Nick Zanca - Cacerolazo (2021)

Full Spectrum Records returns with what might be our most surprising release of the year: Nick Zanca’s Cacerolazo. The debut release under his given name – having now fully abandoned his former alias as the ambient pop and experimental dance music producer Mister Lies – Cacerolazo provides both an intimate exploration of the artist in transit and a full-throated declaration of intent as he stakes out a fresh creative chapter in his career.

Since the release of the final Mister Lies full-length in 2019, Zanca intentionally prioritized production projects for others and collaboration; at the more abstract end of the spectrum, he manned the desk for improvising guitarist Wendy Eisenberg, while he also holds a few production credits for R&B singer and Drake affiliate PARTYNEXTDOOR on the more mainstream side of things. Over time, he began moving increasingly towards more idiosyncratic forms of expression, a creative journey that has now culminated in this new body of work.

Cacerolazo takes its onus from a cherished – and at one point presumed lost, before Zanca discovered it buried in the dark recesses of a desk drawer in his studio – field recording captured in the midst of an Istanbulite political demonstration during his first European tour as Mister Lies in 2013. Existing in a space that is somewhere between Luc Ferrari’s ‘augmented reality’ experiments and the sort of high-definition ambience trafficked in by Visible Cloaks, the music extrudes raw sonic materials into new plastic forms and bristling textures, a far cry from the reverb-drenched dance music of his former oeuvre.

In this context, it is fitting that the album takes its title from a style of populist protest that emphasizes the creation of righteous noise using household items, kitchenware, and found objects en masse. Not only is Zanca rebelling against his former creative identity, he’s straining against the rote structures of pop music that hold back so many artists from discovering their own true voice, generating a compelling friction between past and present identities, shared experiences, and the structures of memory itself. He describes the album as “[a] sonic landscape informed by isolation and world-weariness, forming a dialogue with a past in which travel, contact, and chance could still be taken for granted."