Jordan: I think that’s fairly descriptive of your music as a whole, the only phrase I’ve ever been able to use to describe your sound is this kind of “Cosmic Nothingness”. I get this image of kids hanging out underneath the stars and being amazed by how real everything here is and how real everything there is but how different they both seem. Does that fantasticalness have anything to do with the album’s cover?

Zac: The cover is actually a combination of two ideas. One being an optical illusion called a Necker Cube which is the box feature motif. There was a scientist whose last name was Necker who devised this particular pattern or game almost to illustrate the way that our minds function when using our visual perception. That image is objectively a two dimensional trapezoid. It is just lines organized in a specific way, but the way in which our minds perceive it, we take that objective, 2-D, flat drawing and making it into a 3-D cube whose interpretation can be ambiguous. Its orientation flips back and forth without ever really reaching a definitive way, whether or not it’s facing you or facing away. Then the two creatures are cherubim which is a riff on the idea of the ark of the covenant. For the Israelites, the ark was this alter which was this physical locus where they could interface with god. It was this place in which the divine realm could inhabit. I just thought it was this interesting notion of this real and imminent place but also being a window into this cosmic and mystical world and to riff on that with the ambiguous of the Necker Cube and how we perceive it.

Jordan: I read in an interview, I might have read this wrong, but that at times you purposely keep your work ambiguous, how true is that?

Zac: I think that, the way I understand it, is that I’m trying to express something in its most distilled, crystalline, articulate way that I can, it just happens to be a nuanced and often complicated, dualistic, ambiguous thing.

Jordan: How conscious is songwriting for you? Do you sit down and try to think of the purest way to state something or are you just writing and later on you look down and say, “oh, I guess this is what I’m writing about?”

Zac: I don’t really have a single way of doing it. I try to not let myself get too reliant or comfortable with a single approach to songwriting. It’s probably closer to that second option. When you’re writing songs I don’t believe that you’re authoring anything, you are finding something and presenting it. It’s not as if you invented melody or notes or words or anything like that but you can discover the orientation and orders that they might be in and how that corresponds to a concept or emotion or whatever. You’re presenting that, not making anything from scratch

Jordan: Is there a specific kind of portrayal of things or image that you often find yourself drawn to?

Zac: I try to just be curious and learn about things. For Such Things so many of the songs grew out of readings I had done and had a lot to do with ideas in contemporary physics. I found a lot of those ideas inspiring and the strangeness and the seeming contradictions or whatever felt relatable to everyday life.

Jordan: You mention how you are constantly curious, is that how you got involved with using such unique instruments like the dulcimer or bouzouki? Has using those instruments given you a new view on music?

Zac: Definitely. It comes out of the same sentiment. I feel a little by just doing one thing and I’m excited by being able to have that extensive palate to find things. It’s exciting to see after tinkering around with a new instrument how they intertwine and overlap with what I already know. For example, a mandolin is like a much higher pitched, upside down bass guitar. You kind of look at these overlaps and you might come up with these little fragments and then years later find out that the rest of the song was hiding inside another instrument. That whole process has always been really exciting to me.