TORRES is the pseudonym of Mackenzie Scott. She was born January 23, 1991, and lives in
Brooklyn, New York, with her wife Jenna, stepson Silas, and puppy Sylvia. She has been releasing
albums and performing as TORRES since 2013.
What an enormous room is TORRES’ sixth studio album (her third with Merge). It was recorded in
September and October 2022 at Stadium Heights Sound in Durham, North Carolina. It was
engineered by Ryan Pickett, produced by Mackenzie Scott and Sarah Jaffe, mixed by TJ Allen in
Bristol, UK, and mastered by Heba Kadry in NYC. The album contains 10 songs. Mackenzie wrote all
of them. Sarah played bass guitar, synths, drums, organ, and piano. Mackenzie sang vocals, played
guitar, bass, synths, organ, piano, and programmed drums. Additional synth bass, tambourine, and
shakers were played by TJ Allen.
Julien Baker on TORRES:
What I can say about TORRES is I think the music comes from a convicted place.
Not convicted meaning a person is narrowly and foolishly committed to an ideal, or unshakably
convinced of themselves, or a zealot, or stubborn.
I mean dedicated, I mean: If TORRES’ music gets weird, gets brainy, gets funny, gets defiant,
provokes, deliberately scandalizes, employs the crass to undermine the austere, courts lofty
philosophical truth—it’s all done with the conviction of an artist with the (essential) belief in
the worth of their task.
I think you can hear it in the songs, someone reaching, leaning over the boundary between
known and not, probing the almighty.
After a decade and six studio albums and however many one-offs and tours and articles read
and conversations had, the parts of this pursuit I’ve been able to observe are all marked by a
dedication to creation that treats the act—ongoing—with as much preciousness as the evidence
of the act that is left in a record.
The modes of being are different: heartbroken, broke, furious (right- and unrighteously),
awestruck by love, compelled by desire. sometimes resigned to death, sometimes fascinated by
and reverent of the future. Sometimes viscerally present, other times suspended in heady
awareness, poised on a fulcrum of observation and participation in the phenomenon that
aliveness is.
The tools are the same: instruments that growl and shriek and moan, a lyrical voice shouting,
swooning, chuckling, snarling as the moment commands. TORRES’ music-making is conducted
in a melodic vocabulary unique to itself—methods, equipment, circumstances shifting around
the impulse to affirm the self within the world, to make art that bears all these little artifacts of
the divine and of the real and show it to people and know it is valuable. I think that’s what
Mackenzie’s music does. And I think it’s just incredibly good music to listen to.
