WHAT REMAINS WHEN NOTHING IS LEFT
Ramón Oliveras feat. Lukasz Polowczyk
On the 4th of February, a speaker was mounted in the middle of a cold, cement-lined hallway of a bunker located in the under-belly of Zürich. At exactly 14:06 GMT a textured drone piece titled What Remains When Nothing is Left echoed in this desolate space. It played only once! No one, outside of Ramón Oliveras, the composer, was there to hear it. What Remains When Nothing is Left is a composition based on a reconstruction of a chromakey/ micro poem written by artist / poet Lukasz Polowczyk.
About the artists:
Ramón Oliveras is a contemporary composer / drummer based in Zürich. He is best know for his work as the band leader of minimalist / post-jazz quintet IKARUS, with whom he released three critically acclaimed full-length records on Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin Rhythm Records. On the side, he works projects such as JPTR and DALAI PUMA, and composes music for contemporary dance productions.
Lukasz Polowczyk is a cross-media poet / spoken word artist. His spoken word project AINT ABOUT ME produced by Jan Wagner turned a few heads in 2020 by gaining on-air support from the likes of Mary Anne Hobbs’ (BBC 6), Lefto (WorldWideFM, Verity Sharp (BBC 3), Steve Barker (On The Wire Radio), despite it being deeply experimental by design.
For a taste: aintaboutme.bandcamp.com
Thank you guys for joining us today, tell us about your greatest inspirations or influences?
Łukasz Polowczyk: In Buddhism there’s this thing called Tathata, which roughly translates to the “suchness” of things. It basically means that every single thing in the world, people included, has its own distinct, singular reality. “Nothing is like anything else” is another way of putting it. People who are attuned to their suchness—who live their life from that place and make art from their own bones, so to speak—they inspire me. This is what I’m after and what informs my daily practice both in life and in art. When I teach or when I coach artists, the thing that I hope everyone leaves with is a commitment to living their lives and producing art on their own terms.
Ramón Oliveras: At the moment, I’m very much inspired by everyday activism of some of the people that I know. They’re tirelessly fighting against discrimination of various kinds, and I can’t even imagine how much energy it takes from them and how much bullshit they have to deal with as a result. They inspire me to constantly check my privileges and to queer my everyday life.
How has this pandemic affected your creativity?
Łukasz Polowczyk: It put a strain on my time, which of course ate into the little bit of the time that I always reserved for creative work. I have two kids and a full time job, so I’m used to working in what I call micro-rhythms, ie. these small units of time. I strive to accomplish a little bit, consistently, every single day. If wouldn’t work like this, I would never finish anything, and I’m pretty sure that I would be extremely frustrated as a result. The series of lockdowns that we had to endure out here basically translated to having two small, attention-hungry kids at home, all the time. Both my wife and I are freelancers, so juggling work and entertaining the kids – like really being there for them – and on top of that, negotiating how to split whatever remaining time there is so that we can get some work done, that was brutal! I’m happy that it’s getting warm again, because this offers a bit of respite. I got to work on my bike and on my way to the office I make these small detours to do these field recordings for my noise / field recording project. This daily ritual keeps me grounded – being able to spend a little bit of time on what is essentially deep listening and mindfulness practice.
Ramón Oliveras: I reacted the way I always do when I’m challenged by something, by essentially overworking myself. In the beginning, it felt like heaven! I could finish all these projects that were lingering on my to-do list for a very long time. I started different creative collaborations, I wrote a thesis about the afro-futuristic album “Splendor & Misery” by clipping, and I was just really happy with all of this output. But, due to the fact that live performances ceased to be possible, this left me with this deep feeling of inertia. Performing live was the end goal for pretty much most of what I had worked on before the pandemic, be it a release show for a new album or a performance that I had worked on for several months. As a consequence of this, I reacted by taking on an even heavier workload, which of course, resulted in more projects that had no actual fulfilment. So, in the end, I chewed off a lot more than I could handle, and this forced me to dismantle this rather harmful cycle. I’m in a much better place now.
What do you think is going to happen to the creative world as we move forward in this evolution?
Łukasz Polowczyk: I’ve lived long enough to be able to say that nothing can snuff out creativity. In fact, I think that challenging times bring out the best in artists. Extreme conditions give purpose and direction to art, they mobilise the art community. As artists, we actively use our practice to reshape reality, to make it more to our liking, more humane, or at least to be able to introduce the potential of new realities into mainstream consciousness. There is so much inspiring work out right now! Ironically, the times of relative prosperity that I remember were so flat in regards to what art had to offer. The work made during that period felt so self-indulgent, and just plain empty. I have the feeling that artists are dreaming new worlds again, and I’m grateful for this! So, I think we’re good as far as art is concerned, however, what we should be discussing is how artists aught to be compensated for the work they’re doing and their contribution to culture. I’m happy about the fact that there is all this talk about basic income, for example, and that there are all these new fan-driven support systems for artists that are slowly moving into the mainstream. I just hope that we get beyond the realm of hypothesising about these solutions and that we can actually implement them.
Ramón Oliveras: I agree with Lukasz. The pandemic was a wake up call for many of my friends who are practicing artists, and I see a lot of very interesting things happening. However, I’m also very suspicious of this myth that only depressed and destitute artists can produce great art with meaning. This idea – together with the artist as genius myth – was responsible for a lot of structural misery in the artist community. I know a lot of artists who had a steady income before the pandemic hit, and now they struggle financially. They no longer have the time nor the energy to produce art. So, as Lukasz already said, I’m really happy that there’s this shift in the mainstream, but also that key political decision makers are finally talking about the problems faced by the artist precariat. In Switzerland, there is a new umbrella organisation for culture, and for artists, which was created at the beginning of the pandemic. As artists, we have more political weight than we’ve ever had before. New ideas, like how to provide social security for artists or how to implement basic income, might finally be put to the test.
Łukasz Polowczyk: Just to clarify, I also don’t think that artists necessarily need to be miserable or destitute to create meaningful work. I think that challenging times, whether it’s in regards to politics or cataclysmic events (be it the pandemic or the environmental crises) mobilise the artist community to produce work to deal with these beastly forces. As a result, they shift the purposefulness of art. During the times of relative prosperity—and I’m mainly speaking from the point of view of the Western world—art tends to become self-indulgent and stops dreaming of alternate realities or utopias. Instead, it concerns itself mainly with producing art as leisure product. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with escapism, per se, but when it becomes the dominant voice in culture, we stop reflecting on reality and, instead, we get tangled up in having a conversation with the mechanics of the market.
Tell us more about the role meditation plays in this project.
L: One of the things that became a daily staple for me, in Hamburg, was meditation. As crazy as it sounds, I feel like I woke up from some hazy dream, as if I was not really there for so many years. Which I think was true, at some level. Through a daily practice, I found this new lucidity, which eventually spilled over into everything: the quality of my daily life, the depth and the resolution of my personal relationships, my music production, my writing etc. With the experimental stuff, like this piece right here, deep listening and being present is absolutely fundamental to the creative process. You have to really get inside the sound, be able to experience it at something of a granular level to be able to work with it. It’s much different from working with functional music, because there the point is not to produce the awareness of the materiality and texture of sound, or the process; but to create an illusion of a seamless object whose sole purpose is to trigger the listener at an emotional level. In pop music, you’re not supposed to be aware of the mechanics of how the magic happens. The poem that Ramon chose for this piece is actually my take on a Zen koan: what remains when nothing is left. Try to think about it. Like really! If you do it long enough you'll split an atom. (laughter)
Ramón Oliveras: I don’t practice meditation in the normal, prescribed way, although, it would probably help me to deal with my excess energy. (laughter) However, I developed a series of active but mindful rituals for myself that I use in my everyday life. Preparing green tea is one of them or practicing polyrhythms on my drum set for extended periods of time or listening to minimal music and, also, giving and receiving tantra messages. All of these things produce meditative states. I’m also inspired by a Japanese Zen-inflected aesthetic called wabi-sabi. It’s predicated on the idea of things moving in and out of nothingness, which clearly resonates with the poem that Lukasz wrote. The actual recording was also a very meditative experience for the both of us. During the session, we had to follow directions which were fed to us by a video score. The repetitiveness of the process, and the level of concentration that we had to have to follow the score, it induced a deep, meditative focus. We recorded this piece around five times, and with each recording we sank deeper into this state.
Adventures in the bunker?
Ramón Oliveras: It was a very intense experience for me. We mastered the recording back in 2019, and since then I haven’t listened to the piece in its entirety. To hear it again, after a long time, standing there all alone in this cold environment was somehow, both, disturbing and very peaceful. It was like listening to the piece for the first time, which is a very rare experience for a composer to have, especially when it concerns their own work. So, in a way, it was the first time I got to be the main audience for my own music, and this felt very cathartic, especially after this long period of not seeing any live performances.