voices #22
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
Marko Josipović
answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic / electroacoustic work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “Seven types of silences” that we prefer is “VII”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Marko Josipović: That track came to be similarly like all the other ones of the album. I found a motif or a melody on the guitar, then I would sit with it for some time, and the composition/arrangement would very naturally reveal itself through that. I often work very sporadically and like to jump from idea to idea, but this album unfolded quite linearly, so the piece had a “definitive” feel whilst making it. I remember I wanted it to feel like a forceful emergence from the sea, violent, but also purified at the same time, leaving just enough space for the things to come. That tension between violent transformation and a kind of subtle holiness is what I intended to run through the whole album. The imagery of water and sea also played a big role in how I shaped the sound of this album in general.
[2. CREATION]
■ The A. O.: How do you usually approach composition? Do you start with a concept, a sound, a state of mind or what else? How do you generally proceed from the initial seed to the complete work?
► Marko Josipović: In my case, concept follows sound, then comes the composition. For this album, I had this specific sound in my mind for a few years and after it finally emerged it felt good to just play and explore and see where the sound takes me. My process is very intuitive, for better or worse, and often I just follow what feels right at the time. As I worked, certain spiritual and symbolic themes started occupying the sound, so the ideas of transformation, spiritual labour and catharsis became the central theme.
Spirituality has always been a part of my life. Growing up in a religious country, and more broadly within the diversity of spiritual practices in the Balkans, I was surrounded by religious and sacred imagery since a young age, and that left its impression artistically. While I don’t follow a set belief system, I feel drawn to the mystical and the divine, so this album was a good way to explore and express that side of myself, as I intend to investigate it further in future works.Limitations and boundaries also play a big part in my process, so choosing the guitar as the singular sound source was a good challenge and an attempt to try to reconcile with the instrument, as I have started resenting the guitar through the years.
I wanted to unfold it somehow, corrode it and dissolve it in a meaningful, transformative way.
I would process it through the Strega, a synthesizer and delay unit made by Make Noise and Alessandro Cortini, which I used extensively on the album (only for the delay part!). It’s a very temperamental piece of gear and doesn’t try to cater to the user, which is what I look for in instruments.
It’s one gripe I have with software-based music, It’s amazing what you can do with it today, but I find it hard to start a blank canvas on my laptop in a DAW, it feels subservient to the needs of the user, there is no initial friction. In contrast, with certain hardware instruments, there’s a resistance, an intrusion, it has an agenda almost. That tension is essential to my work, and is much easier for me to finish a piece of music, because there are limits to what you can do and how you can do it.
[3. FEEDBACK]
■ The A. O.: What do you hope listeners feel or experience when engaging with your music?
► Marko Josipović: I tend to not focus on that as much as I did with previous works, I try to put all my energy in the process, but I still hope that people out there can find some solace or inspiration in the work that I do. As you know, working within more abstract forms of music and sound, it can be hard to reach listeners at all. So it genuinely moved me how many positive comments I’ve gotten for this album, some said it inspired them to try a similar approach musically, or how they were moved by it in some way, and I don’t take that for granted at all. I have no use for my work once it is finished, so knowing it resonated with someone after the fact makes me feel fulfilled and inspired to keep creating and reinventing my process.
[4. IDENTITY]
■ The A. O.: In a world saturated with digital music content, how do you try to keep your sound distinct and personally meaningful?
► Marko Josipović: This is a topic very important to me, and I hold authenticity and artistic integrity above all else. I have released music before under a moniker and titling in English, and while I think there’s certainly a place for that, it kind of added this filter between me and my work. I started using my own name and embracing my native language.It strips another layer of protection and adds vulnerability, which is another essential thing for my creative process. That kind of unadaptiveness and unwillingness to cater and translate for an audience is something really good I think, because it demands trust in both your work, and the listener, and when that trust is established it forms a resonance.
Another thing very important to me is to not formulate the process. The worst thing I could do would be to repeat myself or cannibalize on a method over and over again, because once you know what you’re doing the magic is kind of gone. As I mentioned, I love the idea of using electronic instruments as collaborators and having a dialogue with them and forming a relationship rather than them being just a tool. Sadly that approach is also a really good way to learn the ins and outs of an instrument and how it behaves, which in turn can have you relying on muscle memory to use it. That can be mitigated by repurposing and reinstating how a certain instrument should sound and behave, which can transcend the original capabilities of the instrument and push it to places far beyond the scope of what its creator intended. The mere act of doing that to me is meaningful and personal. There’s a dignity in that, a confrontation with both form, and the self in a way.
I also try to make artifacts of the work, even just a few CDs or something tangible.
For this album, I included a small PDF on Bandcamp that features my photography and poetry in my native language, thematically tied to the album. I plan to print it just for personal keepsake, to have a reminder of the work.
Being a photographer by trade I really give the same amount of care to the cover art as the music itself, the visual connection is essential to me. To me, the cover art should be a symbolic and visual extension of the music.
A fun anegdote is that on my previous album, Vretena (Spindles in English) which was kind of this homage to west coast synthesis and it was very sequenced and electronic, It was made just by a software emulation of a Buchla synthesizer, and Buchla synths are always colour coded, with lots of reds, blues, yellows, etc. My girlfriend made a beautiful cover for the album based on the mitotic spindle, and only months later did we both realize that the cover had the same colour palette as a Buchla.
[5. INFLUENCES]
■ The A. O.: Name 3 albums that you consider relevant to your musical path and why.
► Marko Josipović: ○ Coil – The Ape of Naples
It’s hard to pick just one album from Coil’s monumental discography but this one is very special to me and serves more like an accumulation and a statement which echoes all of their work in general. It’s their last album released a few months after the tragic death of Jhonn Balance.
The last track, Going Up, is especially transcendent and beautiful. Balance opened with the line “are you ready to go now?” And closed the album with “it just is” followed by a sample of a glass bottle breaking, which I find very powerful and haunting, knowing the cause of his death was sadly caused by a drunken state.
Coil were the first group that opened me up to this idea of music as a ritual, as an incantation.
There is a spiritual gravity in all of their work, and that left a deep impression on me, showing me that music can be a vessel for things far deeper than just sound. Not to mention they were geniuses in terms of sound design.
○ Alessandro Cortini – Forse 3
While technically a trilogy of 3 albums, Forse 3 is my favorite. Scappa is one of my favorite songs ever. So powerful and cathartic, his music really touches me deeply. There is such depth to all of his work, and it’s amazing how he achieves such powerful soundscapes with so little, both in terms of harmonic structure and the instrument palette he chooses. There is a sense of fragility and intimacy in his work, something I appreciate and strive for in my own creative pursuits. It feels like for Alessandro, the emotional resonance is the ultimate goal. Everything else comes second, so often the recordings can sound lo-fi and noisy, but they aren’t without intent. And even if you’re not a fan of that aesthetic, the emotional resonance simply cuts through.
○ Swans – Soundtracks for the Blind
This album is still a puzzle to me. It’s one of the rare albums that really make me feel unsettled. It feels like the musical equivalent of a snuff film at times, while also being cathartic and strangely beautiful at other times. It’s a 2 and a half hour trip of post rock, field recordings, industrial textures and sound collage. It’s just so bizarre and unresolved, even in the context of Swans’ discography, it just feels out of place. What stays the most with me is it’s atmosphere. Its dense, delirious and feverish, like a schizophrenic glimpse of some much larger sonic psychosis. More than anything, this album, and Swans’ music in general, made me endure their music rather than just listen to it. And that to me can be a very powerful thing to subject a listener to at times. Now that I’m thinking about this, it kind of feels like the evil twin album to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.
[6. REGARDS]
■ The A. O.: Leave us with a quote you love.
► Marko Josipović: “It is a privilege of a lifetime to become who you truly are” (C.G. Jung)