Over the past decade or so, Zac E Tea has been a fixture in the Melbourne music universe - whether that be fronting lopsided psychedelic/dream-pop troupe Splendidid, holding down the wonkier guitar parts amidst Hobsons Bays Coast Guard’s surf-rock mishmash, or more recently as a Rocket Clock in Zoe Fox’s zany psych-pop project. It’s also likely that any of these band names have been plastered around town on posters of Zac’s own design, as over the past few years he’s developed a growing collection of visual art, whether that’s across album covers or gallery walls. Vivid and playful, and often addictively surreal, his recognisable style isn’t too dissimilar from his charismatic personality.

With an already overflowing plate, late last year he announced his plan for 2020 - a year long residency that would see him host a different show with a unique concept once a month, serving to propel his solo project into the world. It’s an ambitious and slightly crazy concept, yet it still somehow makes sense for the creative madman. However, with the residency being described as an attempt to “establish himself as a multidisciplinary artist”, it turns out the idea was more of a means to affirm his creative skills than to show them off.

“There’s just so many things I’ve dabbled in, but I wanted to be like ‘okay, this is something I can actually do’, in a way that seemed professional,” he explains. “I mean, a lot of people that know I exist might’ve already thought that I was a multidisciplinary artist, but I see a lot of the things I do as amateur, so I wanted to step it up a bit. It’s more of a personal thing - that it’d be really helpful for myself, to push myself this hard.”

The project is also serving to accumulate his separate creative efforts, something that was becoming harder as he explored more mediums. “Doing bits of this and bits of that - when can I even bring all this together?” he asks. “One of my favourite things to do is designing posters, so with the residency I thought I’d get to design a poster every month, as well as create music and things that go alongside that, going hand in hand.”

We also mention that the idea of the multidisciplinary artist, something that inherently feels a little more serious, may have been at odds with Zac’s eccentric style - yet Zac remains acutely aware of how he’d like to bridge that gap. “A rule I usually set for myself, if I’m enjoying making something and it’s something I can see finishing, is that I’m laughing. I just can’t stop laughing - when I’m doing something like drawing a silly picture, or if I’m making a song and it’s giving me a weird feeling - I’m going to continue with that. So I think the amount and efficiency would be the professional side, but the rest is completely childish and playful. Just for fun really.”

Lights Out - January 23rd

The first instalment of Zac’s residency series was a solo show performed at Long Play, a small bar and cinema in Fitzroy. After opening with a self-made short film played on the cinema screen, the audience were immersed in darkness for Zac to perform an acoustic set of his darker, moodier material - most of which he’d never performed before because it would be “such a mood killer to do at a bar.”

This was an easy choice to kick things off, because “some of the ideas for mid-year were so ambitious, so ridiculous”, that he needed a more straightforward option to begin with. However, the simpler idea of performing in a cinema sparked Zac’s imagination and quickly developed into something far more conceptual, resulting in a residency show that Zac describes as “maybe the most well connected [so far]”, despite being somewhat incidental.

“The cinema choice was kind of an accident - I thought I’ll play at Long Play because it only holds 30 people and I didn’t expect more than 30 people to come,” he laughs. “And I thought if I’m at Long Play I can play a movie, so then I made that little animation. The idea was for it to be very visual at the start, and then the visuals stopped halfway through the film and it became black, and at that point I’d get onstage. It was just a way to get people ready for an hour’s worth of music in the dark.”

With one idea prompting the next, the concept for the short film Lights Out came from Zac’s poster design. “I did the poster first and I just scribbled it with a pastel, and it looked like such a kiddy drawing. And then I made the movie in the same style so I started talking about that stuff, about being a child and dreaming.” The result is hypnotic, as the bright colours of each childlike drawing swirl and blend while Zac’s calming voice wraps around an incessant acoustic guitar drone. Just as the film blurs the line between real and fantasy through the lens of childhood, Zac continued to challenge his audience in the same way throughout his set - before finally turning on the lights at the show’s conclusion to reveal a life-size puppet sitting in his place.

The next instalment of Zac’s residency was a live gig at the Carlton Baths, where the Zac E Tea Three was officially debuted - Zac’s fully fledged band featuring Imogen Cygler on synthesiser, Gordon Li on bass and Dylan Young on drums. Together the group performed a set of experimental pop, purposely warping Zac’s music to better suit their environment, as they performed beside the 104 year old swimming pool.

The final result wasn’t what Zac had originally anticipated when heading into the month, but once again, the result came thanks to his uncanny ability to creatively respond to hurdles.

He explains, “the plan was that the band was going to play every show, but then January came and we had no time to rehearse so I did that solo. And then February came and we didn’t have a location.” However, instead of hunting for a venue, Zac began searching for a manager - “which is actually really funny that I just started asking random people” - and got in contact with Matt Sheers. By a stroke of luck, Matt simultaneously took on the position of manager and found Zac the perfect location, as he currently booked the Carlton baths.

Things were looking up - “we got the venue and I got the band together… but we looked at the calendar and realised we could only practise three times to learn an hour’s worth of music.” Perhaps the real test of a multidisciplinary artist, Zac was able to adapt. “So I was like ‘let’s make a lot of the songs kind of slower, more spacey and jammy’, and it’ll fit for the pool, we could make it an underwater-y set.”

“That’s what we did - we had a lot of anti-solos,“ he laughs. “I had these crazy jazz musicians and was like you’ve just gotta play one note in this solo for like four minutes.”

The concept for Zac’s third residency show revolved solely around the track ‘Magic Man’, a fan favourite from his live set, but taken to its most extreme. Perhaps his most ambitious idea yet, the show was to take place in an art gallery with an exhibition of 1000 pastel portraits of the track’s namesake, and an hour long set from Zac and the band performing the song with an additional 30 verses.

“It was always to be based around ‘Magic Man’, it’s one of my favourite songs I’ve written,” Zac explains. “When I wrote it, I thought ‘this song is so stupid, it’s got six verses and no chorus’, but people kept saying ‘that’s my favourite song’, and I was like ‘that’s crazy, I like the song too but it’s not a hit’. But people like it, so I thought ‘if people like it, they’ll like an hour of it.’ Well, not really.”

He continues, “it’s more to do with the song - it’s a really long song, the same person’s name keeps getting repeated - and I wanted to make a residency show that was the song in an experience, to its fullest form. If you keep hearing this name all the time, imagine if you went into a space and you keep seeing it all the time. There’s just hundreds of the same image.”

As always, something was bound to go wrong. Firstly, Zac realised he’d underestimated how long drawing 1000 portraits of ‘Magic Man’ was going to take. “I went to the art shop and bought 1000 pieces of paper and bought a heap of pastels - and I got to 100 and I was like this is impossible. I did the calculations of how long it took to make one drawing against how much time there was, and was like ‘I don’t think it’s gonna work’.” But before he could come up with an alternative, COVID-19 hit and the entire exhibition had to be cancelled. Once again, Zac was forced to adapt - “I had 200 portraits done and thought ‘that’s fine’, but how am I going to display it?” - and after a friend suggested he download a game designer and build a video game for the song, he had a solution.

The outcome is pretty spectacular (which you can check out at the top of the article). Doubling as a music video for the track, we’re invited into a virtual gallery and completely immersed in the world of ‘Magic Man’, the gallery’s surreal atmosphere perfectly pairing with the track’s absurd idiosyncrasies and mesmerising charm. Completely created by Zac - “I did watch about ten hours worth of Youtube tutorials” - the result is an incredible example of an artist pushing their capabilities and exceeding their potential.

While we head into less certain times, Zac’s staying motivated - “once this all blows over, I still wanna see it on walls, so I do have the intention of finishing the extra 800. They’re all just filed away now.” What COVID-19 means for the rest of the residency, he’s not quite sure though, saying “the thing that is sort of encouraging is that no one really minds. I’ve got a zero fan base so no one’s calling me saying 'where’s the next residency?’ which is a huge weight off my mind. The main thing is this is mainly for me.”