Name: Ya Tosiba
Members: Zuzu Zakaria (singer, producer), Tatu Metsätähti (producer)
Interviewee: Zuzu Zakar
Nationality: Azerbaijani (Zuzu Zakaria), Finnish (Tatu Metsätähti)
Current release: Ya Tosiba's Asap Insallah is out May 12th 2023 via Huge Bass.
Recommendations: Paintings of Soviet Azerbaijani painter Tahir Salahov. Check them out!
I am now reading a book by Antal Szerb called Journey by Moonlight that was written in 1937. It’s about a guy searching for himself between passions and obligations, trying to distance himself from his bohemian past. He loses his new wife on the honeymoon in Italy and shit starts to happen.

If you enjoyed this Ya Tosiba interview and would like to know more about the band and their music, visit them on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you are listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

Sometimes music can be so immense that I feel my body will not be able to take it and I am going to crash any second. That used to happen more when I was younger.

I somehow tend to listen to music with my eyes closed, when I enjoy it. I also sing with closed eyes. But unfortunately, I have to say, I also suffer from “the producer's curse”: analysing a work, its arrangements, sounds, why the kick is so weak, where the subs etc - generally what bothers me in the production.

What were your very first steps in music like - and how do you rate gains made through experience versus the naiveté of those first steps?
 
It is amazing to have the feeling that you are free to do whatever you want without any constraints, as a child: free from motor memory, habits. To be honest I still have this feeling that I have no idea what I am doing, that is also why I enjoy it so much, I think.

And doing something for the first time is like flying.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music meant t you at that age and what’s changed since then?

I was 11 when the Soviet Union broke apart in Azerbaijan. The first years after the revolution we got many of the Western TV channels including music channels, pop, rock, rap - all of it at once - contrary to previously having very few Soviet State TV channels.

I remember being madly fascinated by Black music in general: rap and hip hop, funk, electro. I felt that white music and dance were a bad copy of Black music.

Sorry to say but not much has changed since then. I still feel the same.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools and how have they shaped your perspective on music?

I went to music school in Baku from the age of 6 years where my instrument was a classical piano. I hated it. I felt I was forced by my parents and was never in love with the piano - I rather wanted to have the drums as my major.

But my favourite tool has been the radio. I have a very melancholic relationship to childhood radio. In my early school years I had neighbour kids I followed to school. Waiting at their door was the most sunny moment of Soviet mornings when loud radio with Uzeyir Hacibeyov played and I got freshly pressed buckthorn juice from their parents while waiting.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?
 
I as a person don’t need to be anything while making music. That is a very liberating feeling and motivates me. What I mean is that my art should not have so much to do with myself. A piece of art should instead have an inherent voice, unrelated to the artist.

I really do not want to tell anything about myself and my life in music. To me art is among others critical, and a rebellion mirror of disorders, illnesses of society and modernity, more than anything else.

But lately, being able to not include yourself, I think, is less and less possible since we are all forced to fight algorithms to have something to say.

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

When I look back at my own music after some time and have forgotten about it, I listen to it again and do not remember making it and it sounds fresh and new. I like that feeling.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

My favourite non-human sound is most definitely the sound of a rooster crowing.

I woke up to it every summer in Zaqatala visiting my grandparents' house. Waking up to it filled me with so much joy that I sometimes did not believe that it was earthly. I really remember the first seconds after waking up and thinking that I had died during the night and now I must be in heaven and that is how heaven sounds.

I still get goosebumps each time I hear it.

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?
 
It is very hard for me to say what I like, but I know I don’t enjoy work which I can easily understand. I am very drawn to music or sounds when I don’t know what they are about.

I must be puzzled by it, by the meaning behind it. Why did this artist do it, what did the artist want to say with it. Is this art? What is this light from an unknown source?

From symphonies and traditional verse/chorus-songs to linear techno tracks and free jazz, there are myriad ways to structure a piece of music. Which approaches work best for you – and why?

I have a very simple, more folkloric approach to the creation of music: I believe I work a lot with the melody and arrangements to make it really simple.The simpler the better.

A repetitive, chant-like structure such as spiritual chants and Islamic recitations are in my blood and they're hard to unlearn.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that’;s particularly dear to you, please?  

Making the video to “Molla” was a very funny experience. The utterly critical text of that song about Mullahs, a Muslim clergy, their corrupt and deceitful everyday life was written by Aliaga Vahid in the beginning of the previous century.

Singing about a mosque leader and kissing a girl, my friend Minni Katina, while filming the video in the elevator which was a huge aquarium hosting thousands of fish in Berlin. But something horrible happened later. The elevator, unfortunately, broke last Winter and all of its exotic inhabitants spilled out into the lobby and the street.

Sometimes, science and art converge in unexpected ways. Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

Combining sounds, instruments and moods or experimenting with modules is sort of a lab with sounds, especially when I think of experimenting with microtonal sounds. But maybe it is too much to call it science?

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

I write about life, I write as I feel. I want to sing and speak to people I don’t know and I really want them to forget everything for 5 minutes.

It’s funny you ask it since I have been thinking how much music and its arrangement resembles life itself: layers upon layers of different moods, characters, personalities: some unfinished, some fade out at the most dramatic part and all of it at once, in one body.

This is what is exciting about art. You have the immediate perception, and then there are the layers below that you have to take the time to find out about. You have a changing relationship to music, artists and genres. You can enjoy a track and later hate it for the exact same reasons, just like relationships you have with people.
 
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?
 
To master a great cup of coffee is an amazing skill. I wish I could enjoy learning it.

This will be a very boring answer, but to be honest, making coffee, cooking food, to me are boring tasks. To me, the best coffee or the best meal is the one my family serves me. I wish I could enjoy making it, taking its photos for memory. I guess I am too stressed out a person to enjoy it.

If I had a choice, I would only sing.

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you cannot explain?

My instant thought is mugam, that carries complex aesthetics of Islam, an improvised melody sung in the high pitched voice of known Sufi Ghazels, within a particular strictly structured microtonal mode. It’s orchestral, with multiple instruments but when you realise that it is a lot of improvisation, it blows your mind. It is also an oral tradition carrying centuries old history of cultural pluralism, Islam and Zoroastrian past.

Improvisation, being the most universal and widespread forms of music production, is not only a technique to develop new material but is also able to present completely spontaneous finished performances to the audience.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?
 
If I could take time back, I would demolish the 12 note system. This includes also demolishing classical piano. I would not allow for gentrification and simplification of sounds by deleting all the microtones to make it “easy” to manufacturers.

Modern electronic tools and softwares would be so different if each local region were allowed to keep their own tuning system as it used to be. Letting microtonality vanish from modern instruments is the biggest sin that has happened as a result of the dominant Western music system.