Part 2

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

Drums of course, because I’ve been playing them for more than 30 years now.

And then I’m really interested in the newest electronic instruments and tools. I have a collection of modular, semi modular synths, drum machines, samplers, analog synths. I usually use them as a ‘carpet’ for something to happen on. Or as different rooms in different colours and shapes to play in.

Also new electronic music tools like ‘Sunhouse Sensory Percussion’ drum sensors are a very interesting new way of making music. Infinite possibilities really if you like to think out of the box.



Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Ok, I wake up at 7:00, go have a training session at a boxing club, comeback home, meditate with an app for 20 min, shower, have breakfast with my wife and then usually at 9:30 I’m ready to walk to my studio. It takes me 30 minutes by foot to walk to the studio and I love the walk. I usually listen to an audio book while walking. At the moment I’m listening to David Byrne’s How music works and the next on my list is Listen to this by Victor Svorinich.

I practice drums, make music, learn the new drum machine or some new tool I bought for like 4 hours and then have my lunch. Then from 3pm to 7pm I teach drums to my private students, mostly 10-14 year old teenagers. I love them and I enjoy the process of seeing them evolve.

Then the walk back home, listen to some new music I dug out. Today it’s Pedro Ricardo’s Soprem Bons Ventos - brilliant!



8pm I have a dinner with my beautiful wife and we talk music, politics, cosmos or whatever's on our minds. Then we watch movies. And sometimes I read before bed. Right now I’m reading Cage’s Silence. It was pissing me of the whole half of the book and I’m starting to like it now.

Might sound a bit boring and repetitious, but after session drumming, and touring for so many years - right now I really really love having a normal routine in my life.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

Yeah, I kinda described already in the previous question with this album. But usually it’s a recorded jam on my own with electronic instruments or a musician friend coming through the studio. Then I choose bits that I like on that jam and start putting together a sketch, a form / a bed for a composition or a melody to appear. Then I record different instruments on top of it again, either on my own or someone else especially if I need wind instruments as I can’t play any.

Then again - edit the takes, mix it a bit, put some sounds through pedals or even convert to midi and use the parts that have been played with another sounds and at some point I feel that it’s time to stop - the track is done.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

Until now everything that I’ve been doing creatively has always been collaborative.

In part because, as a drummer, I might have not trusted myself enough to play other instruments on my own recordings. But then I realised that I edit the recordings of other musicians that played on my recordings to such a degree that often they become so minimalistic that I could’ve played the parts in the first place by myself haha.

So the next few projects on my mind will be done by myself only. I’m actually really curious to hear what it is going to sound like when I do music completely on my own. Hoping this is the path to realising my own voice. And then I can comeback to collaborating again, more refined.

Making music collaboratively is really inspiring though. You never know where it will lead. But it’s really important to do it with likeminded musicians, otherwise it might end up being a dictatorship - “play this, don’t play that”, which usually ends sounding unnatural and shallow.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

Well again, it changes a little bit with every album I’m involved with.

The role of music in As They Are is about bringing people together from different parts of the world and from different cultures (be it musicians or listeners) and understanding that we can all live, and play together in harmony if we listen.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

Oh wow - big questions! I can’t say I understand life or loss or love fully and I don’t think I or anyone will ever. But music making definitely contributes to understanding of how these things feel to me.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?

Both music and science have always been driven by curiosity.

And for thousands of years - both have been an integral part of human existence and development.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I think in many ways making music can be similar to making food.

You have to practice a lot and make mistakes, you need to understand the flavours you like and understand what you like mixing and what you don’t and also knowing the main rules, unless you are at a level where you can break even the big rules. So I wouldn’t say that it is inherently different from ‘mundane’ tasks.

You can always feel if a person put his heart and work in to even just making a cup of coffee. We all know when we had a really shitty coffee and a really good one.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I think it’s not exactly the music we hear that transmits the messages. It’s the interpretations of each of our brains when we listen to music that are connecting the music we choose to listen with certain event, memory, feeling at a certain moment in our lives.

Music acts as a key to unlocking what we already have hidden inside us. And that’s why I love art in general so much - especially not the obvious one - because it means different things to different people.

I like the thought of a musician being the trigger, and the listener being the creator.