Nate Mercereau - SUNDAYS (2021) Hi-Res

For guitarist Nate Mercereau, the pandemic meant finding a new kind of solace. While the in-demand studio musician could capably adapt his style to a variety of genres, his 2019 debut solo album Joy Techniques was a unique beast. Engineering his pedals in such a way that his guitar always sounded like a synthesizer, the expansive record explored incredible sonic facets that sounded familiar and new at the same time. It was a record of such cult acclaim that Mercereau even managed to release a deluxe edition of it, recording on pop hits as a day job while getting to work on the instrumental music he likes in the interim.

Yet once lockdown started, he was forced into a new kind of isolated creativity, one that showed him finding release via weekly livestreams every Sunday. Working with improvisations generated by experimentalist Carlos Niño, Mercereau would, week-after-week, add his distinctive guitar sounds to a series of expansive pieces, collecting enough to ultimate whittle down the best bits into a cohesive album. While SUNDAYS is his second full-length proper, he preceded it with the surprise release of July’s Duets | Golden Gate Bridge, in which he quite literally broke out his pedals to create tonal harmonics with the Golden Gate Bridge’s infamous “hum”. Dueting with a bridge is about as isolationist as you can get.

Built from live experiments during live streams, this synthesis of jazz, experimental electronic music and ambient from Nate Mercereau is simply sublime.