From the outside, a mess of tape loops, guitars and their pedals, synthesizers, cultural minutiae and pages of magazines litter the floors of the east Toronto studio that Zanski haunts. It doesn’t seem to make sense.
From the inside, it’s a delicate ecosystem, a roughly calculated process; the sounds seem to flow through passages in the room, in and out of pieces of vintage gear, over and under cassette tapes and drum machines, vibrating the room under layers of shimmery guitars, each cable into the next. It’s a miracle anything gets done. And yet.
A multi-instrumentalist, Zanski embeds a calculated disaffection through his vocals amid a breadth of live and electronic instrumentation including guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers, and anything else found in his home studio, resulting in a confluence of genre-bending sounds and experimental ephemera, an idiosyncratic combination.
Zanski’s music is the result of years of self-reflection and self-production; his 2021 debut ‘Phenomena’ explored the dreamlike sounds of lower fidelity recordings and subtle electronic production, while his breakthrough hit ‘Fool’ weaved a sultry and lowkey vocal over a thundering bassline and minimalist production. His new music, starting with ‘Canines’, exists to recontextualise the whole process, with a more organic, all-thoughts-bared approach to songwriting and production.
