For Zane Lazos, the exploration of unusual strings, reeds, membranes and other resonant and musical things has always been an obsession.  

  I came from a latent and occasional musical family; it was slumbering in my blood from long ago it seems.  

From early-childhood sound explorations to Western classical percussion as a boy, electric bass guitar  to Near-Eastern and West African percussion, Turkish bağlama saz, Bulgarian gajda, musical composition studies and the bowed Turkish tanbur, Zane has continually strove to discover the hidden language of a host of sounds, instruments and techniques. 

 Zane performs on yaylı tanbur*, various percussion and wind instruments, voice, and other assorted musical oddities to create an elemental sonic journey.  And in the bardic tradition of musicians around the world, he additionally performs as a soloist on bowed tanbur and voice to bring a subtle and sublime air to the proceedings of any event or setting.  Azphodel is an eclectic dance musical and ritualistic beast recorded onto celluloid discs and created in the moment and on the stage (formed from the primordial chaos in late 2007) which some and oft times includes guest co-conspirators in the movement and music arts.   

 *Yaylı tanbur is, of course, the long-necked bowed lute derived from the older plucked Ottoman art music instrument mızraplı tanbur (or in normal parlance, just tanbur) pronounced yai-luh tan-bur and muhz-ra-pluh tan-bur repectively).  The metal body prominent in many tanbur designs came from the Cümbüş  family of instrument makers and retailers.

"As a composer, my priorities have evolved to encompass a simple praxis:  I write music to understand the world.  In that striving for understanding, I tend to yearn for the ancient and the futuristic melded together in strange and inexplicable ways.  I came from an analog to acoustic to electronic and back to acoustic background, and believe that these paths have helped me to twist and revel in the maintenance of traditions while paying heed to that transpersonal impulse to create something new; inspiration causing innovation in the tension and release of it all."

To book Azphodel, send an email to:  

bookings@azphodel.com

. . . the Primal Ancestral Atavism: the Spirit-totem of I, Seed of the

 Millions-of-Forms-of-Being, Origin of all Selves that inhabit the Aeons.

 I am She, I am He that singeth the Uncreated into the Existent

 Aires, Whose Voice is the Many-tongued Orison, within which is the

 Hidden Communion of the Sacred Sigils spoken, and by whose

 tonaltities the States of Nature are wrought.

 ~Andrew D. Chumbley

The asphodel was the flower said to fill the plains of Hades, grow along the banks of the river Styx and was considered the favourite food of the dead.  Azphodel was conceived to encourage dissemination of the essence of that psychopomp for the living.