr. Lies record, which was kind of a rush job in general, for all intents and purposes, and it was instilled in me really early on that whenever you're making a record, it's essentially like a personal document of where you are at a particular point, in my, in your life.

I think these days, I sort of see music, especially some of the heavier sections of this record, as a means of channeling the inner scream that was cultivated, being built up, between this global health issue and more personal aspects. Things generally sort of stacking up. I feel like improvisation and collage and these idioms are a good means of working through those sorts of feelings. So if nothing else, it’s a question of catharsis.

Based on entering this 10+ years ago. Have you seen anything that feels like positive change in the music industry? What do you think can still stand to improve?

Networking events like SXSW where theres this sense of passive listenership. I think this time in isolation has [been] generating a lot of thought towards what performance is and what we can do and [now] theres more attention to sonic detail then there was.

My experience from the few times I’ve gone to see shows is I’m much more attentive and rapt as an audience member. I went to my friend Taja’s (L’Rain) show and I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room where there was that much attention to the sounds on the stage. I think people are more attuned to this idea of collective listening.

In terms of young musicians, with [the] saturation of Bandcamp, it’s hard to be optimistic but what one lacks in material wealth is made up by the the wide scope of sonic culture. I don’t think I would’ve gotten [the] coverage I have for this record two or three years ago for example. People are interested in quotidian experience, when they’re listening to something they’re listening for lived experience, they’re listening for identity now. I don’t know if that was [always] the case.

Basically, what I’m really tired of is musicians that really play up the imagery and character cosplay over the music and I feel like that is going down and people are really processing things with their ears. Because they’re had the time...the extended time to do so.

Last question — How do you say Hii? How do you greet people?

I try to lead with asking the person in question how their day was. It shows genuine interest and it allows me to steer it from there. You don't want to go into a conversation blindly. You want to enter the room and have the sense that you’ve read it.