Forest Scenes by MIZU

There is a philosophical quality to MIZU’s second full-length, ‘Forest Scenes’. Through layers of gorgeous, yearning cello, pulsating electronics, and hyperreal field recordings, MIZU evokes a sense of depth by interrogating systems and exploring unknown territories both physical and cerebral. By way of its daring experimentalism, ‘Forest Scenes’ is patently modern and brilliantly ontological.

Proceeding from Robert Schumann’s ‘Waldszenen’ in name and, to some extent, concept, MIZU began work on ‘Forest Scenes’ immediately after completing ‘Distant Intervals’, conceiving and writing the record over the course of two inspired weeks in São Paulo, Brazil in Summer 2022 and completing it over the following year in New York. While ‘Distant Intervals’ engaged and inverted the classical idioms in which MIZU was reared, ‘Forest Scenes’ lunges even further away from that world. It is in no small way an acknowledgment of transcendent experiences and the thrills of self-discovery, whether in the vast urbanity of São Paulo, in the community among New York City’s queer spaces and dancefloors, or in the more abstract place of a self in transition. Pulling from these energies, MIZU loops in techno producer Concrete Husband, who features on “prphtbrd”, to further ornament the dancefloor flirtations.

While MIZU was socially transitioning during the creation of ‘Distant Intervals’, she began a physical gender transition in step with the inception of ‘Forest Scenes’. The record parallels this transformation, interrogating the boundaries between the forest and what is before / beyond it, building scenes of self-discovery through a kind of ecstasy in the unexplored. The forest is, at least in part, a metaphor for queer spaces, for spaces of self-discovery through community, through encounter. But the spaces of self-discovery, for MIZU, are also very much found within the songs themselves. This marvelous symbolic complexity holds Forest Scenes aloft, above mundane considerations of what is more or less beautiful. What is pastoral, what is modern, what is natural: all these considerations are teased out by MIZU’s compelling production, as she weaves electronic and environmental sounds, and cello both heavily processed and laid bare in a glorious, sweeping dream. But with the headlong dives into deconstructionist experimentation and the pathos, vulnerability, and staggering range of densities through a single instrumental body, MIZU asserts that ‘Forest Scenes’ could not be more her own, as she discovers herself within it.

Notes by Mark Trecka

MIZU explores themes of transformation and the infinite possibilities of self through her singular cello playing and daring performing.

Trained as a cellist at Juilliard, her experimental practice sees her transforming self-recorded explorations on her instrument into bold and distinct soundscapes.

Portrait by Honglin Cai.

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