Category: Interviews

– We have been together for forty years and these years were like a lifetime. We started with two violas da gamba and later played piano and cello on the album Like a Butterfly on your Palm, then added songs on Tenderly to Light. Now we have the time to play four-handed piano – says Vojtěch Havel, a Czech composer and instrumentalist, who plays with Irena Havlová.

– An immigrant always negotiates his position in some way. There are different strategies: mixing languages, preserving traditional costumes or seeking a place through speculative anthropology. This works at the university and in a gallery, but I believe it can also provoke something outside of them – says musician and composer, Wojciech Rusin.

– A lot of stuff is melted together but in the music of La Nòvia, Cocanha, even in my music there’s this idea of doing actually traditional music, living traditional music. I think it’s because we are a generation that wasn’t cut off from traditional culture. It’s not about making a museum, it’s about putting a lot of yourself into it – says Ernest Bergez, composer, vocalist and creator of the Sourdure, Kaumwald, Tanz Mein Herz and Orgue Agnès.

– Piano doesn’t have to be a beautiful instrument with a Steinway concert hall sound, but it can be a piano that sounds like it came out of an old movie. This happens when it imitates another instrument – not a keyboard instrument, but a percussion or guitar instrument. This is how piano music can be rediscovered – says Grzegorz Tarwid, pianist and composer.

– I know what the sound is going to be in the end. Before I start to record something, I’m making cymbals on purpose for that. If I have the sound in my mind, I’m trying to reproduce it on a cymbal or gong. I always have new ideas which come to me when I want to make a new record – I always develop new elements – says João Pais Filipe, a drummer and sculptor.

– The more time passed, the more women I would meet and play with. And these days it’s not uncommon for me to play in bands where women outnumber men. The more women doing it, the more younger girls starting out, having someone to look up to and feeling less of a boys’ club – says composer and guitarist, Mary Halvorson.

– Victor Pivovarov works about Moscow describe the reality, routine and ordinary life, but at the same there’s something very strange about his paintings. There’s a pencil, and there’s a house and a tree on it. It’s the same with Sailor Moon – those girls are living their ordinary lives, going to school, doing all the homework, but at the same time they defend the world against violence from other planets. This is the point where Pivovarov, Sailor Moon and fairy tales from the 70s and 80s meet in the same approach. They come together in my music – says singer and composer, Kate NV.

– When I was in school I studied contemporary art and I was always interested in the ideas of land artists such as Robert Smithson or Nancy Holt from 1960s, who were really concerned with the ideas of site, non-site and what does it mean to take an object or element from a site and relocate it elsewhere. I became interested in those sorts of ideas applied to music and acoustics – says artist and composer, Lea Bertucci

– Rather than the instrument itself, what’s important is whether you find an idea for it and whether it meets your expectations concerning the music you want to play – says clarinettist and composer Wacław Zimpel.

– I stand in front of the microphone and build up the narrative, line after line. I enter into a dialogue with myself or with someone else. All these albums are about impersonating other people and entering into a dialogue, creating a multitude of threads within a single person. I create someone who is me, but as if being someone else. Ultimately, all the figures are me – says Robert Piernikowski.