Selected Works
© Nick Zazove, 2025
I performed, wrote, mixed, and engineered all elements of the works on this page unless otherwise stated.
The works shown on this page are a small selection of my catalog demonstrate which professional acumen in music composition, production, analog audio tracking, and visual media.
Music Composition & Production
“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.
^ Sonic Pi Code Example
“Late Nights”
Date of Composition:
12/23/2024
“Glass Hands”
Date of Release:
1/25/2025
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.
7-minute rap song that showcases lyrical dexterity alongside evolving, atmospheric production.
Lyrically nspired by artists such as MF DOOM, Aesop Rock, and Saul Williams. Production follows the aesthetic of artists such as Squarepusher, King Tubby, and Massive Attack.
Song lyrics explore my working artist-perspective of fractured reality in a digitized, modern media ecosystem, and how it has lead to the general expectation that demagogic strongmen fix problems more quickly than the complexities suggest. The narrator’s fractured identity mirrors, in “Looking Glass,” the very media landscape that communicates his social commentary through a polemic, non-human portrait of mental breakdown.
“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.
• Each song demonstrates an eclectic, varied array of digital synthesis and sampling techniques. They are quirky, emotionally elaborate, and stylistically distinct from one another.
• Intended as gifts for people of great inspiration to me during a pivotal period of artistic growth.
Audiovisual Works
Four audiovisual projects based on original musical compositions. Created using non-linear video editors such as Final Cut Pro and visual coding programs such as Adobe After Effects; Max/MSP’s Jitter, & Processing.
Audio Tracking — Studio
Shi-An Costello, “Chopin Etude No.3”
Mixed & Engineered by Nick Zazove
Date
02/19/2025
Prepared piano recorded through a 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
Improvised modular synth, voice, and piano recorded using SSL’s in-line mixing mode.
SM58 into studio, tie-line to modular synth pre-amp. Piano hi C414, audio re-amped through 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.
Artistic concept explores duality of identity and gender in a digital age driven by a paradox where hyper-individualistic algorithms embolden into mob-mentality. Compare and contrast a real-world devolution into fascism with the normalization of pseudonymous anonymity online — connected by tech establishments normalizing political radicalization.
Documentary Work
My final project for my college senior seminar — 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 primary source materials for this work.