I first encountered New Haven ambient project Renee Zon before NHV Noise got started, while I was rushing to the 2023 Bleep/Blorp Festival of Synthesis and Electronic Music at my alma mater UMass Lowell. Due to a sick child, I was running quite late and saw hardly any of the festival, but to ease my nerves I listened to the Bandcamp releases of two of the other festival performers on the way there, and one of them was Renee Zon. With this as my driving music I arrived in much better spirits.

I reached out to Renee Zon after the festival to learn more about the synth scene in Connecticut and it turned out he had this idea in the works for a zine focused on the local DIY scene called NHV Noise. So here we are! Renee Zon has four Bandcamp releases so far. I gave them a deeper listen, and then pestered the musician-editor himself with a few questions.

Bob3

On “Intro,” crashing sawtooth chords and an ethereal chorus announce build a sense of mystery and awe before a really infectious drum hook kicks in and propels this album into high gear. Here we get a preview of the album’s general vibe: spacey but not aloof, and somehow catchier than these ambient soundscapes have a right to be.

In “I on the Horizon,” the sonic palette of the intro dissolves into a polyrhythm of ostinato and arpeggio underpinned by distant chanting vocals that trickle through layers of delay and reverb. Wow and flutter begin to creep in. Melodic themes form and then playfully dissolve just as we begin to catch on, until the track gracefully deconstructs itself into silence.

“\<3 Murmur” begins with an understated but energetic xylophone-like percussive FM hook. More soft melodic voices flesh out a chill melodic vibe until a toe-tapping hip-hop beat that pulls us ahead abruptly (but with perfectly choreographed timing) into the next track.

“Whisper” is the spaciest of any track on this release. Plucked bass and percussion like a slow and well-oiled train gently chugging along back a delay-and-reverb-heavy chime melody that seems somehow to echo through the ether of interstellar space. It’s like floating.

The chill ambient guitar loop that starts off “Flora Saturnalia” comes in haltingly at first, as if through a failing amp or a dying radio. A simple hip-hop drum loop comes to establish some structure, but then an electric piano riff and bossa nova drum section swerve us in a whole new ecstatic direction, developing there until the organ leads us out. This is doubtlessly the catchiest piece of the release.

In “I See Non Alligator,” Bob3 concludes by taking the themes it has developed in a much more retro-digital direction. There’s a lot of heavily bitcrushed drum samples on this one, and melodic voices overall reminiscent of classic demoscene.

“Morus Rubra”

At the outset of this single, a thundering ultra-low bass, subtle kick, and granular strings recall the outer-space vastness of “Whisper” on Bob3, but this time in a less euphoric and more contemplative mode. This ensemble comes to a full conclusion before yielding to the track’s second act, built around a cyclical but spontaneous duet of plucked-string and piano-like FM voices evoking plant-like growth against the backdrop of cold void.

Invisible Star

This gentle four-track EP is a perfect soundtrack for stargazing. “Intro” evokes cosmic background radiation or a flying saucer sighting with its distorted, heavily delayed strings and otherworldly glissando, but for all its portent the rest of the release proves to be a decidedly friendly and chill encounter of the ambient kind.

On “1,” slowly shuffling drums and electric organ undergird a piano that plays in short, soft melodic bursts that float about in the ether, their orbits overlapping and bringing them first closer and then further away.

“2” is a slow, steady, and delicate solo acoustic piano piece. Its subdued expression evokes living-room familiarity while its shifting tonalities and consistent one-two rhythm suggest a wistful ambiguity of feeling.

“3” brings back the relaxed drums, overlaid with a slowly meandering electric piano line and a dreamy sci-fi pad that twinkles like a sky full of stars over an uncrowded rooftop bar on a perfect summer night.

Rotten Apples

For this newest EP (3 tracks, 10 minutes, released 12 August 2023), Renee Zon leans into a sonic niche he calls “plant synth”, citing Mort Garson and Tomita as primary influences.

On “Moon Plant”, gentle but somewhat lively acoustic drums, accompanied by conventional electric guitar and bass alongside scintillating synth distortion. Cascading riffs lead into a blissful trance, babbling like a brook in the springtime.

“Vulgaris” is bass-led, slower, and more contemplative, with more kick, but its tonalities remain warm and harmonious, like what I imagine a night chorus of forest undergrowth would sound like if I only knew how to listen.

“Smoke”, with its steady hi-hat rhythm, jazzy vibraphone jam, and wildly pitch-bent pads, reminded me somewhat of Satoshi Okubo’s compositions for the Last Window series of Nintendo DS mystery games, albeit more spontaneous and psychedelic.

Interview

Q: My article focuses on the releases from your solo project Renee Zon, but you have your hands in a few other projects; for example you play with a psychedelic punk band called Big Sigh and of course there’s this little community you’re building around NHV Noise, which is also a creative endeavor. Firstly, what’s new or upcoming for you that I haven’t captured here? And more broadly, how do these efforts feed into each other?

A: Thanks for asking! Big Sigh has been on going for quite a while and is my first time acting as the leader of a band. My bandmates and I have been traveling around New England playing as much as possible. We have a new EP coming out late September.

I am currently starting another band named The Lazy Faire for the darker side of my songwriting work. Big Sigh covers a lot of my optimistic music, but I have started to hear a lot of comparisons of my voice to Lou Reed and wanted to build on that. The Lazy Faire is essentially just an alternative route for any song Big Sigh can’t get to. Possibly a point of interest, The Lazy Faire has already preemptively decided to avoid having any internet presence, so anyone interested will have to see us live.

Of course, NHV noise which may be my most successful project so far. I think the reader is likely very aware of the blog, but as a footnote the success of the blog can be quantified as over 100 new followers each month since we started under 6 months ago, and over 2000 views of our website in the month of July.

How they tie together… I guess it’s just personal exploration. As a musician, I am originally a classically trained pianist, but I decided early on that I wanted to be a multi-instrumentalist. I really think that learning as much as possible has enhanced my overall understanding of creativity and music in general.

Q: We talked once about our shared appreciation for Tomita’s seminal 1974 album of Debussy arrangements Snowflakes are Dancing (also released as Claire de Lune) and how it probably had a bigger impact on subsequent generations of ambient or even video game music than people might realize. This got me thinking about artistic influences and how they don’t always have to come from the same genre or even the same artform you’re working in. What artistic influences affect your work that people might not expect or recognize at first glance?

A: Well, my love for that Tomita work is grounded in my love of Debussy. Being classically trained, Debussy was quite fun to learn about, I found impressionist classical music extremely satisfying to play as well as quite lovely. That said, I also love Bach which some would say is on the opposite end of the classical music spectrum.

Besides that, I think any artist who breaks the norms is an inspiration to me. I spent my early 20s in Boston watching some of the strangest musical acts at a college flop house venue, which greatly expanded my personal tastes far beyond what they had been prior.

For ambient music, besides Isao Tomita, I love Aphex Twin, Oneohtrix Point Never, Mort Garson, Ann Annie, ARP, Steve Reich, and Wendy Carlos.

Q: Your recordings create an aural sense of space. We can’t always choose what kinds of spaces we record in, but reverb, delay, pitch modulation, and dynamic range can all affect the size and characteristics of the room that a listener builds in their mental map; you can close your eyes and think “I’m in tiny wooden room” or “I’m in a huge open space” based on the sound, and then of course we’re conditioned to listen for clues to the relative positions of the instruments. How do you decide what kind of space you’re creating with a recording? How can that change over the course of the track, and what technical approaches do you take to creating that sonic space?

A: I think outside the typical reverb we think of as creating space, that time, speed, and quiet are all extremely important factors. Dissonance can also close or open up the space we are hearing or visualizing in our mind. I guess my goal is to create as natural a sound as possible, and natural in the sense of acoustics. The room sound I think my subconscious leans into what a concert hall may sound like.

My best method for creating that space is simply closing my eyes and allowing my ears to guide me. I think practicing on creating a connection between what we hear and how we see can be very useful. Close your eyes and try to see everything you hear, music and sounds are all waves which are very physical things. I find myself seeing a spinning globe in between those spaces where different soundwaves meet.

Q: Do you use a lot of generative synthesis techniques? How do you integrate generative, planned, and improvised elements into a composition?

A: Nothing is planned for Renee Zon, all the recordings are made through improvisation and stream of consciousness. As far as I am aware, it seems many artists I look up to speak about channeling creativity, that it actually comes from outside themselves, and I think that is true for me as well. Capturing inspiration is a difficult skill, but one I spent a lot of time perfecting, and also a skill which certainly paid off. The channeling of that creation, even if it doesn’t always feel like mine, connects me to other worldly things. Or maybe I just like the mysteriousness of it, finding places inside my mind I wasn’t aware existed.

Generative synthesis is not something I understand very well, or I guess is something I am just beginning to learn. If I were to make a comment on my understanding of it, I experiment and then allow my ears to connect the sounds to the emotions I want to feel.

Q: What are your five-year plans? What new creative directions do you hope to explore in the next five years? What do you want NHV Noise to look like in five years? And what do you want to happen in the creative community around New Haven during that time?

A: I would like to score a film of some sort eventually, maybe an indie horror film or some other strange visual or film project I can use as a muse to do some more of that channeling. I guess I would also like to connect synthesizer music to my classical background more, perhaps in a Steve Reich or Pat Methany styled chamber music group. I think my intention with most of the Renee Zon work is to make a connection between acoustic and digital sounds.

As far as NHV noise, my only goal for creating the zine, newspaper, blog, flyer, whatever you want to call it was to try and give the opportunities I wanted when I was starting out to other people breaking into the scene. I strongly believe in creativity for the sake of it. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot about how we all should use creativity as a practice for growing our souls, which I agree with. Based on that, I think encouraging others to create can only make our world a better place. Via diverse thought, or even just as a way to educate ourselves. If I can pass on any encouragement I may have lacked when I was younger to another person, that makes me happy.

I am flattered that you have so much faith in NHV noise to suggest it will even be around in 5 years. Perhaps I would like to hand it’s management off to someone else eventually. Overall, I want it to create a higher standard for how we all as artists interact with each other. Whether or not art is a job or a hobby, I think we as artists should all consider each other colleagues. Encouraging collaboration as well as kindness is what I hope will continue in the long run. I can’t imagine what the zine will be 5 years from now, but I can say I am super excited about our second issue. It is lining up to be a big improvement over the first.

Q: Can you tell me anything about the beautiful cat on the cover of Bob 3?

A: Love that question! I worked at a cat shelter in Boston for a short while. The job ultimately wasn’t for me, but the white cat was one which I fell in love with. Bob was mean to and seemed to hate every other volunteer or employee there, but for some reason loved me. I would have loved to adopt him if I had been in the position to do so at the time.

Apparently white cats are the most genetically… messed up I guess, but I love them. Bob had very light blonde stripes on his tail… he was quite the beautiful cat.

My cat I own now is a grey tuxedo named Bobby Bear, perhaps after that other Bob. The 3 at the end of the EP title was an aesthetic choice, but I recently was working at a house with 3 white cats, and felt connected to old Bob in that moment.

Bob I guess was a sort of spirit guide during a rougher time in my life, and maybe I wanted to honor him. If he taught me anything, it was to love the ones who appreciate you and let the rest go. Pretty deep for a cat, and I’m not sure I knew that at the time, but looking back now that feels right.