Name: Malo Moray & His Inflatable Knee
Nationality: German
Occupation: Composer, producer, improviser
Current release: Malo Moray & His Inflatable Knee's Atolls, featuring among others, Hans Arnold, and Markus Rom, is out via Possibly Sam.

[Read our Hans Arnold interview]
[Read our Markus Rom interview]
[Read our Markus Rom interview about Improvisation]

If you enjoyed this Malo Moray & His Inflatable Knee interview and would like to keep up to date with the project, visit Malo on Instagram, and bandcamp. For an even deeper dive, read our 15 Questions interview with Malo Moray. 



What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/learn being an artist?

I have two very early memories towards my first steps that I remember as very truthful. I had a cassette with German children’s songs, sung by a kids choir. I was dancing to the music through our living room in my red woollen tights! I must have been around 2 then. I was electrified by what I now understand as the beauty of togetherness. I still have these songs bouncing around my head even if I lost that tape way before I went to school.

My other memory is me being around 5 – I took a hose of 2 meters and stuck a big blue funnel into its ending. I called it a trumpet. I climbed a big tree in my parents’ garden with this trumpet and blew it. It made a low, squeaky tone – something like if you haven’t fully learned how to play a didgeridoo. Whilst blowing my trumpet, I hit the branches of the tree. They were my drum. As our house was in somewhat of a tiny valley in our neighbourhood, the sounds reverberated from all around me. That was truly blissful. Me going into a tunnel of joy, losing any grip on time and space.

I still experience that when improvising music today. Before every concert I meditate to connect to this truthful tunnel, within which it is just about me enjoying what I do. Even when playing in a group, it’s an experience of total solitude and absolute connection at the same time. With that in mind, I don’t believe, anyone needs to train to be a creative. It’s human nature to express ourselves in ways that are truly unique. That’s the only possibility that we have evolved so far in our comparably short history as a species on this planet.

Creativity is the driving force in everything that makes us human – we’re leaning into the world curiously, then process it in our unique ways and make something of it that hasn’t been there before. No matter if that might be a painting, a song, a dish that we create from the tasty herb that we didn’t know before or a peculiar way of breathing that arose when walking through a thunderstorm. We don’t need to learn or train to be creatives, curiosity creates ample experience.

But what we sadly need to do very much is to unlearn a lot of things. When it comes to arts, there’s two main problems that we have in “western” societies: a neoliberal/capitalistic educational system and the delusion of artistic genius.

Some years ago, I knew a kid who was writing their own books with illustrated short stories at the age of 5. The kid learned how to write at kindergarten out of curiosity and enjoyed it more than anything. Then, about a year later, I met the kid again. It went to school now, around 6 years old. I asked about their writing. They replied: “Nah, I can’t write stories anymore. We only learned the alphabet until letter ‘F’ in school.” It still makes me want to cry when I think of that moment.

We all come into life with the divine gift of creativity and curiosity. Then we enjoy ourselves for some time and then we get sent to schools. That’s where we spend (in my case mainly waste) up to thirteen years of our sparse time being told how something is done “the right way” and, if you have substantial art classes at all, you usually end up being taught “the right way” too. That’s so dangerous!

I mean, don’t get me wrong – it’s great to do technical teaching and improving creative possibilities to express yourself. But it all needs to start from one’s individual expression. Otherwise it’s nothing but a brutal intrusion into a young person’s soul – a constant, subtle undermining of plurality of voices. Schools aren’t about your personal expression or creativity at all - it’s only about how to do things “the right way” and about the canonical “good art”.

And that’s where our second problem hits in: the construct of artistic geniuses. I mean, people like you-name-them are great and their art survives the times. That’s astonishing. That’s what brings us as whole humankind forward. But there is a fetish in the arts and arts’ education of the last about 100-300 years that makes it so hard for a childlike curious spirit to fully bloom as it is instantaneously snuffed out by comparison of how “the great geniuses” did it, by comparison with “the right way” of doing things.

So make a long story short, I don’t think you need to train to be an artist, as we all are born creators. The nice thing is, by experience driven through curiosity, you can learn new things all the time to broaden your creative expression. But mainly we have to unlearn a lot to grow closer to our creative souls that are buried deep inside, under capitalist biases and clutter.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness as things become more professionalised and how do you still draw surprises from equipment, instruments, approaches and formats you may be very familiar with?  

Oh, please ask me that in 50 years from now! Haha!

Right now, I think, I experience a shift concerning this. I used to have strong routines for work. Like practicing technical stuff daily etc. But I realized, besides the training effect, it limited my creative endeavours as it was hard for me to feel free to explore after training this and that for xyz amount of time.

A great teacher for this is our kid. They do it in such a smart way. They can be laser focused on something and really really grind their skills about something. But the moment this something lacks resonance, they drop it and do something else. That’s great! I’m pretty sure, this method doesn’t apply to the business side of being a freelance indie artist as I am, because if I don’t email 20 new venues to play per week, no one will.

For the creative side of the game, I am stoked to discover the more fluid forms of motion. And the more I think about this, it comes down to emptying myself and experiencing silence to then receive something from Source.

I made some steps with meditation practices and they feel great and very inspiring, but I am really at the beginning of this journey.

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 think, with almost 33 I am way too young to act as if I was sure about things like that. I simply lack the experience. I’d rather want more experienced people offer their points of view:

The other day, I saw an interview with David Bowie. He said something that really resonated with me. My recollection of it would be: As artists, we have the privilege striving to not only make it from one day to the next. As artists, we’re given the endeavour to transcend everyday life by reaching for something which is greater than ourselves to express that we’re all part of this big oneness.

Or to put it more simple, with Victor Wooten (again, quoted freely): The world doesn’t need another highly trained bass player! There’s enough of them out there. What the world needs are good people. So, within the field that we choose to make our living in, ask yourself: How can I become a better person through what I do?

I don't have anything to add to this.

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?

We’ve already touched on this before a bit. Spoken from the outside, I couldn’t tell. A piece of music can be performed with heart and soul or not. A cup of coffee can be made with heart and soul or not. I think, a mundane task can be as meaningful as playing a piece of music and both can be creative acts of equal spiritual meaning.

I once saw a person make a falafel wrap with such a spark and joy, it definitely breathed way more art than the classical concert that I attended afterwards which was plainly uninspired museum-music and very boring to me. But it’s not even about the how the music or the Falafel wrap were made. It’s about the why. As I could tell from the spark in the person’s eyes, they were making their falafel out of pure joy. It was a self-fulfilling necessity of performing this creation. That is art.

For the uninspired performer, I can’t tell. Maybe they had a bad day. Maybe my antennae weren’t as receptive. Or maybe their why wasn’t clear. Maybe it all doesn’t matter in detail, but if the why for performing a specific task is clearly heartfelt and honest, I can’t imagine how it couldn’t turn out as art.