Zammuto - Zammuto - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

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. Album Tracks 1. Good Graces 2. Great Equator 3. Hegemony 4. Henry Lee 5. Need Some Sun 6. Don't Be a Tool 7. Electric Ant 8. 10 9. Stop Counting 10. Sinker 11. Your Time 12. Code Breaker

The 37th Momus album started as a pre-election warning against the 47th US President in the form of a song called Orange Pills (Inchdon't swallow themInch being the take-away). Somehow the American electorate failed to listen and elected Trump anyway. The issue, for non-MAGA people, then became where to position oneself on a spectrum running from quietism to activism. It's a theme which bounces through Quietism, a quiet yet poppy album focused on the sound of a real acoustic guitar (the machine which Inchkills fascistsInch, as Woody Guthrie liked to say). One might want to reduce the idiotic noise of this world, to retreat into a privileged world of beauty and intelligence, to become an introvert or a recluse. But politics cannot be denied, even by a Paris-based aesthete. In a new take on the old cliché InchFirst they came for the quietists and I said nothing...Inch One tiny piece of aesthetic activism going on here is the choice of a South American musical idiom 1960s bossa nova, partly generated by 2020s AI tools which are North American. A secondary theme - very much related to the use of AI - is mimicry, and the dialectical tug between authenticity and the synthetic, human input and the impact of robotics. What's real, what's fake, and which of those - the mask or the supposed face beneath - gets us to a more interesting place? A filmic vocabulary appears there are continuity girls, spoiler alerts, actors whose props win Academy Awards. At the end the album presents it's human author with an imaginary medal, for this is his Inchimperial phaseInch - a double-edged sword representing both his own artistic zenith and a period in which the world is dominated by new empires, old oligarchs. Album Tracks 1. The Actor 2. Orange Pills 3 3. 30,000 Nights 4. My Apprentice Devil 5. Spoiler Alert 6. The Quietist 7. Noise Reduction 8. Trauma Bingo 9. Th

2014 Asian pressing. KT Music.