ZOF - Nostalgic Premonitions
Dome of Doom Records
October 27th, 2023
Digital + Cassette

Dome of Doom records is proud to announce Seattle based electronic music producer, DJ, multi instrumentalist and vocalist ZOF's debut album 'Nostalgic Premonitions'.

"As a kid I had a very vivid imagination and would often wonder what the future would be like as I hit different ages. I have a synesthetic sense of time, where I see time and the progression of years like a spiral of film where one rotation is a year and each month has its own color (July is navy blue, August is pale burnt yellow for example), and when I visualize time before I was born it’s kind of greyscale. Whenever I would visualize dates in the future, this time spiral pattern was consistent, but I always had trouble visualizing time just beyond the year 2020; it was almost blurry or distorted.

I didn’t think too much of this, I just assumed that because the date seemed so far into the future to my kid mind that I just couldn’t really imagine what it would look like. But as I got older and the year 2020 got closer and closer it didn’t become any clearer in my mind’s eye, and I felt increasingly uneasy about it. I’m not saying I’m psychic or anything, but when covid hit and we went into lockdowns I had this feeling of “I knew it”. I didn’t know what I knew, but I knew something big was going to happen. I had as hard of a time coping with lockdowns as anyone else did, but I accepted what was happening immediately, almost as if I’d been expecting it, or dreading it.

This is a feeling that has repeated itself throughout my life. I used to frequently have prophetic dreams, usually about mundane things, but sometimes weirdly specific and significant. Because of this, I often encounter situations where I’m hit with a sense of nostalgia but for something I’ve never actually experienced. And it’s not like deja vu - it’s more like a longing for an alternate timeline, or missing something you’ll experience in the future. All of the songs on this album are meant to capture this strange feeling, kind of floating between the past and present while observing the present from a 3rd person perspective. With so much going on in the world from war to climate change to the constant and accelerating erosion of rights here in the US, dissociation and seeking escape is a pretty natural response. Each song is like a photograph or vignette of what it feels like to be living during what’s either the end of the world or the beginning of a better one. I’m hoping for the latter.

Whether it’s just pattern detection or some kind of clairvoyance, I’m rarely wrong about what the future will hold. Sometimes seeing those predictions come into reality floods me with a sense of nostalgia for simpler times when these things were just vague inklings instead of real and here, but I can’t help but have a sense of optimism underneath it all. The album grapples with a lot of different themes, and my intention is that each song can be interpreted many different ways. Each song can be understood from a personal perspective as well as a commentary on culture or society as a whole.

The order of the songs is very intentional, I wanted to have the songs flow together both musically and conceptually. Starting the album with “Same Thing” sets up the dilemma that is the main premise of this work: that on an individual and societal level, we tend to do the same things and repeat cycles that fuck us over in the long run, but we continue it because it’s comfortable and it’s worked for us or others in the past. This mentality, which is a very human flaw that we all have to challenge at some point, is what causes most problems whether it’s on the micro-scale in our personal relationships, or the macro-scale like social norms. Resisting change in unprecedented times doesn’t exactly work.

The overall structure of the album I think of as a conceptual hourglass. The beginning and end of the album touch on big picture concepts, and then as you move towards the middle the topics become more specific and refined."