COSMIC AND STELLAR NEW MUSIC FEATURE

Always relished the sound of music as a child. Chuck Berry to Pink Floyd, and so on, it’s mostly been guitar music, my parents’ record collection. One day my grandfather found an old guitar in the attic and gave it to us. From then on I was pretty much unstoppable about it. I just wanted to learn how to make those miraculous sounds which I had been hearing on the records. Later I took classical guitar lessons, which enabled me to experiment with finger style picking.

Your greatest inspirations or influences?

Any type of music can be inspirational, from classical to blues, to metal. I don’t like getting stuck in one genre, or getting too hung up on a single inspiration. For something specific, I found a really cool album recently: Jordi Savall’s ‘Venezia Millenaria’. One of the coolest, spookiest, most wonderful things I’ve ever heard, a real gem in early music. It presents one thousand years’ of music progress in multicultural Venice. Fantastic!

Tell us a bit about your creative process? 

I always feel I have more ideas than what I can physically cope with, in terms of finalizing. So there’s a constant backlog in my head that keeps pulling me forward. It’s like, the instrument is throwing up these options, like, ‘hey dude, how about this, or how about that’. And I respond, ‘wow dude, that’s cool, but hang on, I still have the other one to finish, it’s a lot of work you know’. And the guitar insists, ‘put that one aside now, this one is more interesting’. And sometimes I say ‘dude, I’m not putting this one aside, the new one needs to wait’. But sometimes I jump to the new one.
As for visuals, they are emphatic. Maybe, since I have no lyrics. The visuals can tell a story. Most of it is retro sci-fi, it’s kind of an unorthodox match for the experimental slide blues sound. It works perfectly, mixing old and new. My CD covers and videos tend to carry protest messages, implicit, general ones. The futuristic setting adds to the feel of generalization.

How has this year changed your creativity or how you see the world changing moving forward?

Obviously, no live gigs, that’s a massive downer. I don’t like recording stuff without having extensively played it live. Still, my creative process wasn’t affected much. I think everything in the world will always move five steps forward, and then four steps back. Thus we will never feel great progress, except when we look at the past and say, ‘wow, how on Earth did we get here from there?’

Anything else? 

My brand new music video for ‘Interstellar Resorption #3’, a tune balancing edgy and smooth sounds. The cgi animation  takes us to a planet, where someone is getting out of somewhere on foot and then arrives somewhere else. This wooden-figure-like character is on the run. We –with cgi artist Rob Sulman- based this minimalist escape story on a heroic WW2 episode, the near-forgotten Wetzler-Vrba escape. Humanity should never forget heroic acts of such magnitude! Such forgetfulness is a global problem actually. You can see hidden visual markers to indicate the story-line but otherwise we kept it implicit, open to interpretations. For instance, an artist friend compared the video to our endless, claustrophobic lockdown walks, which is a fair take. In the end intergalactic space absorbs the planet. This is important because we should always keep it in mind, I mean, the gigantic powers that rule all.

'Interstellar Resorption #3'  https://youtu.be/ZYErGhD4L1M

'Toys In Ghettos (Part 1)' https://youtu.be/jELlN-_6Nrw