Part 2

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

HA! MORNING ROUTINE! A DREAM OF MINE! I can take you through my dream-routine-timetowork-day:

It’s 8, I get up, do 30’ of yoga or jogging, then head off to my studio after a quick shower. With the first coffee and a croissant I start making music in my studio –writing a new song, finishing a demo, checking out my new synth, writing or recording a string score for a recording session, practicing songs for the next concert, or even learning some guitar or drums just for the fun of it. I’d go for lunch in the early afternoon – maybe with some other artist working at the same campus? - and continue my work until the afternoon.

At the latest around 4 pm I’d probably really have to do some mails and phone calls. By 6 I could head home and either cook something or more probably go eat out and then head to a concert, a bar or to whatever event of friends of mine.Though very often, I get up later and hurry directly to a recording session with no time for breakfast or sports, or I spend a whole day answering emails and then getting really frustrated about that. Or I have a concert in the evening and am so nervous throughout the whole day that I can’t really focus on anything else.

All in all it’s spending a lot of time on amazing music with amazing musicians an friends, travelling around and meeting loads of people, whilst relentlessly trying to keep the office work to a minimum (and bitterly failing at it), and forgetting that holidays and off days are a fairly reasonable invention by most religious communities.

Anyway, I love it.

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

So Friday 16’ of December the song “Uszit” came out.  It’s a special song to me, for it’s one of the first I’ve played and recorded all by myself!

I wrote the song around last Christmas – this special, dark time charged with the social expectation of harmony and love within the family (as well as consumption of course) puts me under a lot of pressure. I feel trapped in wishes that I can’t or don’t want to fullfill and guilty for it will lead to me disappointing people. The song expresses this feeling and actually sets the border that I usually fail to set, demanding a timeout, rather than a gathering. Since the topic is so intimate and delicate, I decided to record and produce it by myself, as far as possible.

So I recorded piano and voice as a one take at Domi Chansorn’s G5 – he put up the microphones and protools session and then left me alone with it. I had a really good flow that day, I’d recorded 2 more piano-songs and wrote 2 new sketches on his piano! I then recorded the whole vocal and string arrangement in my own studio some other day – just stacking them by ear, following my intuition. I sent the tracks to somebody to have it mixed and mastered, that’s it.

Ususally with my full band, it’s more complicated, rehearsing, organising the studio days, everybody being available, finding the money - but I think I am starting to like this new auto-produced way.

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?

I sometimes feel uncomfortable when people are listening in, while I am creating music. It’s mostly bad self-esteem – I think the other people will be judging my work, so I lose trust in myself and my ideas. And that can block my creativity.

The same applies when it comes to showing music – I hate DJ-ing, for example, for I love the music I listen to, but when showing it to other people, I fear, they’d not like it and that might shake my opinion about it. I feel my self-esteem as a musician and with it my opinion often melts under the rays of opinions of other musicians that I admire.

When I am alone, I usually totally know what I like, I am creative and fast with it, I have a 1000 ideas, and I just record them all. So when I write a score for somebody, I often start alone and record all my ideas and then hand them over for feedback on which I can then work on by myself.

I also always hated jams, it made me feel as if I had to prove myself. Though I have more recently figured out, that these feelings (of being judged, observed, maybe too bad of a musician to be part of it) disappear almost completely when I am jamming or doing music only with FLINTA artists – my self esteem is completely fine, I am not scared of being judged, of playing too bad, I don’t feel I need to prove anything – I can just enjoy making music together or playing it to each other. I just know who I am, what I like, what I am good at and what I don’t know. So that was pretty shocking as well as relieving to find out. I also know by now, that I am not the only FLINTA*musician with those feelings!

I am still working on how to change that; individually for myself – being able to actually enjoy a jam session, no matter what genders are present – as well as systemically: not having to face as many male-only-studio or live-sessions in my life anymore …

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

I personally feel, whatever we do or say in a way is political and standing in a constant exchange with society. “Being unpolitical” to me as well is somehow a political statement. So I can either chose not to care about that statement I give, or to actively take care of that exchange. I am often writing about social or political topics that shake me, as well as I am showing my most personal, intimate feelings, making myself vulnerable through it, giving people the possibility to connect with me.

I believe music can create a very direct emotional connection between complete foreigners. And in nowadays’ disastrous world-wide conflicts, emotional bonds between complete foreigners would be a very important thing! For if not, foreigners always seem to cause fear, fear of losing what we know, what is dear to us. But if strangers become dear to us in some way, that fear disappears.

So I at least hope that music and art, culture as a general concept, can form bonds between strangers, create exchange and maybe make people step outside of their own bubble?

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?

So my first song I intuitively wrote about the loss of my grandfather. It helped me cope with it, singing about it was a way of commemorating him, telling him what I’d never told him. And also last year a friend of mine, Valentin Baumgartner, an amazing musician and probably my first idol when it came to “earning your living only by doing music”, I wrote a song about him, his being.

For me, songs are a very direct way to put my thoughts and emotions into words through that get a little distance or an outside view on them (which makes the heavy emotions more bearable) as well as at the same time ensuring, I will never forget that I’d had those emotions and how heavy they were at that moment.

For me, forgetting is one of the worst fears. I don’t really fear change, but I fear forgetting the good times that came before it. For it would not pay the respect that time or person had earned. And in those songs I can contain those emotions, I will always remember how I felt exactly when writing those songs.

Of course, I also nearly always listen to other people’s music when I’m down or sad and it comforts me. I actually hardly ever listen to upbeat music, except when I want to dance :)

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

Hm. Science? As in technical developments?

Music is part of humanity I guess, it’s a natural form of expression, but the means by which we create and transport music is of course largely decided by technology – giving us new possibilities of exploring!

Vinyl, tape, CDs, streaming, e-guitars, synthesizers, computer programming and digital recording, mp3 players, cell phones, headphones … Those inventions have all had a direct impact on music creation as well as music consumption. I’d say though, that most of these technologies have been invented, thinking of the consumer, making music more easily accessible, transportable, not thinking of a deeper purpose and forgetting what that would do to the people creating it.

So it is up to us again to reclaim technology in order to make it art again.

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?

Haha, making coffee is definitely a form of art!

I don’t think so. I think you realize when a person is devoted to their task. Art can come in many forms and I think it’s mostly about taking people out of their bubble, out of their thoughts and connecting them in a moment. And food is probably especially strong for connecting people!

Though I love about music that there are the two aspects of instant intuitive and emotional connection through music - you hear a song, you connect immediately, it makes you feel things - and the words – their meaning you might only grasp after listening several times. And through that you might convey thoughts that people would not have been open to listen to, had they not been carried by that music …

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?

You really ask special questions. No, I wish I’d understand more of that.

I guess humanity has developed its means of communication through hundreds and thousands of years and our amazing talent for communication might be the reason we are so present on current earth?

There are a melodies, pitches and tonal movements in each language, and also it is vital for us to be able to transmit our emotions not just by our choice of words, but by a (maybe subconscious) tone – so it seems only natural our ears had to develop to tell the differences in intended sounds and at some point, to make music out of that.

But either way, it’s all a riddle to me. We just get used to riddles, don’t we?