Name: Luka Aron

Nationality: German

Occupation: Composer, musician
Current Release: Luka Aron's Tinctures is out via Ediciones Capablanca.
Recommendations: Morton Feldman: “For Philip Guston”; Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception

If you enjoyed this interview with Luka Aron and would like to know more, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram.



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?

My passion for music might have partly grown out of boredom with my small village upbringing. My parents had some friends playing in local bands, and I remember joining them on stage, just faking it with a toy store guitar when I was maybe 5.

After that, I took lessons with different teachers, eventually starting a grunge band. We were quite dedicated, writing original songs and performing all around nearby towns. It was also the early days of the Internet and I learned a lot through that, so music was always a door to another world for me, escaping the provincial mindset.

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 don’t have particularly strong synesthetic experiences and tend to experience sound as vibrations in different parts of my body, not just the ears.

There is a lot of audio-visual stimulation in the presentation of music these days. It’s almost like sound alone is not enough and artists feel the need to create a “fuller” experience. Maybe this comes out of a lack of liveness, especially in the electronic music scene where the visual aspect of the performance is often negligible.

In my opinion, it should be alright to perform in plain white light or a blacked-out room, barely moving your hands.

There needs to be a space where sound, and sound alone, is at the center.

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

The project Minua (with Kristinn Kristinsson and Fabian Willmann) has been very transformative for me. We have been playing together for almost 10 years now and our music is in constant change, serving as a canvas for developing new ideas which I then often transfer to my solo project and other collaborations.

We released a tape on Warm Winters Ltd. last year and I’m super happy with how it turned out. We’ve also got a new record in the pipeline which will be released by Nils Frahm’s label Leiter Verlag!

[Read our Fabian Willmann interview]
[Read our Nils Frahm interview]

I was initially very drawn to the concept of free improvisation and found myself in that sort of scene in Berlin but have gradually detached myself from it when I realised that this practice, more often than not, paradoxically involved stylistic guidelines in its own right. I then shifted to a more strict and systematic way of composing, with a reductionist approach.

In this sense, I can very much relate to the often-quoted sentence by Steve Reich: “By voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever momentarily comes to mind, we are, as a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind.”

Right now, I’m finishing my master’s degree in electroacoustic composition at Kungliga Musikhögskolan in Stockholm which has been a very stimulating and productive experience so far!

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.

I’d like to think that identity plays only a minor role in my artistic practice. But I acknowledge that this might come from a privileged position.

However, the hegemony of Western culture is something I actively try to work against.

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

I would like to create a music where our perception is not the end point, but rather the starting point (e.g., the reverse-engineering of auditory processes); or where nature serves as a directive and I, as a composer, merely uncover or zoom in on something that is already there.

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”?

Everything that anyone will ever create is based on what others have done before. Therefore, it will stand in relation to what is happening in the present – for example in a certain scene one might feel a belonging to – but also to events that happened a very long time ago. That thought is beautiful to me, but it doesn’t necessarily mean continuing a tradition or anything like that.

That being said, I definitely try to stay away from fleeting trend zones––they bore me. At the same time, constantly seeking for something new or innovative can be linked to a capitalist way of thinking. Yet, we must remember that repeating what others have already done (or worse, stealing – especially in the case of established artists ripping off less privileged, much smaller artists without crediting them) merely reinforces the status quo.

So, navigating this as an artist might seem tricky but in the end it is just about carefully developing one‘s own values and then staying true to them.

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?

Pedals have been with me right from the start and were an important tool for a textural exploration of the electric guitar whose typical sound characteristics I basically always tried to hide. Eventually I got more into synthesis, both analog and digital but the combination of electronic and acoustic instruments, their spectral fusion, is generally what interests me in my pieces.

Audio programming languages such as SuperCollider and PureData have been essential for working with just intonation, enabling precise tuning possibilities beyond equal temperament which most conventional audio software is still hardwired to.

The zither, a multi-stringed instrument related to the psaltery family, is very dear to me and I explored picking up its inherent resonances and quivering sustain on my latest record Tinctures.

Lately I’ve been returning to the guitar for projects like the dream gaze band Roomer (with which we just released ‘SKICE’) and as part of the live set of Greenlandic electronic musician Courtesy whom I’ve been touring with extensively over this past year.

Currently, I’m in the preparation for a project involving an early music ensemble for an upcoming record that also features the Buchla 200 synthesiser.

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

Morning:
Meditation
Chores (e-mail, accounting etc.)

Afternoon:
Research
Composing/Rehearsing

Evening:
Reading
Meditation

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

The series of pieces I’m working on at the moment are based on the observation of certain auditory and acoustic phenomena and how they relate to just intonation, which resulted in an expanded harmonic framework involving multiple closely related overtone series, whose fundamentals are based on the subharmonic series. It’s an (almost) self-generating system, where the compositions follow the path of least resistance (directed by some algorithmic rules I set beforehand).

It’s all about finding processes that take on a life on their own, and then letting them do their thing, with minimal interference. Constantly simplifying and reducing, the Occam’s razor principle is an approach I often put to use.

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’m hosting Deep Listening meetups in Stockholm (based on Pauline Oliveros’ practice) where we explore the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature of listening. Practising this as a group can be a powerful catalyst for personal and community growth. Even a concert is partly a social happening where we can potentially have a collective experience.

[Read our Pauline Oliveros interview]

When it comes to creating–composing new material, I like to do this in solitude. The most radical way of producing music is to do it for yourself only. Then, after the fact, can exist the thought of sharing, which one could view as donation.

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

Music can have a multitude of functions: it can sharpen your senses, make you experience the world differently for some time, maybe even create a heightened sense of awareness. It can also communicate and produce new ideas. Ultimately, every listener will bring their own set of experiences into the setting, leading to widely varying responses, also affected by the degree of openness and attention, as well as aspects of enculturation.

In this context I’d like to share a quote by Marcel Proust:

"I wondered whether music were not the sole example of the form which might have served – had language, the forms of words, the possibility of analysing ideas, never been invented – for the communication of souls.”

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?

I'm not sure whether art has really offered me any answers to these questions, but it has provided an alternative space where these topics might become a little less relevant.

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

Music can be informed by science, yet science can never fully explain music.

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?

Honestly, on most days there is nothing magical about making music (or in better words: the preparation for music to arrive). It’s pretty much a continuation of everyday activities for me.

But every now and then, when music really appears (which is not that often), in concerts or in solitude – as a spectator or as a performer, it can evoke alternate states of mind that are transcendent from day-to-day life.

Those experiences can be very transformative, but I can count the times they occurred on two hands.

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

For me, true listening is not the attempt to receive a message but to be entirely immersed in a given sonority, in other words “to be in the world”.

Sound is resonance, not merely in the space but also in our bodies, making listening inherently an approach to the self. This could serve as an explanation for the deeper meaning we often obtain from it.