Name: теплота
Members: Grundik Kasyansky, Tom Wheatley
Occupation: Producers, sound artists
Current release: теплота's Skynned is out via Accidental Meetings.
Recommendations: An Allegory of Virtue (unfinished) - unknown (attributed to Correggio); De Natura Sonorum - Bernard Parmegiani

If you enjoyed this теплота interview and would like to know more about the duo and their music, visit their official website. The band members also have individual homepages: Grundik Kasyansky; Tom Wheatley

The following interview is an amalgamation of the thoughts of both musicians.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/ or sound that drew you to it?

… it was the early nineties, a friend of mine said “you know we can do something on a computer”, and it felt so easy. It was a substitute for poetry. I was taking poetry seriously, writing and publishing, but it had started to get boring … I had the impulse to make music, strongly, but I come from a family of musicians and I was very competitive. It took a long time to find my way in…

The physicality is what excited me initially. I was naive, I thought to make this heavy, extreme music you had to hit things hard. I was very disappointed to learn what amplification is …

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

I get a lot of physical feedback. If I’m playing a rhythm, my body has to play it, and then receive the effect of that motion … with electronics it’s also very physical, even when I just turn knobs. Some say it’s very detached, but it’s not. You play with the room. It’s not really visualising, but more feeling the shapes … you see shapes and objects, but it's not …

When you make music it’s more practical. You see these shapes and objects and think: OK, what I am going to do with them? What are they? How do they fit together? … maybe seeing is not the right word, it’s more feeling. You don’t use your eyes … but yeah, there are objects …

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

Things are moving by themselves somehow. You stay and the world moves around you … I’ve always felt that now is the big breakthrough … you always feel: now I am just getting it. Perpetual emergence … it’s a regulatory instinct … that’s what I mean by you just stay yourself and the world is going round …

But with теплота, the breakthrough did feel very clear … coming out of  HEAT/WORK, having made a partially synthetic album, we wanted to make this extended music live, which meant a total reimagining of what we do. And that’s a process that keeps folding over as we go on …



Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please

Tom: I identify as a jazz musician. I don’t usually say it because the general conception of what that means has been so skewed that it doesn’t remotely resemble what I’m talking about. But everything has always come back to that … I understand completely.

Grundik: I identify myself as an electronic musician. But it’s just words, it might not mean the same as other people might think what electronic music is. And it feels silly to talk about … we actually avoid talking about it …

But I do remember when my first album came out, back in Israel in 1999. I was on my way to pick it up from the label. I was in this hoody, super cool, and I was thinking: oh, I am a techno musician ...

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

Improvisation can be taken for granted sometimes. We might say that all our music is improvised, which is not usually the case in this field … But calling теплота music improvised is to simplify what it is, no? Many concepts of ‘improvised’ music wouldn’t want anything to do with it …

But in the end, it is quite simple: you have two people, you have some materials at hand, and you are just trying to make sense of it. It’s like we play the same piece again and again, which is evolving in time.

I don’t remember who said it, and I might be a misquote, but someone said “the point of playing jazz is to get better at playing jazz”. A self-contained cycle … it’s like we play the same composition endlessly, refining it every time … sometimes it’s not about virtuosity, sometimes it’s better not to play …

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

Aren’t they all the same thing? All that matters, I think, is innovation. That is perfection and timelessness … You don’t want to hear the band who came after …

You just need to stay true to yourself, no? If you stay true to yourself, and you happen to be an innovator, then you innovate … it does feel, that when people start to care too much about innovation or perfection, they kind of betray themselves … it’s there anyway, you don’t have to care about it too much ...

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?

Double bass for me. I’ve taken a few other things seriously over the years, but nothing has been as generative as this …

For me it's just one instrument too, for many years. It can evolve, but it stays. With electronic music, you kind of construct your instrument by yourself … ultimately it doesn’t matter at all, it’s just about persistence, because they are all limitless …

When I was younger. I felt a jealousy towards drummers, how they could augment, reduce, invert their tools, mine was stuck in one place … but of course it’s not that simple ….

Absolutely. I was always jealous of acoustic players. You play just one thing, and stick to it … the grass is always greener …

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

You do whatever you need to to get you to the work. As for the work, routines come and go. They last a week, a month, a year, but you know they disappear. That’s the balance, between repetition and change, that’s the key … it makes no sense to say what we’re in now …

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

Skynned came from the monthly ЭС project. We learned so much about what we are doing, or what we are trying to do. Yeah, we could recommend it to any group. Just release a single per month for a year, you’ll learn a lot.

And then we tried to consolidate this knowledge into a record. Consolidate, and advance. Trying to tight up the edges. Some ЭС tracks were more than 10 minutes long, we wanted more succinct statements.

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?

It must be both. Of course for us the communal part is essential. But you need to listen and play alone, to develop. Solitary work tends to be more conceptual. It’s like a swing, one thing leads to another. Ttwo poles to balance ideas between.

For instance, you start from the solitary work, take it to the other, learn from this, reflect on it alone, repeat … with the artefact of the record, somehow listening is always communal, linked.

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

We understand the world via the work. Ultimately it’s how we learn about our lives and the world … and we do that with the work of others, too … It’s the most tangible mystery we have, unsolvable and immediate, everywhere …

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?

Then you can realise that music is not about you, then you are free. It’s got nothing to do with you …

Music is a non-representational media. You cannot describe it, it’s just sounds. I can feel that it relates to everything, and I can learn from it about literally anything. But whenever I try to describe it, it disappears ...

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

I don’t think music can tell us a lot about science, but science can tell a lot about music.

I’ve taken a lot from science. Say, how a bow works. Until I understood what it actually is, physically, I just couldn’t make it sing …

I am thinking about Bach. He was not a mathematician in the strict sense of the word. But obviously math is deeply embodied in his music. I wonder how good he was in formal mathematics? To make that music, I think he must’ve been very able. I studied the chorales for a long time, I don’t think you could make that without access to the grid … totally. But then it is so ‘heavenly’, so unscientific in a sense.

Music is not science. There is no scientific method in music. It would kill music. One is informed by another but these are different things.

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?

It’s so tempting to say no, but yes. We’d been in trouble if it wasn’t.

We need to agree what we mean by playing music. There are at least two different things we can mean by it. There are certain processes, learnings and techniques involved, and in this sense no, music is not like anything else. It’s a very singular thing. But then there is this creative impulse, that takes a form of playing music. And in this sense this impulse can take any other form too …

I used to play electric bass in a big pop act, it was like working in a factory. You are on stage in front of 10,000 people and you feel nothing, you just repeat … and as opposite, I remember myself in the desert at night. Sitting down and listening to sounds. And it felt like I am playing music. And I am doing nothing, I am just listening.

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?

It must operate on many different levels. There seems to be a lot of meaning that is learnt culturally. Also that which is there a priori. A lot of feelings that are seemingly universal, a lot of that are extremely subjective … it’s not about sounds, it’s about perception …

When you think about Bach: yes, it’s mathematical, and it’s heavenly, it's perfect, how could anyone not like it? It’s irresistible … and then for some it’s boring … and he was not widely known in his lifetime. So, it happens in endless ways … and it’s all in your head …