Nick Storring’s work is no stranger to these pages, but his latest album, Mirante, is a revelation. This sonic homage to Brazil sidesteps cliché, instead channeling an impressionistic current that rises from the South. Lithe patterns ripple through winding corridors and ephemeral tide marks traced in sand, the music feeling both rooted and fleeting. Expressive cadences propel it forward, as if carried by an upward-moving chain, with each new environment becoming another pulse in its bloodstream. Mirante is truly something special.
Mirante is out now on We Are Busy Bodies.
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Let’s go back to the beginning. I’d love to hear about some of your earliest memories of music and sound – are there certain things that stand out to you as memorable or formative from when you were younger? What are some of your first memories related to music?
I was a pretty weird kid and loved music passionately from a very young age. Being the eldest child (and an only one for my first 6 years), my parents have held onto my earliest, scribbliest drawings, and many of those depict guitars, saxophones, or even fake album covers that feature my parents, the neighbor, and our cat as the band. My trusty brown Fisher-Price tape recorder was a favorite toy as well as my assortment of plastic guitars, whistles, and other odds and ends.
I spent my first 25 years in Kitchener, Ontario, a mid-sized city about an hour west of Toronto and I can distinctly remember a few local and nearby sources of early musical wonder. Kitchener is home to the second-largest Oktoberfest in the world, and a sizable German immigrant community (it actually used to be called Berlin prior to the First World War). There were two Oktoberfest-related carillon, one that had more animatronic features and another that was enclosed in a Bavarian-looking Gazebo. I also remember this very odd place just outside of town that was brimming with an assortment of player pianos and other mechanical instruments and games. There was also the science arcade (eulogized on Tony Price’s latest LP) at the Ontario Science Centre which had numerous instruments from analog synths to gamelan instruments.
When I was little, my parents would grocery shop at this store called Hi-Way Market, one of those vast jack-of-all-trades stores you don’t see anymore. They had a robust toy section and even their own musical instrument shop and at a certain point when I was a toddler I became absolutely obsessed with the idea of getting this toy accordion I saw on display there. I think I may have even had a dream about it, I wanted it so badly. I asked Santa for it but he politely declined. The additional bit of context there was that my favorite TV show at that time was Polka Time, yet another local Oktoberfest offshoot. Neither of my parents were German or that into Oktoberfest so they were bemused by this fixation.
When did you start playing an instrument? And from there, what made you want to start making and playing your own music?
I started learning the cello quite early, early enough that my first cello was just a viola with an endpin, having already shown considerable interest in all things musical. I think it was around age four because I know that I stopped for a year once I started kindergarten.
My mother enrolled me in lessons because she had copyedited a news story about the local Suzuki school (she worked for the local paper). The idea of learning by ear was appealing to both my parents. My mom had done piano lessons but had found the standard classical approach frustrating as a youngster. My dad’s musical background was more intuitive and rooted in folk music. I’m super grateful that I learned that way because it primed me to think of music as something open-ended where I had agency, even if I was just learning by copying my teacher.
In terms of composing and playing my own music, I feel as though that was always in the back of my mind. There wasn’t a specific motivating factor, it just made sense to me somehow.
I remember mucking about with Atari Music Composer on the family computer as a really young kid. By the time I was in grade 6, I had acquired several toy keyboards and commandeered the family guitar, starting a “band” with a friend — we ended up singing an original song in front of the whole school. Everything changed in the summer of that school year when I saw the Quay Brothers-directed video for “Are We Still Married?” by His Name Is Alive. I never knew music could sound like that. This prompted me to not only start actively digging into weirder music via college/ community radio, the nascent Internet, and pestering record store clerks but also to experiment with making music myself. My parents got me a cheap little Radio Shack mixer and I had sent away (yes, by mail—it came as a 3 ½” diskette) for a demo version of this MIDI sequencing program. I would write little things on this software, and then plug the computer and a walkman into the mixer so I could play found sound on cassettes over top of the sequences.
And it only escalated from there. My birthday present in Grade 9 was a brief recording session and a spot on a compilation CD organized by someone my family knew. Apart from a more gothy band called Weave, I was very much the outlier. My contributions were a piece I made with samples on ScreamTracker, and a very Bach-derived solo cello piece (apart from some digital delay). The next year I saved up for a DX7 and throughout high school I continued pursuing music composition as much as I could, shoehorning into every class project and school assembly that I could. The logical next step was to study composition formally in university.
Let’s talk about the new record, Mirante. It’s described as your most rhythmic album to date. Was this a deliberate direction, or did it emerge naturally during the creative process?
The answer to this question isn’t a straightforward one as the album was composed in three discrete phases. The two heavily percussive tracks (“Falta De Ar” and “Terra Da Garoa”) were created quite a bit earlier than the remaining material and with those, I definitely had pursued beats very deliberately. A game I’ve found myself playing with myself over the past five years is poking at the edges of various electronic genres with my music, all the while maintaining my Dogme95-style rules I impose on myself (acoustic/electric instruments only, super minimal electronic processing). Both of these tracks emerged from that thinking…
The second phase was the tracks that comprise the score for Yvonne Ng’s dance piece Sleeping, Tucked in the Lonely Purple (which appears as “Roxa I/ II/ III” on the record) and the pulsed feel emerged very organically there. I’ve been working with Yvonne for over a decade now and typically she starts developing the movement before I start making the music. The rhythmic stuff in those three pieces just sort of came as a consequence of the compositional process. When we paired it with the choreography, it made a lot of sense straight away.
The final phase began as I came to understand what would be the album’s thematic lens. I had observed that the three “Roxa” pieces paired nicely with those earlier then-orphaned beat-driven tracks. The other thing that I became aware of was just how much my recent trip to Brazil had informed the character of the score directly, and the fact that the clangy almost post-punk feel of both “Falta De Ar” and “Terra Da Garoa” reminded me both of São Paulo’s urban intensity and some of the music coming out Brazil.
Eric Chenaux might have planted the seed of this idea when he wrote the liner notes for my album Newfoundout; the two percussive cuts were crafted in that same time period. He wrote:
“I hear Brazilian singers.
Clearly.
And clearly they are not there.
The music seems convinced of the presence of Brazilian singers.
That was my first coherent thought after listening to Newfoundout
Now.”
From there, I composed “Mirante” and “Parque Tingui” from an awareness of the album’s emergent theme: Brazil. On the titular piece, the rhythmic aspect largely came about naturally but was steered by my desire for cohesion across the album. By this point, I knew exactly where these tracks were going to fall in the overall sequence. “Parque Tingui” is actually the lone piece that doesn’t have a strong underlying rhythmic base.
You’ve incorporated Brazilian instruments like cavaquinho and cuíca into the album. What was the process like of learning and integrating these instruments into your compositions?
I’m not really a virtuoso on any instrument. Even with the cello, which I’ve been playing for close to forty years now, at a certain point, I decided that I would focus on cultivating my own approach to the instrument rather than acquiring flashy chops or even versatility. (Discovering It’s A Brand New Day – Tom Cora Live At The Knitting Factory within the first year of my music degree didn’t really help my grades on the classical performance side of things…)
Since I started employing the methodology I currently use for my solo recordings (the one I mentioned above), my thinking with respect to any instrument or sound-making implement is discovering my own path with it and using it on my own terms.
While I don’t have the practice under my belt on a single instrument that others have, I would say that I’ve practiced the skill of interacting with a lot of different instruments. Outside of stuff like trumpet, trombone, tuba, it’s rare that I pick something up and feel helpless.
That’s not to say that I’m not curious about more conventional applications of instruments, though. The title track, for instance, may start with me making electronic-sounding textures with the cavaquinho (and one of my trusty humbucker pickups!) but then I move into playing a chord progression that falls somewhere between something you’d hear in a pagode track and something from a Cocteau Twins tune.
Admittedly the cuíca was a bit less immediate on account of how you produce its unmistakable yelps. It’s basically a small drum with a piece of dowel stuck through the skin. You rub this rod with moistened fingers or a cloth to produce friction, and your other hand touches different parts of the drum head to produce different pitches!
The album title reflects your position as an observer of Brazilian culture. How has your relationship with the culture evolved since your first encounter?
My relationship with Brazil started as an extension of my musical curiosity. I got into Brazilian music in my late teen years and never really stopped delving further into it. My initial introduction was Elis Regina and of course the Getz-Gilberto record, but that rapidly evolved to include various forms of MPB (such as Tropicália), as well as more traditional music. Toronto has a fairly significant Brazilian community and Maracatu music had a big moment here a number of years ago. Hearing that thunderous chorus of drums left a huge impression on me. I’ve also had several Brazilian acquaintances in Toronto through music and other arts here.
Over the years my interests expanded to encompass other forms such as pagode, samba, funk (or “Baile Funk” as North Americans call it), and the various more experimental things that are happening there more recently (pro tip: follow this writer.)
I met my wife, Nathalia, shortly after she arrived in Toronto in 2016, and we married in the fall of 2019. Nathalia’s social group here includes a lot of Brazilian people so I had been to and even co-hosted a lot of gatherings where I was the only non-Brazilian. Portuguese was often the dominant language at these gatherings, Brazilian food was served, and Brazilian playlists blasted out of various stereo equipment. We had also hosted a dear friend of hers here and her cousin.
It actually wasn’t until January of 2022 that we actually made it down to Brazil. It would’ve been sooner had it not been for the pandemic. It’s pretty recent in the grand scheme of things, but it unlocked a whole world for me. Now, when Nathalia mentions missing a particular food or activity it hits really viscerally for me and I often crave those dishes and experiences myself (once you try São Paulo-style pizza, you always want it that way.)
By 2022, I had already been studying Portuguese on DuoLingo to be able to communicate better with her family (her dad’s English is great but her mother barely speaks any) but looking back, I was like a fish out of water. São Paulo far exceeded my expectations. I knew it would be interesting but I felt an immediate connection with it in a way that I hadn’t with other places. It’s richly historical, an amazing arts scene, and absolutely unbelievable food, and the people are typically very friendly. It’s definitely the sort of place that I can imagine being daunting without having friends and family there, though.
On our second trip, we traveled a lot more. In addition to São Paulo, we visited the contrasting cities of Salvador in the North and Curitiba in the Southern part of the country. This gave me a better sense of the cultural and geographical breadth of Brazil. Salvador is a coastal city where African culture is very prevalent in the food, music, and religion. I got to witness the Balé Folclórico da Bahia live in their own intimate venue and it was one of the most riveting things I had ever seen. The sheer force of it was so palpable sitting that close: singers and drummers just going for it and dancers hurling themselves at one another and miraculously avoiding collisions. Where Bahia is super African, Curitiba is known for its European feel. It was lovely too, with beautiful parks, iconic buildings like Museu Oscar Niemeyer and Ópera de Arame, capybaras everywhere. It’s very quiet and tidy, though, which was disconcerting for the three of us that went on that trip (it was all of our first time.) I also got to see more live music the second time including Metá Metá, one of my favorite Brazilian bands, and Péricles who I think of as sort of the Luther Vandross of pagode.
On our most recent trip there I felt more comfortable navigating things on my own. The pace of the trip was more leisurely with any traveling kept within the state of São Paulo. We spent more time in the nearby coastal cities of Santos and São Sebastião, which are lovely, as well as several beach towns further up the Atlantic Coast (where several images on the cover were shot).
This past fall, Nathalia’s mother came to visit us here in Toronto. She and I ended up spending a lot of time together because Nathalia was quite busy at work. Angela doesn’t speak much English at all though. I surprised myself with how thoroughly I could communicate with her and also kind of translate local and Canadian idiosyncrasies into a São Paulo/ Brazilian context.
It also features your first use of field recordings since your debut in 2011. Why did this record feel like the time to work with field recordings again, and how did these recordings transform the compositions?
Back in 2011 when I released Rife on Entr’acte my perspective was very different; I was very much making electronic music and field recordings—just like instruments—were treated as just another raw material for me to manipulate.
I shifted gears creatively after that first album came out. I was feeling creatively restless and wanted to deliberately set about finding a sort of ground hybrid that wove together the main musical outlets at that time: playing in bands, improvising, writing chamber music, and producing the sort of abstract electronica found on Rife. I stripped away everything but acoustic and electric instruments and started building these pieces of impossible ensemble music by ear in my home studio. Because I had framed field recordings as a sort of “source sound,” they fell by the wayside.
Over the past few years—since about 2020, field recordings have been creeping back into my practice albeit through a performance-driven impulse. I’m always looking for novel ways to produce peculiar sounds without resorting to synths or effects and somewhere along the line I got into using acoustic guitar humbucker pickups. I started using them in conjunction with household metal items and various instruments but soon I started taking the pickups, along with various mallets, etc., and my Zoom recorder out on walks and to record myself playing on metal structures near my place—sculptures, stairs, shopping carts, fences, etc. Falt recently released a short digital album of mine that was recorded exclusively through humbuckers.
Around that same time, I also started purchasing things like hydrophones, contact condenser microphones, and the mighty LOM Geofón. And it was really exploring field recording through these alternative recording methods that got me interested again. First, it was using them to record things I was playing on, but it evolved into more observational applications as well.
Something unexpected about my first trip to Brazil was my response to the soundscape. I vividly recall driving to Ilhabela (an island off the coast of São Paulo State) and noticing that the crickets I was hearing from the car window were lower and mellower than their Canadian counterparts. While that got me thinking about replicating their sound instrumentally when I went back the following year, I was intent on recording some of the beautiful sounds I had heard there before and I was sure to bring some equipment along.
The two tracks that feature field recordings were the ones I made after I was conscious of the album’s theme. The field recordings for me were a great way to establish a sense of place, but also reinforce my own perspective as a spectator (I suppose I should note that Mirante means “lookout” in Portuguese.)
The track “Mirante” begins with the sound of rainfall through a contact-miked metal shutter in my wife’s bedroom back home. I love that sound and scrambled to get my recorder out to capture it. The cut later features birdsong that I recorded from the upstairs bathroom window at the same house. Mid-way through, the track is interrupted by a hydrophone/ microphone recording of the ocean (laced with faint children’s voices playing in the water). Even though the latter two are common subject matter for field recordings, I feel as though all three of these sounds have an idiosyncratic quality to them due to the way they were recorded, and have a similar effect to the image on the back cover that I address in the following question.
The composition “Parque Tingui” is named after the park in Curitiba where I recorded its underlying soundscape at night on my iPhone, a choir of chirping wildlife. Yet again, there’s a personal imprint that goes beyond the insects and birds themselves. For starters, it’s audibly just an iPhone voice memo—kinda lo-fi—but you can also hear cars passing so you know it’s not some pristine natural environment. Plus, you can also hear our friends Felipe and Lígia speaking faintly.
I’ve since continued exploring field recording and outdoors in various ways. I actually just completed a new set of material that uses the natural slapback delay and reverb of a long cement tunnel that runs under a cemetery near my apartment quite extensively.
You also incorporated your own photographs into the album design. How do these images connect with the music and the themes of the record?
Since my twenties, taking photos has been a hobby for me, a way for me to maintain my spontaneity and creativity when I’m not able to or don’t want to make music. In my mind, the photos on the Mirante sleeve relate to the field recordings. In addition to providing a visual sense of Brazil, they also frame that mirante vantage point discussed above.
The cover displays a man in the ocean engulfed in waves. On one hand, this is like the epitome of how many North Americans envision Brazil: beautiful beaches dotted with tanned bodies. And there’s no denying that beach culture is a huge part of life for so many Brazilians—two of their most famous cities, Rio De Janeiro and Salvador are both directly on the water, and from São Paulo, the beach is only a short drive away.
On the other hand, what compelled me to capture that moment was that this man seemed so solitary amidst this beautiful barrage. I guess that’s a feeling with which I sort of identify when I’m there. There’s something overwhelming about the country itself and I mean that in a good way. It’s massive, diverse (with plenty of regional cultures and immigrant populations), and densely populated. Particularly in cities, you’re always surrounded by activity, but it’s actually nowhere near as chaotic as one might expect. There’s this penchant for constant celebration there, and that sense of occasion tends to get magnified when you’re there from abroad visiting family. And on an individual level for me, there’s also the overwhelm of being a foreigner. Especially with the language (even after acquiring passable fluency in Portuguese), but also not knowing all the little ins and outs (everything from unintentionally rude hand gestures to things related to safety.)
The ocean also has a duality to it. When waves get super vigorous, it’s downright dangerous but just before it reaches that point, surrendering to its power can be such a joyous and even weirdly meditative experience. I’m not sure I really experienced this sensation until going to a beach in Brazil. I feel like I aspire to this quality in several of my compositions, including some of the ones here.
The image on the back cover presents the same stretch of coast as the front, shot in the reflection of a slightly dirty glass partition. The ostensible subject matter (the beach) isn’t represented directly, instead, it’s filtered through another surface. In order to take that photo, I was standing at the outer boundary of the beach and had my back turned away from all the action. In a way, I think that image speaks to my “outsiderness” metaphorically, but I also just thought it had a strange imperfect beauty to it.
Do you see Mirante as a standalone exploration of Brazil or the start of a deeper journey into music inspired by the country?
I doubt that I will make another album that approaches Brazil in this particular way. It’s really a product of my initial visits there.
Certainly Brazilian elements will continue to surface in my work, though. Some of my recent creations even have some oblique overtones of what Brazilians call “Funk”, but done in my usual no-electronic-instruments way.
I even had this idea of starting a group consisting only of bowed string players from either free improv/ Brazilian music backgrounds to play weird, improv-heavy pagode arrangements. I’ve only shared this idea with a couple people. The idea would be that in addition to playing more melodically, we’d use extended techniques and preparations to evoke the original instruments you hear in that music (pagode is samba-derived and thus uses cavaquinho, alongside percussion that includes pandeiro, surdo, cuíca, tamborim, and repinique).
Also, as we spend more time there, I would love to cultivate collaborative relationships in Brazil, as it’s just bursting with amazing music.
What surprised you the most about making this record? What challenged you?
Two things come to mind here. First off, nailing the mix was a bit more challenging than previous efforts. I fiddled with the balances quite a bit after completing the compositions, whereas usually mixing happens as part of the compositional process and that’s it. I think a big part of this is related to the more pronounced use of percussion—sometimes exceedingly dense percussion—and reconciling this with the other elements. I’m really grateful to David Psutka (who runs the excellent Halocline Trance imprint and makes music under the name ACT!) who really helped with this part. His home studio is professionally treated and has beautiful monitors and there we were able to diagnose things to yield nicer-sounding pre-masters.
Frankly, the Brazilian dimension was both a surprise and a challenge to me. As I mentioned earlier, that aspect was something that bubbled to the surface from my subconscious rather than being an explicit intention throughout the process.
Once I decided to pay homage to Brazil, grappling with this vis-a-vis the notion of appropriation proved challenging internally. I’ve typically been quite wary of making deliberate, concrete connections with particular places or cultures. As someone who has endeavored to maintain an awareness of this issue and the power dynamics of cross-cultural exchanges for the past twenty years or more years, the question for me was: “Even if I’m making a super-personal, semi-abstract, artistic statement relating to my experiences in Brazil, am I tapping into a discourse I’m opposed to?” I sat with this and also consulted with trusted friends (Brazilian and otherwise) about it before putting it out into the world. The last thing I would want is for my solo output to appear to speak on behalf of traditions that are not my own.
I’m someone who not only listens to a wide variety of music from all over, I’ve always readily embraced instrumentation from across the globe. Even with this album’s ostensible ties to Brazil, there are also African, Indian, and East Asian traditional instruments butting up against North American folk instruments, European classical music instruments, electric instruments, toys, and found objects. To me, appropriation isn’t just about the instrumentation, it’s about what the music itself is doing and how it is framed.
Ultimately I’m neither claiming nor setting out to make Brazilian music, it’s music that endeavors to reflect an admiration for and personal connection to Brazil. I’m not about to deny that certain attributes of what I’m doing are indebted to Brazilian music, but they’re filtered through my own sensibilities and idiosyncratic approach—especially since it was all played by me.
This is where the title became key for me. I initially chose it because I like the sound and spelling of the word and its personal association for me, but later it became a sort of meta-commentary, as I mentioned before.
There’s an anecdote that I often think of when discussing this topic. My first professional gig as a composer after finishing music school in 2005 I was hired by a Lebanese theatre director who had recently arrived in town to score a play about immigration (ironic, given that I had never immigrated). At first, it was tough because I was very reluctant to make anything at all resembling ersatz “ethnic” music. After banging my head against this wall, I broke down and cooked something up at home with banjo, mandolin, cello, been (an Indian “snake charmer”) and darbouka and other percussion. When I sheepishly played it for the director, Majdi, I was fearful I crossed the line into the Orientalist schlock I had read so much about. He sat in silence with a pensive expression for the track’s full duration, pausing quite a while after it finished. When he finally spoke, he looked me dead in the eye, enthusiastically stating “Nick… this sounds like home.” I went on to work with his company for a decade following that project, but this moment really stuck with me. It never represented some sort of green light to go plunder other people’s culture, rather it affirmed for me that it’s a very complicated subject where listening, respect, self-awareness, and context are crucial ingredients.
And to close, as always, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
I love: crickets, the ocean, the click of turn signals on cars, opening a can of a very carbonated beverage, crackling fire, pedal steel (RIP Susan Alcorn), church bells.
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