MIZU’s many movements

The Opener is The FADER’s short-form profile series of casual conversations with exciting new artists.

When Mizu Issei was five, her parents took her to see The Music Man on Broadway. She immediately fell in love with musical theater: the costumes, the pageantry, and the songs. The following year, after her family moved out of the city to a village in Westchester, The Music Man came back into her life as a high school production, and she auditioned for a small role. “I was so nervous,” she tells me in her makeshift green room at Light and Sound Design, the third-floor DIY venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn where she’ll perform songs from her new album, 4 | 2 | 3, for the first time in a few short hours. “I sang ‘God Bless America.’ It was the only song I knew. I can’t imagine myself singing that now.”

She started piano lessons around the same time but switched to cello at age seven, studying with a teacher whose presence and relationship with the instrument inspired her to fall in love with it. At age nine, she composed her own musical, loosely based on The Producers, which her parents had unwittingly taken her to see when she was far too young. She arranged it for piano and voice, recorded it, and performed it for her parents and their friends, acting out every role. (Mizu is an only child.)

As MIZU, Mizu’s recent musical performance has incorporated movement and costume. “The seeds were planted and then forgotten about, and I’m coming back to them now,” she says. 4 | 2 | 3 was originally commissioned as the score for a dance piece — a through-composed track to be played alongside the dance — but she’d already begun reconnecting with movement-based art while performing her previous two albums, Distant Intervals and Forest Scenes.

Exploring her “girly, hyper-feminine” side, she wore lacy white dresses and played her instrument in every conceivable position: sometimes holding it over her head, sometimes lying down with it, always moving where the music took her. “The cello felt like my protective blankie,” she says. After watching her open for Tim Hecker at the cavernous Red Hook, Brooklyn venue Pioneer Works in November 2023, director/choreographers Baye & Asa recruited her to soundtrack their newest project, a roughly hour-long piece based on the Sphinx’s famous riddle: “What has four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs at night?” (Answer: Man.)

Mizu was conflicted; opening night was in March, a week before Forest Scenes was set to release and around the same time as a scheduled surgery. It would be her first score, her first long piece, and her first functional work commissioned by an outside party. Knowing the timing would be difficult, she accepted.

Baye & Asa already had the structure of their piece nailed down — “4” and “3” are short, bookending sections to “2,” which is cut into 10 subsections on the album, mostly named for the direct prompts the directors gave Mizu. Their collaborative process varied from song to song. For “Mob,” which comes near the end of “2” and is the only song on the project with articulated percussion, Baye & Asa had already choreographed the full dance to a click track, so Mizu built the song around it. The percussive sounds on that tack all come from her instrument. “The cello has such a percussive body — different places you can tap and with different fingers or with your fist — and with processing you can amplify what’s already there,” she says. “I did a lot of that acoustic — a lot of bow ricocheting on strings, the hitting, the snapping, the sound of the bow hair — but then I very minimally stretched and warped the audio files in the software.

On earlier, more open tracks, she had more ability to stamp her own life onto the score. “I used to practice on an upright piano in my parents’ kitchen,” she says, “So in the child section, ‘4,’ you hear this piano loop that starts off very innocent. But it gradually spoils, and you lose that innocence. There’s harmonic dissonance, and then these warpy textures come in.”

The warped, drifting cello takes center stage in the album’s midsection, for which Baye & Asa asked for “something sparse with irregular hits.” Mizu rendered the resulting four tracks almost exclusively through extended technique and digital digestion, with very little melody in earshot. There are also whispered and processed vocals; “I recorded the echo of the reverb, or something like that,” she remembers. These delicate vocalizations become a background drone that rises to a thrum in the appropriately titled “Gossip Mill.”

“3,” the final section of the record, meant to represent old age, comprises a single track, the longest on the project. It’s called “The Riddle,” a title Mizu chose herself. “It was my favorite scene to record because I was basically writing it with the dancer,” she says. “She’s an older woman, and so beautiful. Observing her, I realized there’s so much wonder in old age. Having experienced everything they’ve experienced, the elders I look up to still have hope for the unexplored.”

Later on at Light & Sound Design, Mizu will don a second outfit — an ultra-distressed black dress courtesy of her go-to designer, Meghun, that she claims has a soul that steps into her when she puts it on — and dance with her cello in the dark, gliding between shadows as she plays from 4 | 2 | 3. As our hour-plus interview comes to a close, I ask her where she feels she is on the life spectrum the piece portrays. “It’s always shifting,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like a little kid, and it’s so refreshing. Some days I feel so weathered and hopeless. I’ve been thinking a lot about mental health, how we all have to live within our minds. Right now I feel like a ‘3,’ though, because my foot is asleep.”