Part 1

Name: Mark Zito aka FRACTURES

Nationality: Australian
Occupation: Singer-songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist
Current release: The new FRACTURES single "Medium" is out now.
Recommendations: I’m going to recommend a game: Inside on Nintendo Switch. Simple, dark, beautiful.
And for books - anything by Haruki Murakami. I haven’t read them all, and I don’t necessarily understand what they’re about, but I love them.
They’re like a David Lynch flm. Never tangential, they barely resolve but they just pull something out of you.

If you enjoyed this interview with FRACTURES and would like to find out more about his music, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, twitter, and Soundcloud.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and infuences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

Playing came frst for me. We had guitars, keyboards, drums around the house so I didn’t have to look far. Devoted a lot of my puberty phase, which I believe now has ended after 20 long years, to guitars mainly. Bass was the main guy but I put a lot of time into learning every chord of every John Mayer song I could fnd. Then came the jazz fusion. It felt right at the time.

Older brothers and sister trickled down pretty varied infuences so I was lucky in that sense.

I was a late bloomer with production, I’d always noodle away with little pop-rock ditties but until I started singing around 23 it wasn’t a factor. And then it was.

Short of calling it an escape, I just sort enjoy the solitude I get from making music, and the idea that you start with nothing and can create something over a day is still a mystifying sort of magic.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it infuence your approach to creativity?

If I have any response to music, and I often don’t beyond just enjoying a song for whatever reason, it’s usually being taken to a place. Outdoors; indoors; loud; quiet; full; empty; light; dark, etc. Some imagined setting maybe - a club, a street in the UK, a festival in the day time.

So as far as infuencing me and my approach, I often just invert the process. I don’t always set out with that in mind but as the direction of a song becomes clearer I might hone in on that particular feeling that the location evokes in me, and try and somehow imprint it into the sonics.

It’s defnitely something I’ve begun to do more lately, for some reason I feel like electronic music lends itself to that more naturally for me. I don’t know why.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

It’s been varied. I kind of started this career without knowing I had, or necessarily intending to. I didn’t call myself a musician for a long time, still something I grapple with because the threshold of success changes day to day for me and everyone else I imagine and is pretty arbitrary. Part of me wishes I’d started earlier but I guess that’s just the path I took. Such is life or something like that.

The personal voice part is something I’m always going to deal with because my tastes are so varied. I’m doing my computer music thing right now - beats on beats on beats - but I’ve got the lo-fi folk thing sitting here gathering dust, and the more alternative rock thing doing the same.

These are boxes I want to tick but navigating within one project is a challenge in itself just because of the way the industry can work and where I’m at in my career.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it infuences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

At the risk of sounding like a lost little boy, the sense of identity aspect is hard to grasp for me at times. I want to be all things - writer, performer, producer - but sometimes diluting them seems counteractive to them as separate entities. Kind of like the jack of all trades, master of none trope. Right now I’m doing my best to service all of them.

I’m not an avid listener of music anymore. Maybe not something I should admit to but it’s just not something I like to do in my spare time. Or at least not something I think to do. I reference stuff, I listen to it as a guide maybe, or I’m shown it.

Undoubtedly it infuences me though, and my output is the sum of them. I find I might start a group of songs borrowing heavily from something but the more I add to the song pile, the more I divert and kind of fnd the ‘me’ part of it, and then I lean on the references less and less.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

I don’t have a particular mission statement I adhere to or anything like that, it’s all a bit lacking in romance when I boil it down. I sit at my computer, I noodle, I chop things up, and when something sticks I follow it. The end result I’m searching for is if the song provokes some sort of emotion, or takes the listener to the place I’m picturing in my mind. It never really goes much deeper than that.

I’m getting better with age at making things more cohesive - it used to very much be that I would write songs independently of each other, not really stepping back to look at the collective. So nowadays I’m always approaching writing with that in mind: how a song fgures in the overall scheme of a release.

It’s something textural more than anything. Coating the sounds in a particular way - making them shiny, or furry, or whatever else so they present as one.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I’m probably not someone who’ll ever push the envelope musically, and if I do it’d be inadvertent, so I’m probably safely in the middle of the whole equation.

Lots of the music I enjoy is not reinventing the wheel in any way whatsoever, just presenting it in a different way. It’s diffcult for things not to be homogenised in a world of electronic production - so many people using the same tools, cross-referencing the same songs, watching the same twitch streams. If I busied myself with fnding the ‘new’ sound I feel like I’d be wasting a lot of time where I could otherwise just be making music I like. And the rest will follow.

I think open mindedness is pretty vital though, I might not necessarily enjoy the more cutting edge music that comes out initially, for example I struggle with the hyperpop thing as far as sitting and listening to it for enjoyment but I can step back and appreciate the innovation of the sonics, and where that might lead.

I think that over time these things seep into the mainstream anyhow. So it’s not a battle that’ll ever be won outright. It’ll just be a perpetual back and forth that shifts the ‘normal’ sound further from where it was gradually.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

The one constant has been Logic, my DAW of choice.It’s appeal was its accessibility. Like a garage band for grown ups.

What I use within them is constantly changing, there’s always a new plug-in that you hope will bear fruit. Not always the case though.