Details
Today’s guest is the Berlin based sound designer, composer, and artist Andrey Guryanov. Andrey creates music for films, but is also interested in improvisational and performative practices, as well as reduced and generative electronic music. We discuss Andrey's new album Anthems, which uses the Soviet national anthem as its source material, the power of art during times of war, his collaborative projects Logs (with Dasha Zvezdin) and Drojji (with Felix Mirensky), and his label Abstand.
Comment
Today’s guest is the Berlin based sound designer, composer, and artist Andrey Guryanov. Andrey creates music for films, but is also interested in improvisational and performative practices, as well as reduced and generative electronic music. We discuss Andrey's new album Anthems, which uses the Soviet national anthem as its source material, the power of art during times of war, his collaborative projects Logs (with Dasha Zvezdin) and Drojji (with Felix Mirensky), and his label Abstand.
Listen to Andrey Guryanov by audio.com MP3 song. Andrey Guryanov song from audio.com is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 51:42. This high-quality MP3 track has 2116.8 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 20 Jul 2023. Stream and download Andrey Guryanov by audio.com for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
Summary: Andrey Guryanov is a Berlin-based sound designer, composer, and artist who creates sound and music for various mediums. He is interested in the relationship between improvisational music and electronic music. His album, "Anthems," reflects on the history of the Soviet and Russian national anthems by using the silence between the tuning chord and the first verse as source material. He discusses his journey into sound and the process of creating the album. He also talks about the role of art in times of conflict, particularly in relation to the war in Ukraine. Andrey collaborates with Dasha Zvezdin in the project Logs, which combines 3D digital art with processed sound material. They created a music video for the track "2022," which features visuals based on the destruction caused by the invasion in Ukraine. Transcription: Hello, you're listening to the Audio.com podcast, where we speak with musicians, authors, curators and other practitioners about their work within the interconnected fields of sound, technology and performance. I'm Ilia Rogachevski. Today's guest is the Berlin-based sound designer, composer and artist Andrey Guryanov. Andrey creates sound and music for films, theatrical productions, installations and video art, with a view of extending the aesthetic of cinematic music. He has worked as a foley artist and sound supervisor and re-recording mixer for over a decade, and was nominated for a White Elephant Award by the Russian Guild of Film Critics for his soundtrack work on the Yakutian horror feature Hara Haar in 2021. Andrey is also interested in improvisational music and performative practices, as well as their relationship to reduced and generative electronic music. He is an active participant in the free improv scene, and frequently collaborates with other musicians. Logs, his duo with Dasha Zvezdin, combines 3D digital art with a mixture of layers and processed sound material. Drojji, his post-dance project with Felix Merensky, inverts established narrative structures of pop music to create expansive new soundscapes. Guryanov also co-runs the label Abstand, which released his solo album Anthems back in May 2023. This album reflects on the peculiar history of the Soviet and Russian national anthems by using, as its source material, a silent pause that occurs between the tuning chord played at the very beginning of the piece and the first verse. The track you can hear now is called 1944-1956. I spoke to Andrey about his work over video call. He was out while we talked, so you'll be able to hear Sounds of Berlin life recorded on his binaural microphone. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? Where you began your journey into sound, and how did you arrive to where you are today? I was born in the city of Penza, Russia, in 1987. I was always interested in doing something with music and something with the sound, so I got very lucky. At the age of 12, I got exposed to Cubase at the music school. So then I started to learn film sound again in Russia. So I'm kind of an educated film sound designer, with a proper diploma in a way. My life had changed a lot, but I hope I'm still going to be able to do this because I like it. So I was doing film sound for, say, 15 years now, and during this process there was always something about the music and something with the music. I got very lucky again to get involved in two free improvisation scenes in Moscow, and it all kind of started to solidify into one thing, which I believe this release for me is like a very neat point to explain who I am, a very neat point to have a new start of a sort. By doing that, I got to the place where I am professionally. I'd like to talk about your new album, which is called Anthems, and it charts the incredibly strange history of the Soviet National Anthem, and the current Russian National Anthem as well. I don't know how many people, how many of our listeners will be aware of that history, but I wonder if you could fill us in on that history and how that's fed into the project. What's the thinking behind it? It's very simple. I will semi-quote something because I'm not sure that I remember the author. It's supposed to be something that a Jewish person said about the Holocaust. When they say that they want to kill you, you believe in it, like treat it as truth. So the first thing that made me really understand that something around me is going really wrong is when the Anthem of Soviet Union became the Anthem of Russia. There is a well-known tune of Soviet anthem that came to life in 1944, and it was the national anthem till 1990. And then in 2000, the same anthem with a new lyric became an Anthem of Russian Federation. I was 13, and I got scared, almost physically scared, like what the hell is going on? For some years, yeah, actually 20 years, I thought that it's just, again, it's just a gesture, it's just like showing off, but it wasn't. It figured out that the idea of reanimating Soviet Union was actually pretty much alive, and this gesture of reviving the old anthem was just a part of the big process of trying to rebuild the Soviet Union. And not only this, the lyrics of those anthems, starting from 1944 till now, there were three versions of that lyrics, and they were all written by the same man. In the first version, it was 1944, it was like Stalinist regime at its top. Joseph Stalin was mentioned in the text like the father of nation, more or less. And then in 1977, they were changed to eliminate Joseph Stalin from them, and there was a short period of time when the anthem was played without the lyrics. And in 2000, the lyrics were completely changed into like Russia, great country, democracy, all that stuff, more or less. And all three texts that were accompanied by the same tune, by the same music material, they were written by the same person. This is Sergei Mikhalkov? Yeah, he is also like a father of two quite famous Russian characters. One of them is Nikita Mikhalkov, and I guess his reputation is well known right now, at least. And yeah, that was the same guy who wrote all these lyrics. So it was like picking up where we dropped Soviet Union, this model, and then let's recreate it again. You didn't use the music or the lyrics in the album. You used the silences between the first chord and the beginning of the singing. So what is it about that particular silence that interested you? And how on earth did you get an album's worth of material from just a few seconds? The very chord that comes first is something that always made me fever inside or got me frozen every time I heard it, because you hear it from your very early childhood, maybe from the moment you are born. When you hear it, you are supposed to stand up and be ready to phrase your country. And this pause was like the moment when I almost physically felt that, okay, I have this millisecond to prepare to what's definitely going to come after. There is a thing that is called aura, or aura, I don't know how to properly say this in English. It's a certain state of mind that comes before an epileptic seizure, that people with epilepsy, they know it, and it's very personalized for each one, but they know that it's going to be the same constellation of something you can perceive. That could be smell, that could be sound, that could be a certain vibration. And so I got this aura from this first chord all the time, and I'm frozen. And I wanted to extend the state of being frozen, so what's coming after won't ever happen. There is already a hymn. I want to point to this. I want to point to what happened with getting that hymn back, getting this anthem back, without actually using this anthem. So I didn't want to deal with that particular material, because it's kind of too toxic, it's kind of too heavy. And the third part of it all was that there is a certain documental value in this pause, because in this pause you can hear what kind of technology was used to capture it, to store it. So you can hear different sort of clicks inside it when we're talking about tape, or when we're talking about digital recording, or when we're talking about like it was reproduced on pretty much every available medium, including vinyls and all this. And you can actually hear also what were the conditions of the recording, like how clean was the chain. And for me, this short sample of silence contains maybe even more information than what comes after and what comes before, because what comes after is for someone who is interested in political history, and it's well researched. And for me, I was kind of interested in what kind of documental information I can extract from this little moment. So it was way more important for me also to point out that sound itself has a documental value, and maybe even more than video photo. So yeah, and then I just started to play around with it, and there is an album that came out of this. So how did you get access to these recordings? I read in the liner notes that you've got digital copies that were made between the year 2000 and 2010. What was the process of getting these different recordings that spread across time from 1917, when it was La Marseillaise up to the present day? I mean, as long as I had a long history of working with cinematic sound, I got acquainted with the state sound archives, also archives of not only these, but like field recordings that were created for the sake of the movies. I guess back then it was a request from a theater I was working at the moment, so they just gave whatever they had. It was digital copies, so I don't know what was their path, how they got from the original to me, but as far as I can speculate that they were made in, well, after 2000. I know how they digitalized the tapes, I know how they copied tapes, real tapes to real tapes before. It wasn't like I went to the archives and hold the very original, especially from 1917, like it was supposed to be a wax disc or something like this. No, it was just a bunch of emails going back and forth. I'm not sure that it was all that they got, but it was enough for me to start. And I also, I didn't want to get the very original, I wanted to have what I can get, what I can, what they will give me now, because they will also have a sort of a technological history that I can follow. And one of the anthems that was international, it was obviously a copy of a copy recorded on a reel that probably was used before. And in this post, there was a piece of the same anthem, very quiet, very supple, somewhere there. Maybe it got over-magnetized, so in this silence there was like maybe the next row of the reel that got exposed on the first row of the reel, I don't know. So it has a shadow of the same anthem in this post, which also describes that they were not properly stored, they were not copied to another reel time after time in order to maintain the quality. So it has a documental value again. I can tell by analyzing it that nobody gave it enough of care, like the document is supposed to be taken care of by the person who's really crazy enough to love the document. It was obvious that nothing like that happened, it was neglected, and this is why I can hear this shadow in this little fragment. It gives me a solid proof that this word that you read when you read a textbook on history is like something you're supposed to question. And that sort of not taking proper care of the original recording of the anthem from the beginning of the previous state, it means more for me, because it means that this is how we deal with it, we Russians, this is how we deal with our history, we don't. We just don't care. And this is why it happens again and again and again. So that was the value of this post and that was the idea why I wanted this post. I wanted to hear it in a different medium. Technically speaking, how did you extract the information that was in that post, the sonic information, and how did you manipulate it? That was a rather simple thing to do. It's all pretty much was the digital process of amplification, of looking at a spectrum, cleaning something that probably is there. I mean, with 15 years of doing film sound experience, I got kind of good at restoring something, at working with something that was not recorded properly, and then I need to extract the info from it. So for me, it was a very natural process that I am very used to. And that's pretty much it. So I tried to clean it as much as possible to see what kind of noise is there, what kind of noise belongs to the reel, what kind of noise belongs to the chain of the original recording, and what kind of noise belongs to future damage that happened before the original recording. Also, I just got all this, not artificial intelligence, but very simple stuff like bit detection software. Then there was a very standard for, well, I guess many, many and many uses this approach to use the Denoise software and then to click this nice checkbox, leave only noise. So, like, what kind of clicks are there, and all that. And from that, it's practically a speculative process, more or less. I don't think you can say that it has any scientific value in it. So it was a speculative, more or less artistic process of getting this out of there. I wanted my own interfaces, I wanted to do my own very simple things, but the way I want to do them. So I wrote my own maximum speed stuff to play with, and to improvise and to perform. And I just got all this bunch of samples, clicks, noise, everything into the software, and then it was purely non-scientific, but rather artistic way of just playing around with it and figuring out what's there. I guess it's a little bit like plunder phonics, isn't it? It's that concept of collage in sonic form. Well, I guess plunder phonics, technically, correct me if I'm wrong, but it is more of using the wholesale piece, and then using it in juxtaposition with other wholesale piece. This was more aesthetics of micro sound of the beginning of the 2000s, when the digital domain was kind of researched enough to look into glitches. Pretty much, it also has something to do with the glitch. But it's also plunder phonics because it was plunder phonics like this shadow of the previous sound that was on the reel that I got later on as a digital copy, it is plunder phonics. It's basically combining two of the same stuff together with a different term. So yeah, it's a collage approach in a way, yeah. The last track on the album is called 2022, and it's composed out of audio from YouTube videos of explosions in Ukraine. There is a music video that's attached to that track, which features visuals based on the destruction caused by the invasion in Ukraine. If you could talk a little bit behind the ideas of that track and what you think the role of art is in times like these. The complicated part for me here is that I'm not sure that I still, I mean, it's released, it's there. It got reviewed, it exists. It has its own life, luckily. I'm still not sure that I'm actually supposed to speak about the war from any other perspective than Russian. So the point for me was that I had my friends in Kiev when the big war started, when the active phase of the war started. I don't even know how to talk about this properly because the war was going on for quite a long time. It was just, it was not in my brain that much. So anyway, I just felt that I need to somehow conclude this. There was an album. The album was ready and done in 2020, maybe 2021. It was mastered. It was waiting for someone to take it to release. So it was ready, I guess, more than a year before February 22. And so I changed the name of the previous track that was like 2020. A year passed, I had to change it into 2021. A year passed and it was like January and I had to change it to 2022. And also the first name of the album was 1970-2020. It was an observation. When the invasion started, the observation was outdated in a way. It was not fulfilled anymore. It lacked some of the things. It lacked some info and I thought like, how can I fill it up to be complete? And I just used my personal connection to those places, those people that were there to wrap it up. It was an ongoing process. Like, look, this is what's happening. This is how it's happening. And it's still going. I had this as an idea of ongoing process as a sort of a premonition in the end. Like, basically, who am I to tell anything about this? Because it was supposed to be obvious what kind of place Russia is. But I had this inside of me and I wanted to deal with this to like get it out of me and to also analyze it. And I believe that from now on, it's just a question of time when this last anthem, the explosions, that murders, that massacres, all that unnecessary violence will kind of put an end to this line that started in the Soviet Union and that went on and on and on to our moments. It's a sort of a ridiculous in a way idea on how you can affect something of sort of a magical realism, how art can probably change something. The biggest question is still the same. Like, if you ask me how this album can stop the war, I can't. How am I reducing the amount of death right now in Ukraine because of the country that I used to live in and that is my homeland? I don't think it affects anything. I don't really think that this is the way to stop it. But I do think that it's very important to proceed with speaking about it in every and any possible way. If you're in the niche of experimental music, which is like, it's a nice world. It's very interconnected society of people. And if I'm going to do my job and tell this little society that this country, this political institution is unhealthy for the whole planet, unhealthy for its own people, unhealthy for the external world, it's just a model of sick sociopathic violence. There will be like maybe 10 more people who will never question this. Like, is this true or is this just western world fighting with the eastern world? So, if I can alter the opinion of 10 people about this, good enough. In every niche, in every little fracture of reality, there will be someone who will spread this word that this is unhealthy. It's bad for everybody. It's not how it's supposed to be. Let's at least not think about it as something questionable. It is just like straightforward black. So, so so so so so Your partner Dasha Zvezdin created the music video for 2022. She's a 3D artist. You also work together in a project called Logs. Can you tell me a little bit about that project? I understand that it's mostly improv based. So, the video, we used a fragment of all kind of available images of available like footages of a little snippet of everything pretty much in the same way that I used this post in the album. Still, it's an open question if I, the occupant, the aggressor, not me personally, but my citizenship makes me like belong into that crowd, which I don't want to be. It doesn't matter. The fact is the fact. So, whether we as aggressors can use the result of the destruction that we done as aggressors to do our art around this. And it's a question now, back then, when the video was done, the question of we need to do something about it, what we can do, we can do some sort of art was also the question of our own survival, which is still a complicated point for me. And this is how the video came to life that the original idea was that we need to react somehow. And Dasha wanted to react. She needed to react this way. I believe it's also the same kind of thing that can work in its own niche, like for the people who are interested in 3D, it's first of all, it's a very good conceptual artwork. On the other hand, I hope that there is that the whole massacre that underlies there is still visible. And it's still, you can still perceive it after maybe years after, hopefully, I don't know, but it's still a reminder. And about Dasha. Dasha is a contemporary classic composer, very talented. And she also had a history of involvement in free improvisation scene, pretty much worldwide, more or less. It's very cool to see her works as a 3D artist, because when you see an artist transitioning from one medium to another, and like stealing, and stealing here is a very good, very positive word, stealing something from that medium and bringing it into it, smuggling it into another. Somehow, I believe you can see it in the video that she's also a composer, which makes this video very peculiar on its aesthetical side. Leave alone the message that is supposed to be there. And we wanted to do something more digital, more electronic. So yeah, basically Logs is a duo of people who approached electronic sound from two different directions, me more or less from this cinematic sound design professional scene, and her from the very top there, you know, the guys who write real scores and operas. And what is the common ground between us, between our intentions of how to deal with the music and how we can coexist together? This was about us coexisting as musicians on a values of certain freedom. And it's a very interesting project, because we wanted to give that freedom also to the music itself. So what we started to do was playing like two, three, four hours long sets to see how we can expand out of common ideas, common boundaries. It's moving to its own direction now. It's not that long anymore. But yeah, it's basically two person doing their own stream of sounds, trying to make it durable, sustainable, and long. The combination of our background, I believe, makes it something worth to give it a try to listen to. It's interesting that you mentioned the length of your improvisations, because I get a sense that the visual element is very strong and very important in logs. There's quite a lot of music videos that Dasha has made to go along with the music. And I wonder, are these things closely linked? How do you marry the sounds with the visual stuff? Is it all one concept that manifests together at the same time? Or is there another approach? It is going that way. Basically, it's like pretty much what happened, I guess, yesterday that we started to think that we need to start with a one frame of concept that will grow into everything. But before that, it was more or less, well, pretty much conceptually disconnected, consciously disconnected pieces of information, like the visual part. It's not supposed to be directly connected. It's not supposed to react. What Dasha is doing is supposed to have a life of its own as well. It's like the basis of free improvisation domain. What I do is supposed to have a life of its own. And so you perceive three independent layers of reality. And the marriage, I believe, is supposed to happen in the perception of those who listen to it, of those who look at it. And also we're trying to stay close together, but also to sustain the independence of our each individual layer of what's going on. And what I liked about logs back then, and what I like still, but it's kind of growing to something else now. So it was like that layers that are not directly connected, but then this magic happens. They go together and you can't tell anymore which one is affecting what. And technically, when we play, the only thing that connects us is that we're plugged into the same mixer. So we don't share tempos, we don't share materials, we don't share anything. It's like it's independent. But then for me as a performer, the nicest point of it is when I can't even tell who's doing what anymore. Because the matter that I'm creating and the matter that she's creating, it often comes so close to each other that I mean, I know what I'm doing. I can guess what I'm doing, but I can't hear it anymore. It's solidified into, it's petrified into something next, if we have her layer of music, my layer of music and her layer of video. And then I see that there is this fourth layer of something else. And you're out of it. This is like, yeah, okay, this is going the right way. This is how it's supposed to be. So I was intrigued by your album Eight. It was released on cassette and digitally, but it was also released as an art object, which is a sort of an amorphous USB stick with a glowing log, glowing projectile of some sort sort of attached in it. It was created by the artist Sergei Prokofiev. And I'd like to find out how this artwork, this multiple ties into the mood of the album. I hope I can speak on Sergei's behalf here. This log and this angle that is shown there, it's basically the angle that you see on the photos of police on the process, because this is the angle that they hold their batons before striking you. Sergei is working, he's like, I don't know, maybe the best, the most precise, the most clean protest artist I know. And for us, it was important that logs is not only music, but it grows out of freedom and this sort of independency of the layers that I described before. It's not conceptually, but it emotionally grows out of the conditions that we perceived living in Russia back then. The pressure that was always there, the violence that was not always direct, but it was present and you can feel it. And we didn't want to openly put it into the political narrative, but it was there anyway, as I believe. There is no music that is just music. There is no way you can avoid reacting to the circumstances you are in. Both me and Dasha, we like lamps. So when we move around, we have like a bunch of little lamps, like USB stick lamps. So we go to, we get to the new place, we put them somewhere and it's like, it's our place from that moment. We try to individualize it with the light. And so we talked to Sergey about our love to these light devices. And then he came up with something that works very good for me, because on one hand, it's just a nice, neat, little light device. But when you start to look at it, when you start to think about it, maybe it's completely unobvious when you don't read the text that goes around the subject. But basically, why do we need it? And why do we need this little light? And what is the origin of this need of, you know, some sort of stability and comfort? We just talked with him about how we like the light. And then he came up with the idea, because this is his medium. He is working as a protest artist and he's still doing it. It's not even about a conversation that we can have about this. It's about someone's PhD that is supposed to be written about this, like, how can you still be a protest artist when you're not there anymore? And it's so obvious that your protest is not going to work anyhow. And if you're even supposed to do this, if you are eligible to do this, if you have a right to do this, so yeah. You actually, you're involved in lots of different projects. And another one of them is called Drogy. You're due with Felix Miryansky. And on Bandcamp on various websites, it's described as free dance, and inspired by footwork, fast tempos, and the structures within pop music. But when you listen to it, it sounds like a deconstruction of all those things. So can you tell me about the sources you used? And what's the concept behind that project? The first album that was released, it was a double album, like two sides of the tape. The first one was called Mighty Minority. And the second one was called Future Sound of Russia, which sounds awful now. But the concept behind the Future Sound of Russia was described by our close friend as, in Russian, it's barkhotny kolonializm. So I guess velvet colonialism. It's more or less. The Mighty Minority was more about like, just some stuff that we like that was sampled, and then reproduced in a way with, again, with this Maximus P software, and all that. And for Future Sound of Russia, it was just the pieces of music that we actually liked, because we share with Felix our interest in what is not the right way to say like authentic or ethnic music, but something that has its roots. And for me, the idea was that I don't feel that I have roots. Right now I'm in Berlin, and I feel like I've always been in Berlin. And like, I've always lived here. And it happens every time I change place. So I don't feel that I have roots. And I don't feel that I have any sort of heritage, because part of the heritage that was stomped into my head in Russia, I want to get rid of. So this is half of it is lies, half of it is propaganda. And what's left when you take one half and another half is pretty much nothing. And though I have like some cultural and ethnic heritage, DNA heritage, I've never felt that I'm that I have a root in somewhere. So we created a situation that we pretended that we dug out some little snippets of music in the future, five centuries from now. And from that artifact, we created something that is supposed to sound in a, you know, future buses that are traveling in between future cities. The sort of a car you can see in Alfonso Cohen's Children of Men. It's like diesel punk of some sort. That album Future Sound of Russia was about like, what's going to be the music that the driver of these buses is going to listen to. So basically, this is still colonial practice to use the samples of, say again, ethnic, authentic music, but I'm not interested in really stealing something. I'm more interested in a possibility for a person to create its own path, to choose its own path, to not inherit something, but rather invent for yourself what you want to inherit, even if that never existed. So to create your own legend and to be able to live in the world where you are able to create your own legend and your own history. So not to be dependent on, again, on the propaganda that happens around you anyway, because it always happens, and to rely on to what you actually need to get your own personal freedom. Yeah, basically, it's an attempt to be free again, to be free of restraints of your origin. And aside from the fact that I believe that we all are supposed to, especially Russians, especially me right now as Russian, I'm supposed to deal with my past, I'm supposed to deal with the history of the country, I supposed to excavate something from there and put it out to the world in the open. I also believe that I'm supposed to have a default right to not depend on this, to not depend on the history of where I was born in or where I live in. I'm supposed to change it as I want. Because it goes with the ideas that we're dealing now in the world, that you are supposed to be able to identify yourself with whatever you want to identify yourself. So Drozhy was more about this, and the footwear combination and all the rest, it was just something that I felt and Felix felt fancy at the moment. Like, so what do we want? 150 BPM, is it good? Yeah, it's good. Does it fit us? Yeah, it does. Let's go. And later on, it became something even more interesting, because how Drozhy works, it's actually quite cool, because what is happening there is I still have my new patches and Max MSP created to do some sort of composition in the life, in the process of real improvisation. So we're not sure where we're going to get all the time. And Felix gets some signal from me, recognizes it into MIDI score, and feeds this MIDI score into synthesizers on his side. So basically, he's not like producing any sound of his own, he's just making an interpretation of what I do. And what I do is basically an interpretation of something else, because I'm heavily sample-based. I'm trying to be sample-based all the time, because I just like it, I like to use sound as a document. And so it's like an interpretation of reality that is, again, being interpreted by someone else. And basically, Felix in this whole combination is also trying to re-appropriate something from the, say, artificial intelligence, like he's serving as a sort of artificial intelligence or a machine of recognition of what music is. And at the same time, it deals with... All this speech recognition software is quite peculiar, because it's adjusted to certain ideas of what music is. It's like, now we modernly measure the level of loudness with LUFS system. It's designed to analyze music with voice in it. And when you try to feed something glitchy into it, the system doesn't recognize the levels right, because it's not adjusted to that sort of material. And basically, Felix is trying to, with his own speech recognition stuff that he's using, he's trying to see, so how does the machine hear what we hear as music? And he makes a second transition from that to create a new layer of interpretation from it. So it's like a very interconnected to itself reciprocating process, because basically, I also have a microphone when we play Drozhi. So the signal that Felix creates, it feeds back into my microphone, and I send it back to him, so he can recognize it again. And it goes, and it goes, and it goes, and it goes. Abstand, which is German for distance. Correct me if I'm wrong in my interpretation, but I suppose it's sort of a reflection on where we are at the moment, working distantly, remotely, as a result of COVID and migrating to other cities, living in places different from where you were born. And I'm interested in your interpretation of what this word means, and what this label is about, and who are the artists on it? And what is it that unites them together? Basically, it was started by me, Dasha, Snezhana Rezin, and Mikhail Kraichok. Well, we are all connected this way or another, we're all kind of friends in different constellations. The place where it started was that I had anthems, which is pretty much a clear, straightforward interpretation of some historical events, and now, like, of nowadays as well. Miho's album, Ich schwore, ich hab Angst, I swear I'm scared, is more about his personal and emotional life in what's happening from the perspective of a person who lives in Berlin, so let's say, Western Europe. Snezhana is, because of her mixed heritage, she was very affected by the war, definitely, and she is, again, back to the same topic as I am. And the fourth release that goes into the first, there is a first, like, batch, first edition of Abstand Label, it's like four releases. Anthems, Ich schwore, ich hab Angst, released by Snezhana Rezin, and released by Mizi. He's from Greece, he's a very cool artist. Mizi's one, for example, is exactly what you just spoke about. During the corona time, apparently he had some, you know, some, yeah, basically some time to deal with something, so he created a patch in Max MSP in order to see how many instances of sine waves, I may be wrong with this, but anyway, how many instances of this very simple synthesizers can he have in Max MSP until it crashes. And from that he grew a whole, pretty much, master, sonic masterpiece of a nice process of transition from pure technological interest into trying to go beyond the top, how it grows into real art, how it grows into real music. So, basically, with the first batch of releases, we're more or less dealing with how we react on reality, how our music reacts on reality, how it's interconnected, how it's, again, how it's not just music, how we deal with it. It's not that direct, it's not that precise, it's rather a speculative idea in a way, because almost everything was created before the label, so we just had a bunch of material ready to go, and what was the feeling is that it's connected by how we're trying to deal with this, how we're trying to deal with our lives, being musicians, also being niche experimental musicians, more or less, and the name, it was more or less Snezhana's decision to call it Abstand. She was at the moment fascinated by the idea of living on space, of what's called non-lieu, if I'm pronouncing it right in French, a transitional place, a waiting room, a place where you are just supposed to observe and you are waiting for some factors, something from the external reality to change, and you are nowhere. The place is described as like nothingness, living on space. Yeah, it definitely has to do with with Corona, because I believe that there is a global wish, a global intention to, let's forget about this, let's say it never happened, which is very scary, because basically it was the first kind of pandemic of that sort in many, many, many years, mostly, as far as I remember, during the Corona, what was thought of as the similar thing to happen, happened 100 years ago, which was Spanish flu. Anyway, so, and if you think about it, it was the beginning of 20th century, so it was a different time, and now we live in the time where, as you mentioned, we immigrate more often, and it was not that common in the beginning of 20th century to have that much of movement around, and now we're flying as crazy, we're traveling as crazy, we're moving around as much as possible, and the next pandemic is, it's just a question of when, and I think it's going to be soon, this is going to happen again, with that sort of density of population, and that sort of interconnectedness, physical interconnectedness of everything, we shouldn't forget about it, we shouldn't forget about how it happened, so yeah, it has, the name has a strong connection to that, but it's not only that, it's like, there is always a certain distance between two things, it's like Zeeman paradoxes, you can go from point A to point B, you're always going to be halfway to point B, and this particular distance is always there, and we live in a very practical world of very practical things, and basically I do believe that it is still an open question, why the hell do we even need music? Music in general, it fills this small gap that makes it really combine two things together, makes you really to reach your destination, so it's designed for that, it's designed to fill the void, we can't fill it with the language, we can't fill it with money, we can't fill it with, I don't know, sex, nothing, so yeah, basically this gap is something that cannot be filled, and we can't fill it rationally, but it always exists, and this is the gap where we are real humans, this is what makes us real human beings, this little gap that we can't reach with the logic, and this gap I believe, music has something to do with it, music can help, so this is also another layer and another angle of speaking about Abstand, about this distance.
