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Part 2

Could you take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work? Do you have a fixed schedule? How do music and other aspects of your life feed back into each other - do you separate them or instead try to make them blend seamlessly?

Nothing is fixed. Life is mostly improvisation and each day brings something new. What I can say for sure is that I’m practicing, writing, recording or mixing music every day.
 
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece or album that's particularly dear to you, please? Where did the ideas come from, how were they transformed in your mind, what did you start with and how do you refine these beginnings into the finished work of art?

I’ll consider the albums Nobody Ever Escaped From There (Moving Furniture, 2018) or There Was Hardly Anybody There (Spina!Rec, 2016). It's electronic music with a wide range of drones and long sounds and electronic sources plus field recordings. Typical process is listening to a lot of material that I recorded when practicing on electronics and delicately choosing a few tracks as the basis of composition. I’m filtering, processing if needed, panning, equing. When I’m happy how these tracks combine with each other, I try to find proper field recordings that will expand the music. If I find good ones, I try to mix them with electronics and it means that I have to do all the processing again, but with new layers.
After that I prefer to leave tracks for a while, could be one day or one month or one year. When I’m ready I begin to work again and do subtle changes if I’m mostly satisfied already or I can try to remove or add new tracks to the piece. It’s like that till one happy moment when I think “Ok, time to think about an album”. Then I try to combine and listen to pieces that I did and make a proper tracklist. Sometimes it fails and I have to wait to when I’ve finished work with newer pieces.

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?

I’m not really into theories about inspiration. Sometimes it happens where I really need to record an idea or play something that I have in mind. Mostly I start to work on something and ideas pop out (or not). It's a kind of routine that keeps my mind in a good state.

How is playing live and writing music in the studio connected? What do you achieve and draw from each experience personally? How do you see the relationship between improvisation and composition in this regard?

One of recent recordings is a duo with Jason Kahn from Zurich, Switzerland. We knew each other for quite some time and did some things together before, but Studio Album released on Notice Recordings in July is our first duo cassette. Jason used his voice with amplification and I played on a modular synthesizer. Tracks were recorded in Saint-Petersburg and Zurich in 2018 and 2019 before some concerts we played. Also we have live recordings. In both cases it was pure improvisation, we just did some edits for a studio album. The most important difference is the audience that reacts and connects with the improvised music very well. Sometimes you can feel support from people, sometimes you barely have understanding. This immediate reaction of other people makes us play a bit differently even if we say we don’t react to the audience.

This kind of collaboration happens now and then and I really like when we have some good music as a result. It’s risky and you have to react very well to what happens. It could be a direct reaction or hidden, somewhere just between you and your musical partner.
 
How do you see the relationship between the 'sound' aspects of music and the 'composition' aspects? How do you work with sound and timbre to meet certain production ideas and in which way can certain sounds already take on compositional qualities?

When I play a solo concert of improvised music I pay a lot of attention to room acoustics. It makes me think in one way or another and can lead to results that I can’t get in my typical situation at home or studio. It's important for me to listen to the room and try to understand how I can use it, how to play with it. On soundcheck I prefer to try a wide range of sounds with different volumes and intensity to understand how and what sounds can lead me to certain musical results.

When I play synthesizer I can find some sounds during soundcheck to start the concert, all next movements usually happen in real time. This basic sound can lead me to the idea of what I’d like to play after. When I play the saxophone I’m even more free and I just try to keep silent for a while before finding an ideaof where to start.
 
Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work? What happens to sound at its outermost borders?

Music and sound is the most abstract art and you can have your own understanding of it, but it has a lot of power that needs proper context. I have worked with dancers, theater, sculptors and visual artists in the past. Every time I’m amazed how sound can change the whole perception of the other arts. If there’s a “bright” painting and you listen to “dark” music, then in most cases, will become a “dark” impression of the whole piece. If there’s abstract movements of dancers without any visible rhythm and you add beat-oriented soundtrack to it, it transforms to a rhythmic piece. In both casesm the music becomes something for the other art, it loses some of its own meaning because visual information is so powerful. But as I said before, music is abstract and if you want to listen, just close your eyes when you watch something.
 
Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

If we talk about improvised music, often I compare it with folk music. Both are rooted in society and both can happen for musicians and listeners in real time. The essence of folk music is that everyone can play it on one or another instrument with basic skill. It's a similar approach for improvised music. You can start to produce sounds without deep knowledge of how to do it on a particular instrument or even without any idea about music. Of course, after those first steps everyone can decide if he wants to study it deeper. It’s very open music and perhaps it’s one of most important aspects of this activity.
 
It is remarkable, in a way, that we have arrived in the 21st century with the basic concept of music still intact. Do you have a vision of music, an idea of what music could be beyond its current form?

When we’re in the strange times of a pandemic, something has to change in the organization of musical activities like concerts and travels. We’re more and more into the virtual world and new technologies could be a good way to expand our conservative concept of music. Personally I’m quite retrograde, though. I think we still need physical objects for albums and we need to play music live for people, even if there’s just a few in the audience.


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