Zac Nelson - New Once - VINYL LP

Following the dissolution of his groundbreaking collage-pop duo, The Books, Zammuto rebounded with an eponymous debut album submerged in transitional anxiety and audio effects designed to intentionally obscure the very humanistic qualities that marked Nick Zammuto's best work in The Books. An enormous weight has been lifted from Nick Zammuto and you can hear as much in the opening minutes of Anchor. The arrangements have more space, the songs are more dynamic, and the vocals are delivered with a confident intimacy that is almost alarmingly beautiful (the collaborations with the enchanting Daniela Gesundheit of Canadian indie-pop duo Snowblink are particularly transcendent). Written, performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered entirely at home in Zammuto's converted tractor garage recording studio (pictured on the front cover) using an expanding array of vintage analog outboard equipment, Anchor embodies the very DIY lifestyle and self-sufficient approach that has come to define all that is Zammuto. His is a rarified art made on it's own terms far away from the insular feedback loop of trend cycles and commodied expectations. His home is his anchor, and Anchor is his home.

It is indeed a pleasure to find myself writing the introduction to this record programme, the result of an extended gestation spanning more than a decade of my musical research. The common thread of this project is the search for a personal reflection in the mirror of the anthropomorphic musical instrument par excellence, the human voice. Finding a parallelism between vocal cords and guitar strings, by arranging originally vocal works. This primordial and initiatory sound in the communication between living beings is here understood as a medium that goes under the musical epidermis, towards a more anthropologically horizontal pulsation and resonance. Over the centuries, from the Gregorian chant onwards, we have witnessed a fervent Inchmusically orientedInch approach to sound and metrics, in favour of instrumental performance and dance. However, in my experience, the most effective musical expressions have always been characterised by a communicativeness that goes beyond the instrument, revealing an expressive flow that, unmediated, takes us back to the apparent naturalness of the vocal expression. Similarly, from the opposite perspective, it was enlightening for me to listen to Carmelo Bene's recordings and discover that Valerio Binasco studied The Tempest using the metronome, to get in contact with Inchthe musicality of speechInch. The intention to interbreed with the human voice has been and still is for me an inexhaustible source of inspiration. This research, which can be extended to compositions of all epochs, is presented here in a compact version, through the arrangement of works by two authors belonging to German Romanticism.

Sandy Kelly - Leaving It All Behind [COMPACT DISCS] UK - Import date 10/13/2023