C.Z.
Colby Zinser (aka C.Z.) has lived parallel lives in music, with production credits across the spheres of pop, rap, underground club, techno and experimental IDM. The LA-based producer is a tireless and obsessive creator, operating numerous aliases and working in a variety of spaces, from polished pop studios to grimy warehouse dancefloors.
Hailing from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, C.Z.’s early contact with music was shaped by chiptune experiments on Gameboy, rap music and his home state’s latent breakbeat scene. Recruited as ‘studio rat’ into a brother’s band as a pre-teen, a burned copy of FL Studio triggered an obsession with manipulating sound, also providing a first taste of jungle music through the software’s built-in loop packs. Later Zinser was put onto hard trance and techno through French and Dutch co-workers while working as a teen in the shipyards of his hometown.
Performing as C.Z. or through aliases like Ice Underlord and Wink, he’s put out a stream of hybrid dancefloor tracks and edits, and earned support from the likes of Bjork, who featured the C.Z. track ‘Metroid’ in her iconic Triangle Records birthday set in 2015. Behind the decks, C.Z. is a fixture of the LA underground, and has toured internationally, playing venues like Lounge Neo, Tokyo and Echo Park Festival, Shanghai.
In 2020 Zinser released his first full-length under the C.Z. moniker, ‘Hyperfocus’, a release that marked his emergence as solo artist with an uncompromising and singular voice. Blending trance, breaks, jungle, IDM and hardcore, C.Z. draws on a broad musical past to form imaginative hybrids and impossible mutations.