Category: Interviews

I speak with Oleg Shpudeiko about his sonic memories of his home in Ukraine, his return post invasion, and processing it all on new album “Kyiv Eternal”.

– 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.