Apple Music Home Session: Zoon

Zoon’s 2020 debut album, Bleached Wavves, was the rare shoegaze album that appealed to the heart as much as it scrambled the brain, casting heavy tales of addiction recovery and Indigenous struggle in a splendorous fusion of guitar-daubed futurism and Ojibwe rhythmic traditions. That record would land on the short list for the Polaris Music Prize in 2021 and elevate Zoon into a pivotal figure in the ongoing evolution of shoegaze, by bringing an Anishinaabe outsider perspective to a historically white and apolitical genre. However, Zoon founder Daniel Monkman says things could’ve gone very differently for his project. “When I first recorded Bleached Wavves, I originally wanted it to be a string album,” he tells Apple Music. “But with a very, very small, next-to-nothing budget, I just couldn’t make it work.”

Fortunately, Zoon’s Apple Music Home Session provides him with a belated opportunity to realize his original vision. Recording with Michael Peter Olsen (who’s laid down strings for the likes of Drake, Arcade Fire, and k-os), Zoon remakes a pair of Bleached Wavves cuts—“Vibrant Colours” and “Light Prism”—as acoustic dream-pop hymns redolent of a coffeehouse Galaxie 500. But he still infuses them with just enough textural detail (shimmering strings and nature sounds on the former, noctural twang on the latter) to retain their essential otherworldly vibe. Those tracks sit alongside a blissfully blurred cover of the early My Morning Jacket nugget “Sooner,” which displaces the original’s folksy intimacy for a constellation of analogue-synth tones and drones. “Michael rented mics and set them up in every room to capture my performance,” Monkman says. “He also set up mics near the window to record the birds outside, to give the session more of an atmospheric texture. Stripping everything back really showed the unique song structures and tucked-away melodies. Having the chance to reimagine the songs in this way has been really special.”