Portfolio
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© Nick Zazove, 2026
Most Recent Works
Most Recent Compositions
Final recording for upcoming album.
“simple. stoic.”
Date of Video Release:
December 2026
• Final Cut of "simple. stoic." by Nick Zazove.
• Footage shot on Canon EOS M3 composed and edited using Touchdesigner, then arranged in Final Cut Pro.
Additional Cinematography by Alex Glassman His: [LinkedIn] [Personal Website]
Found footage:
Charade. Directed by Stanley Donen, performances by Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, Universal Pictures, 1963. Song contains dialogue samples from the same film. [Film is Public Domain]
Final recording for upcoming album (some lyrics may be altered).
Additional Vocals by Michaela Marchi Her: [Bio]
Song composed entirely out of one second recording of a man, Edgar Cortes, saying his own name into a microphone. The audio clip was then processed using extensively a wide variety of analog & digital synthesis techniques.
Music Composition & Production
“From Me to You”
Date of Album Release:
04/02/2025
• Electronic songs created entirely from short samples of the eponymous song recipient’s name, spotlighting an array of synthesis and sampling techniques.
• These songs are intended as gifts for people of great inspiration to me, personally and/or professionally.
“Siren”
Date of Composition
04/02/2025
Verse-Chorus form, constructed from manipulated sample of tornado siren, various soft synths, and drum programming coded in Sonic Pi (Ruby).
Multiple melodic themes, classical counterpoint, 12-tone serialism, and electronic sound design.
Inspired by the electronic excursions of Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie; the compositional approaches of Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg; and the beat-driven aesthetics of DJ Shadow and DJ Premier.
Artistic concept explores the blurring of freedom and repression as diametric equals in ubiquitous digital code structures, inaccessible to the public thus they shape modes of expression by design. Analogous to the birth of serialism from the embers of 1940s fascism —> maximalist digital programming techniques that similarly reconstruct timbral language from bits and integers.
“Late Nights”
Date of Composition:
12/23/2024
^ Sonic Pi Code Example
Live, improvised studio performance of my modular synthesizer.
Inspired by artists such as Morton Sobotnick, Pauline Oliveros, and Aphex Twin.
Artistic concept, quite literally, is to show how I like to spend my free time — particularly as a frantic dead-of-night music composer.
“Dreaming of Paris'“
Date of Song/Music Video Release:
6/12/25
“Dreaming of London'“
Date of Song/Visualizer Release:
12/26/24
Amorphous, The Girl Who Dreams: 1/23/26
Museum Installation
Dead Alive (Work in Progress)
Estimated Date of Completion:
December 2026
Audio & Video by Nick Zazove
Dead Alive is a generative video-composition instrument: an algorithmic engine that maps pre-shot footage onto 3D geometry in TouchDesigner, driven in real time by a joystick and by data accumulated from everyone who played before.
A participant steers a first-person camera through a corridor locked to a five-minute song, scrolling forward at a constant rate. Low-poly terrain generates around them, video maps onto the surfaces, and spatial audio moves with the camera. Over the run, a single maggot becomes a community of maggots, which folds back into the shapeshifting imagery around it. Push to the wall and you reappear on the other side.
Clip order shifts with the joystick. The narrative doesn't. Every run looks different and arrives at the same place.
The piece asks whether human life is separable in value from other forms of life, or from the technologies that assign it value — and it makes the participant the mechanism rather than the subject. You have real agency inside a boundary you can feel but never see.
Current build: single-channel projection, 5.1 audio
In development: four-channel projection, infrared audience sensing, and recursion across runs.
Film Mixing
These works are private at the discretion of each director, and are thus password protected.
Reach out to me directly for password for these works specifically, if you don’t have it already
“Our Time Here”
Director: Victor Ramos
5.1 Audio Mix by Nick Zazove
• Victor did the sound design himself; no film score was used. He was quite meticulous about what he wanted from the sound leveling and spatial design.
“Orchidaceae”
Director: Maya Castranovo
5.1 Audio Mix & Additional Sound Design by Nick Zazove
• Involved, close collaboration between director and me in post-production. I created the surreal sound effects and experimental panning structures stitched throughout the film.
Introducing: Carlo Villa
Date of Release:
09/03/2026
Interview and editing by Nick Zazove
Music by Carlo Villa
Interviews
• Audio documentary podcast episode that explores Kent, UK based folk artist Carlo Villa.
• Three hours of interview tape accumulated, edited down to sixteen-and-a-half minutes.
• Explores themes related to composing music thoroughly in an era that may not be equipped to fully understand it — but continuing because one is intrinsically motivated.
Introducing: Nep
Date of Release:
09/01/2026
Interview and editing work by Nick Zazove
Music by Nep
• Audio documentary podcast episode that explores Florida-raised and LA-based pop artist, Nep.
• One hour of tape accumulated, edited down to ten minutes.
• Explores themes of escaping a home that never felt exactly like home but experiencing an ironic homesickness that compels one to write an entire album.
Bryan Fox
Date of Release:
TBD
Interview and editing by Nick Zazove
Short podcast episode about Bryan Fox, a former LA-based actor and photographer turned-tennis professional.
Explores themes related to finding peace in oneself after experiencing the turbulence of trying to break through the LA art scene.
Video Work
• Four audiovisual projects based on original musical compositions. Edited in Final Cut Pro and footage includes original shots, found footage, and some generative videos made in Adobe After Effects; Jitter, & Processing.
—> Click on any of the squares below to check out the visuals!
For Jescelyn
• Merges sampled public domain footage, Processing-generated visuals, and original cinematography through a Fluxus-inspired editing style, threading deliberately disjointed and grotesquely oversaturated imagery into a critical polemic on systemic inequality in America that ultimately argues for more empathy.
• A major inflection point for my video skills, built with tools I'd never touched before. It captures a raw, almost naive grit that my later work never quite replicated.
Cut off the Head
• An outsider art video, and my most explorative foray into the generative capabilities of Processing in particular (After Effects also used). Force implied by the intensity of the shots a-la Eisenstein.
• Song composed entirely in Logic Pro using ES P and ES2, some field recordings, and a built-in drum kit.
• Song took three years to compose, directly inspired by Beck’s “Odelay” in formal approach.
• Video itself compiles array of footage across my entire career up to this point. Demonstrates the collage style my my video editing skills employ.
Add the Heart
• Footage is 99%+ comprised of one single still manipulated through After Effects, then edited together in Final Cut Pro.
• Song is 100% composed from a sample of me saying my friend’s name using Logic Pro X’s built in instruments: Sample Alchemy, Sampler, and flex pitching.
Ghosts (Visualizer)
Analog Studio
Shi-An Costello, “Chopin Etude No.3”
Mixed & Engineered by Nick Zazove
Date
02/19/2025
Prepared piano recorded through AWS SSL 24/48 Console. A/B stereo pair over the strings, two lavalier mics taped to the piano bridge, and an X/Y pair near the piano lid parallel compressed using an LA-610.
The engineering intent was to emphasize performance of prepared elements and maximally preserve the dynamic range over a subtle, warm bed of compression.
Nick Zazove, “The Haraway Cyborg Execution”
Composed, mixed, and engineered by Nick Zazove
Date
03/27/2025
Solo-improvised modular synth, voice, and piano recorded through SSL’s in-line mixing mode.
SM58 into studio, tie-line to modular synth pre-amp. Piano stereo pair C414s; multitracks later re-amped through a Yamaha piano amp.
Modular synth stereo image captured line-in to console, bused into parallel LA-610.
Mixed digitally in Logic Pro, mastered using SSL console + outboard gear.
Artistic concept explores duality of identity in a digital age. Social media algorithms hijack people’s reward systems to hyper-individualize their feeds, yet the platforms perpetuate a mirage of open communication. This practice has normalized political radicalization.
Evan Steinkoler, “Spiral Waltz”
Mixed & Engineered by Nick Zazove
Date
02/19/2025
Jazz quartet recorded through AWS SSL 24/48 Console.
A/B KM184 stereo pair over the piano strings, SM58 vocal mic; cardioid C414 at the F-hole of the bass; cardioid C414 pointed toward first finger tone hole of clarinet; 10 multi-mic setup across drum kit (overheads placed equidistant from snare, spaced apart for wide image); omnidirectional room mic placed in center of quartet.
The engineering intent was to emphasize room cohesion, togetherness of band.
Sonic Youth Documentary
A documentary about the band Sonic Youth. The book “Girl in a Band” by Kim Gordon and documentary “1991: The Year Punk Broke” by Dave Markey were the most prevalent source materials cited in this work.
To be added by 9/8/26: Film Score Reel
For now, I will add the four songs to be included in the reel: