Flying Together by Nate Mercereau: Ambient Guitar Journey

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Listen: Flying Together by Nate Mercereau

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There is a threshold in instrumental music where the guitar ceases to be a stringed instrument and becomes something else entirely—a weather system, a breathing organism, a vessel for pure intention. Nate Mercereau’s “Flying Together,” the eight-minute-and-two-second opening statement from his 2022 album SUNDAYS EXPANSION, lives precisely at that threshold. It is a composition that refuses to announce itself with a riff or a melody in the conventional sense. Instead, it emerges: a slow coalescence of synthesized guitar tones, shimmering percussion, and the unhurried breath of a saxophone, all unfolding as if the musicians simply walked into a room and began listening to one another at the exact same moment.

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Released on October 23, 2022, through Mercereau’s independent imprint How So Records, the track arrives as both a culmination and an expansion. It is the lead single from an album that extends the spontaneous, outdoor recording practice Mercereau established during the pandemic-era SUNDAYS project, and it features a constellation of West Coast improvisers—Carlos Niño on percussion, Josh Johnson on saxophone, Jamire Williams on drums, Efa Etoroma Jr., and Aaron Shaw—who have become central to a loosely affiliated movement that merges spiritual jazz, ambient texture, and electroacoustic exploration. To understand “Flying Together” is to understand not only Mercereau’s singular approach to the guitar synthesizer but also the broader ecosystem of musicians, labels, and philosophies that have made this kind of patient, immersive music possible in the 2020s.

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Who Is Nate Mercereau?

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Nate Mercereau is an American guitarist, composer, songwriter, and improviser whose career resists easy summary. He has contributed guitar work and production to platinum-selling records by Jay-Z, Lizzo, Shawn Mendes, The Weeknd, and Leon Bridges, moving fluidly between the commercial demands of pop production and the open-ended explorations of free improvisation. He has performed and recorded with Kamasi Washington, André 3000, Idris Ackamoor, Sam Gendel, Surya Botofasina, and Shabaka Hutchings. He has released solo instrumental albums that critics have compared to Brian Eno, John McLaughlin, and the Brainfeeder roster. He is, in short, a musician who has learned to speak many dialects of the same language—and who has chosen, in his solo work, to speak in a tongue that is entirely his own.

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Mercereau’s musical education began in the classical and acoustic guitar traditions, with deep study of figures like Laurindo Almeida and Andrés Segovia. This foundation in fretboard discipline and tonal sensitivity would later prove essential when he began exploring the electric guitar innovations of Robert Fripp and Allan Holdsworth, whose approaches to extended techniques and electronic processing fundamentally altered his conception of what the instrument could accomplish. “I’m into living with full presence and awareness, and that’s all I need to do to be here,” Mercereau has said. “The process of showing up fully to whatever it is, and bringing it all to that moment, creates something.”

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This philosophy—music-making as a form of documentation, emotional processing, and real-time discovery—permeates every aspect of his practice. He maintains a rigorous habit of recording everything: formal performances, casual sound-check moments, the initial instinctive explorations that emerge when he first picks up an instrument. For Mercereau, those unfiltered first moments contain crucial artistic intentions that, if captured and later incorporated into finished compositions, retain an authenticity that excessive revision would erase. It is a methodology that privileges spontaneity over perfection, presence over polish, and collective conversation over individual virtuosity.

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SUNDAYS EXPANSION — The Album Context

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SUNDAYS EXPANSION is the direct successor to SUNDAYS, an album Mercereau released in 2021 that documented a year of weekly outdoor performances conducted from April 2020 through April 2021. From approximately twenty-five hours of raw material generated across those Sunday gatherings, Mercereau edited and sequenced a one-hour album that captured the essence of spontaneous ensemble creation during a period when live music performance had been severely constrained by global pandemic conditions. The album was a meditation on presence, patience, and the value of showing up week after week to make music with no predetermined outcome.

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SUNDAYS EXPANSION, released in October 2022, extends that template. The album contains five original compositions—”Flying Together,” “Let The Forest Take Over,” “And Then Go Further…,” “Digging Up The Roots,” and “Sylvan Sunday”—plus the previously released live track “Truly Loving It (Live in Ojai).” The track lengths vary dramatically, from the brief two-minute fragment “And Then Go Further…” to the thirteen-minute epic “Digging Up The Roots,” suggesting an album that treats duration as a compositional parameter rather than a constraint. The titles, with their references to forests, roots, and sylvan landscapes, reinforce the album’s connection to natural environments and organic growth processes—a metaphorical framework that aligns with Mercereau’s commitment to allowing music to develop according to its own internal logic.

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“Flying Together” serves as the album’s opening statement, and its eight-minute duration immediately signals that this is music unconcerned with conventional song structures. There are no verses, no choruses, no hooks in the traditional sense. Instead, the track establishes a sonic environment—a space in which the listener is invited to dwell, to breathe, to follow the music as it unfolds in real time. It is a composition that rewards both active listening and passive immersion, and it sets the tone for an album that refuses to rush.

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Inside the Sound: Signal Chain and Technique

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To understand how “Flying Together” achieves its distinctive sonic character, one must examine the technological ecosystem that Mercereau has spent years refining. At the center of his setup is the BOSS SY-1000 Guitar Synthesizer, the most advanced guitar-to-synthesis interface currently available. The SY-1000 features custom digital signal processing that delivers six times the processing power of earlier BOSS models, with a sound engine that leverages independent string processing to provide ultra-articulate performance, lightning-fast response, and instantly variable tuning capabilities. This technology allows Mercereau to assign different synthesizer algorithms, effects, and parameters to individual strings, effectively transforming the traditional six-string instrument into a twelve-voice or greater synthesizer.

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But the SY-1000 is only the most recent chapter in a longer history. Mercereau has immersed himself in the decades-long evolution of guitar synthesizer technology, beginning with the iconic Roland GR-300 from 1979 and extending to the even earlier Roland GR-500 from 1977. He understands that these vintage units contain particular sonic characteristics and synthesis algorithms that later digital systems, however more powerful, cannot precisely replicate. His current rig reflects this historical awareness, incorporating both vintage and contemporary elements to achieve a sound that is simultaneously familiar and alien.

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Beyond the synthesizer itself, Mercereau’s signal chain includes multiple layers of processing: a Godin Freeway guitar fitted with a Roland GK-1 pickup for hexaphonic signal capture, a Korg expression pedal for real-time parameter modulation, a Digitech XP400 multi-effects processor, a Gamechanger Audio PLUS pedal for analog overdrive and saturation, and a BOSS ME-70 multi-effects pedalboard providing reverb, delay, modulation, and dynamic processing. Each element serves a distinct purpose: the synthesizers provide tonal generation and transformation, while the effects units create the spatial context, textural depth, and dynamic character that distinguishes his music from more straightforward synthesis approaches.

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Perhaps the most innovative element of Mercereau’s practice is his incorporation of live microphone recording into his stage rig. He points a microphone at the band or ambient sound source, records whatever happens, and then maps those captured samples across his fretboard’s note range, enabling him to physically play back recorded audio through the synthesizer while simultaneously manipulating its speed, pitch, and spectral characteristics. He calls this technique “playing reality,” and it represents the fullest realization of his conceptual approach to the guitar as a universal instrument capable of embodying and transforming any sound source. In “Flying Together,” this technique likely contributes to the track’s sense of organic emergence—the feeling that the music is not being composed so much as discovered in real time.

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The Eight-Minute Arc: How the Track Unfolds

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“Flying Together” opens not with a statement but with an atmosphere. A warm, sustained synthesizer tone—generated from Mercereau’s guitar but bearing no resemblance to a conventional guitar sound—hovers in the stereo field, creating a sense of suspended time. The tone is neither major nor minor in any functional sense; it exists in an ambiguous harmonic territory that invites the listener to project their own emotional response onto it. This is characteristic of Mercereau’s approach to harmony, which tends toward open, modal spaces rather than functional progressions, creating meditative, trance-like qualities through repetition and subtle variation.

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After approximately thirty seconds, Carlos Niño’s percussion enters: not a rhythmic statement but a textural one, with cymbals and hand drums creating a shimmering backdrop that feels less like a beat and more like a weather pattern. The percussion is treated with the same spatial processing as the guitar, existing in the same reverberant environment rather than occupying a separate sonic plane. This is a crucial aspect of the track’s production aesthetic: every element shares the same acoustic space, creating a sense of ensemble unity that transcends individual instrumental contributions.

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Around the two-minute mark, Josh Johnson’s saxophone enters, playing long, unhurried tones that weave through the guitar textures without competing with them. The saxophone is not playing a melody in the conventional sense; it is adding another voice to a conversation that has already begun, responding to the harmonic and textural environment established by Mercereau and Niño. This is the essence of the spontaneous composition methodology that defines SUNDAYS EXPANSION: the music is not written in advance but discovered through collective listening and response.

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As the track progresses, additional layers accumulate: Jamire Williams’ drums enter with a gentle pulse, Efa Etoroma Jr. and Aaron Shaw add textural contributions, and Mercereau’s guitar synthesizer evolves through a series of timbral transformations. The track reaches its textural peak around the five-minute mark, with all instruments contributing to a dense, immersive soundscape that nonetheless maintains a sense of openness and breathing room. Then, gradually, the layers begin to peel away. The percussion recedes, the saxophone fades, and the track resolves into a meditative coda that echoes its opening, bringing the eight-minute journey to a gentle close.

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The structural approach of “Flying Together” is fundamentally organic and non-linear. There are no sharp transitions, no dramatic key changes, no moments of sudden dynamic contrast. Instead, the music evolves through gradual accretion and dissolution, creating a sense of journey without destination. It is music that asks the listener to surrender to the process rather than anticipate the outcome—a demand that, for those willing to meet it, yields profound rewards.

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The Scene: International Anthem, Carlos Niño and Ambient Jazz

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“Flying Together” does not exist in isolation. It is part of a broader ecosystem of West Coast experimental and spiritual music that has coalesced around figures like Carlos Niño, the percussionist, producer, and curator who has spent two decades functioning as a champion and matchmaker for Los Angeles’s most expansive artists. Niño, who also hosts a long-running radio show on KPFK and co-founded the online streaming platform Dublab, has facilitated collaborations between musicians who might otherwise occupy non-overlapping sonic territories: violinist Miguel Atwood Ferguson, electronic producer Flying Lotus, beatmaker Madlib, saxophonist Sam Gendel, and rapper André 3000, among many others.

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The particular constellation of musicians with whom Mercereau collaborates most frequently—Niño, Josh Johnson, Jamire Williams—has begun to crystalize into something resembling a defined artistic movement. In 2025, these three musicians released their debut album as the Openness Trio on the prestigious Blue Note Records label, marking a significant institutional validation of the ambient jazz and spiritual music approach they have developed over more than a decade of collaboration. The trio recorded across multiple intimate and natural settings around Los Angeles and Ventura County: the outdoor hills of Ojai, an intimate living room in Elysian Park, an oak tree orchard, the courtyard of an Echo Park home, under a pepper tree in Topanga Canyon. Each environment contributed distinct acoustic characteristics to the final product, reflecting a philosophical position that music-making is fundamentally inseparable from its environmental context.

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André 3000’s 2023 album New Blue Sun, co-produced by Carlos Niño and featuring playing and arranging work from Nate Mercereau, represents another crucial node in this network. The six-hour instrumental flute and percussion journey, which occasioned substantial critical discussion and occasional controversy within ambient music communities, marked André 3000’s most explicit embrace of spiritual music aesthetics and demonstrated his commitment to experimental instrumental music as a serious artistic direction. Mercereau’s contributions to New Blue Sun have become increasingly central to his public profile, with major media outlets noting his involvement and the album’s influence on his subsequent work, including his 2024 solo album Excellent Traveler, which incorporates sampled flute from André 3000 recorded during casual studio sessions in Los Angeles.

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This resistance to limiting descriptors—whether “spiritual,” “ambient,” “soundscape,” or even “experimental”—reflects a broader artistic politics among this generation of musicians. They recognize that genre categories carry historical and cultural baggage that constrains rather than illuminates actual artistic intentions. The term “ambient jazz” has recently emerged as a descriptive category for this work, but it is a label that the musicians themselves approach with caution, aware that it can too easily collapse into “the soundtrack to a bougie yoga retreat,” complete with expected sonic accoutrements that communicate spiritual aspiration through established shorthand rather than genuine artistic exploration. The particular achievement of musicians like Mercereau, Niño, and their collaborators lies in their capacity to navigate and transcend these ready-made cultural associations through the specificity of their artistic practice and the genuine spontaneity evident in their recorded performances.

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Critical Reception

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Critical response to SUNDAYS EXPANSION and “Flying Together” has been characterized by recognition of Mercereau’s distinctive voice within the contemporary experimental landscape. Reviewers have noted the album’s successful extension of the SUNDAYS project’s methodology, praising the expanded palette of collaborators and the deepened commitment to spontaneous composition. The track has been described as “a crystalline expression of contemporary experimental guitar practice at the intersection of spiritual jazz, ambient music, and electroacoustic exploration,” with particular attention paid to Mercereau’s ability to create orchestral textures from a single instrument and his sophisticated integration of synthesizer technology with traditional instrumental performance.

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Mercereau’s earlier work, particularly his debut solo album Joy Techniques (2019), established the critical framework through which his subsequent releases have been understood. Critics described that album as occupying a space between the jazz-hip-hop fusion aesthetics of Brainfeeder Records and the synthesizer-driven ambient innovations of Brian Eno, while others drew comparisons to the electric fusion experiments of John McLaughlin and Miles Davis. The album’s careful balance between jazz training and pop songwriting sensibilities, its creation entirely on vintage guitar synthesizer units with no keyboards employed, and its nine-track architecture running just under forty minutes all established Mercereau as a musician capable of creating complex, layered compositions that worked equally well as intimate solo listening or sophisticated background ambience.

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The trajectory from Joy Techniques through SUNDAYS to SUNDAYS EXPANSION has been read by critics as a progressive deepening of Mercereau’s artistic vision, with each release moving further from studio refinement toward spontaneous capture and real-time performance. This evolution has been met with increasing attention from both experimental music communities and broader audiences, positioning Mercereau as a significant figure in the contemporary ambient jazz landscape.

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Try It Yourself: Gear and Approach for Mercereau-Style Ambient Guitar

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For musicians and producers interested in developing approaches to ambient and meditative guitar-based music that draw upon Mercereau’s working practice, several foundational elements warrant careful attention. The most essential prerequisite is access to a guitar synthesizer system or alternative technology capable of generating synthesizer tones from guitar input. While Mercereau’s current primary instrument is the BOSS SY-1000, more affordable entry points exist, including previous-generation BOSS models such as the SY-300, various Roland guitar synthesizer units, or alternative systems from other manufacturers.

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Beyond synthesizer acquisition, the following technical and philosophical elements are central to Mercereau’s approach:

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The most important technique to develop is the use of dynamic expression pedals to shape the envelope characteristics of synthesized guitar tones. Rather than allowing synthesizer algorithms to generate notes with their default attack and decay envelopes, Mercereau regularly employs foot-pedal-controlled filter sweeps to create expressive, vocal-like sounds. Before extensively utilizing guitar synthesizers, he spent considerable time developing expertise with volume pedals designed to shave off a note’s attack and fade the note in gradually, a technique that proved so effective in generating emotionally resonant tones that he has carried it into his synthesizer work.

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Slide technique is another signature element. Slide works remarkably well with guitar synthesizers, providing continuous pitch modulation and micro-tonal expression that is essentially unavailable through traditional fretted playing techniques. Combined with the synthesizer’s ability to sustain tones indefinitely, slide technique allows for a degree of expressive freedom and vocal-like phrasing that distinguishes Mercereau’s work from more mechanical-sounding synthesis applications.

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Finally, consider incorporating live microphone recording into your practice. The ability to capture ambient sounds, sample them, and trigger them through your fretboard opens up a world of textural possibilities that extend far beyond traditional guitar playing. As Mercereau puts it, this technique allows you to “play reality”—to transform the sounds of your environment into musical material that can be manipulated in real time.

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Where to Hear More

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For listeners who find themselves drawn into the world of “Flying Together,” the path forward is rich with possibility. Begin with the full SUNDAYS EXPANSION album, which deepens and extends the aesthetic established by the opening track. Then explore its predecessor, SUNDAYS, which documents the weekly outdoor performances that laid the groundwork for the expansion. Mercereau’s debut solo album Joy Techniques (2019) offers a more studio-refined but equally compelling vision of his guitar synthesis practice.

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From there, follow the collaborative threads. The Openness Trio’s debut album on Blue Note Records (2025) features Mercereau alongside Carlos Niño and Josh Johnson in an extended exploration of spontaneous chamber music. André 3000’s New Blue Sun (2023) includes Mercereau’s contributions within a six-hour meditation on flute, percussion, and healing sonic spaces. Mercereau’s 2024 collaboration with saxophonist Sam Gendel, digi-squires, released on Leaving Records, offers a more intimate and experimental take on the duo format.

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Carlos Niño’s extensive discography as both leader and collaborator provides a broader context for the West Coast ambient jazz movement, including his work with Miguel Atwood Ferguson, Flying Lotus, Madlib, and Saul Williams. The International Anthem and Leaving Records catalogs offer further entry points into the experimental and spiritual music ecosystem that has nurtured this work.

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FAQ

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