ET: What is your release «-_-» about?

L: Getting things done, even if you are not fully satisfied. Setting a mark to look back or come back. It’s not that I’m not at all happy with the result, but for my emotional self, the process is over a long time before the release. Usually, my process ends even before a track is finished. For me, it’s enough to have some loops, sketches, and my imagination. But for a proper release, you’d better finish it off. After 15 years of making music, I realized this fact and adapted my process accordingly. The result is that I finally released some music! Yay! And set a basis for my future music.

ET: What was your instrumental approach?

L: Working with instrumentalists was key to this LP. Collaborations were all that was missing in my previous attempts at making an LP. So I’m really thankful for the jams with Julie B. (vocal), Anna Regina Kalk (guitar), and Sol-i So (vocal).

ET: What are your next steps?

L: Let it sink in and sink with it. 🙂
Honestly, I want to expand my palette. Playing drums, singing in a choir, and getting better in audio programming—learning more about acoustics and physics. This is my momentary mood, but it always changes. I’m curious about where I’ll be when I look back on this statement.

ET: What is your release «Inertia» about?

S: There’s no «goals» or «about» regarding «Inertia» because i do not intellectualize what i do, it’s mostly physical. Maybe the only thing i’m looking for is the listeners‘ inability to define what they are listening to. As a listener myself, i don’t need explanations on what i’m listening to, i’m not looking for that with music. Sometimes words are killing music, it’s just noise take it or leave it.

I like the Phill Niblock quote: «No harmony. No melody. No rhythm. No bullshit.»

ET: What was your instrumental approach for «Inertia»?

S: My instrumental approach is always the same with SEPL. It’s mainly improvisations and collages reshaped with EQs. That’s what it’s all about noises & sounds recordings and its heavy process. It’s a lot of work but i like it this way and it fits perfectly with my working routine. I can record hours of impros/field recordings for finally use 20/30 minutes (4 hours initial recordings for «Inertia»).

ET: Tell us about your work as a visual artist?

S: Whether it is for SEPL or image making in general, my practice/approach is similar, and the link is inseparable. I’m always working on images, mostly low quality photos that are digitally textured and manipulated. I have tons of unused pictures. The impact that an image can have on my sound production is undeniable. The influence works both ways. I often need an image as a trigger.

ET: What is your release «Transit» about? 

JJO: I began the writing process of Transit in the autumn of 2021. Since the beginning, it was a conscious attempt to reflect my emotional state at a time of fast, deep changes. I found myself moving into a new country, coinciding with the end of my musical studies, pressured to integrate  myself in a new culture and set the foundation for the development of my musical career. Excitement and hope were often mixed with uncertainty and fear, and I had to re-evaluate a set of conceptions that were deeply assimilated. Everything was moving at an accelerated pace, and I became obsessed with the impossibility of permanence – the things we leave behind, the things we lose. That resulted, partly, in a search for relief that took the form of photography and field recordings – attempts to capture, to immortalize moments, attempts to give them a tangible form. Most of those field recordings ended up being an essential part of the sound world of Transit, like a sort of collection of emotionally charged moments now frozen in sound.

The end of a relationship and having to temporarily relocate to my small hometown in Spain made the emotional foundation for Transit even more relevant. The writing process was a way to remain connected with myself, in an activity where I found excitement, authenticity and peace. It was at the same time a way to legitimize, and capture, the intensity of the emotions at that time.

Creating the music for the album was a journey in itself. With a few exceptions, I composed the tracks in the order they appear in the album. This narrative, the sense of progression and the evolution of the musical material from one track to the next was intentional from a compositional perspective, but it also served as a documentation of my own personal process during those months. Those pieces became a sort of self-portrait evolving in time. Next to carefully crafted musical structures, I indulged myself with some more visceral gestures, specially in the introduction of field recordings. Many voice samples can be heard through the different tracks: they are messages from friends and loved ones from conversations we were having at the time of the composition. In the suffocating Deeper inside we found the mess we made, the heavy distorted sound of broadcasts on the Russian-Ukranian conflict screams through the track. The addition of this material, charged with personal meaning, to patiently produced musical content, felt like a comfortable and exciting approach to create this music.

I made Transit with the hope that the music would deliver a strong sense of narrative. The use of these personal sonic materials, the pictures embedded in the field recording and the words of friends abstracted in sound certainly set a personal context around the album. At the same time, I do not attempt to fully reveal their meaning to the listener, not pinning down every single source or describing what each process and track should truly describe. I’m deeply intrigued by this situation, where sounds that are deeply near to me may become abstract to others. I do wonder what kind of narratives the listener imagines while listening to the music, if there are any at all. But I do hope that Transit encourages imagination and invites its listener to their own sonic and personal journey.

ET: What was your instrumental approach for «Transit»?

JJO: When I begin composing, the choice of instrumentation is essential to the concept of the piece and suggests certain working strategies and compositional processes. I usually tend to follow a rather reductionist approach, sticking to a few sources and tools and exploiting their possibilities. I think this perspective responds to my background as a saxophonist – for many years, I developed a strong connection with a single instrument as my sole tool for musical expression. The electronic medium has expanded my sonic palette, but these deep relationships with certain instruments or tools have remained as the most comfortable routine for imagining music. Many of my works rely on electronic processing of my saxophones. The sound world of my first album, Enlaire, explored the digital transformation of a single synthesizer.

In the case of Transit, however, I tried to be more generous and inclusive and explored multiple sound sources. I already described the integration of many field recording and speech samples, which added analogue depth and noisy material to the whole texture. The purely musical material was created using several analogue and digital synthesizers and an electric guitar. The original sources, however, are not interesting or relevant for the sound I’m aiming towards: as in previous works, I rely on heavy digital transformations of these instruments to create something detached from their original sonic identities. In this sense, I’m not a gear fetishist and do not care much about one source or another – sculpting, breaking, transforming sounds through digital means is what I’m truly interested in. In that respect, I consider my DAW my real and ultimate instrument. I transform sound and create textures primarily using Max, and I structure those sounds and develop the composition in Reaper. I have a multitude of plugins and a few guitar pedals that I use to further transform sound, but I consciously try not to reveal their identity in a very transparent way in the music.

My practice as a composer has been quite divided in between two approaches. On one hand, I conceive pieces designed for the stage, meant to be performative and quite gestural. The use of live electronics is my preferred method when working in this direction – I perform motives live and loop them, and I transform sounds in real time using custom Max patches. On the other hand, I produce tracks, relying on a slower process that favors care for smaller details and more complex structures. I still improvise and record gestures that become the sonic material of the piece, but sculpting, transforming, erasing and re-organizing becomes this slow, peaceful practice that allows me to create my pieces and gain independence from the gestural necessity of live performance. Transit, in this sense, was never meant to be a performative piece or a work that would be effective on stage: the album format is its final form and the individual, private listening situation on headphones its final goal.

ET: What is your release «Subkreskaĵaro» about?

SS: «Subkreskaĵaro» continues the tradition of making albums that use only a single instrument – this time it happened to be a 6-string fretless bass. I like the idea of restricting myself to one source of sound and mangling it in various ways. Quite often I challenge myself by choosing an instrument I’m not really capable of playing (e.g. piano, recorder or blues harp) which contributes to the experimental character of these releases.

ET: What was your instrumental approach for «Subkreskaĵaro»?

SS: Honestly – just playing around. The album is a documentation of my first steps on the instrument which I gave myself as a christmas present. It was badly adjusted at that time – e..g. the string action was too low – and I also had to get used to the big scale of the fingerboard. I tried various combinations of analog and digital effects and just started recording.

ET: Tell us more about your work as a classical guitar teacher?

SS: I work as a teacher for classical guitar at two music schools in Baden-Baden and Karlsruhe. Most of my students are children between 6 and 18 years. Some of them are very open minded, dedicated and curious so it can be a quite rewarding work. I don’t want to sound to negative so I’ll keep it short: Others are not.

ET: What is your new album «…for double bass & prerecorded electronics» about?

DB: The new album is really just about trying to create something in a genre I’ve always liked–the orchestral-instrument-and-tape music of the postwar period. I like the idea of taking an essentially 17th or 18th century instrument and letting it stand against a new technology, and then hearing the basic timbral contrasts that result–the synthetic sounds of the electronic backdrop against the acoustic instrument’s more organic sounds. I’ve done a number of collaborations with electronics before, usually live, where my sound is fed into a computer and manipulated in real time, or in the studio, where my sound is processed after the fact. This time I wanted to work with a fixed backdrop, to interpret it and adapt to it on its own terms, in a sense. In this regard I was especially inspired by Luc Ferrari’s Etudes d’improvisation, which uses a set of prerecorded electronic tracks to provide certain constraints for the performers who improvise with them—constraints of tonality, rhythm, texture, and what-have-you.

ET: What is your release «SFAIRA» about? 

TE: The album was created in a production process together with another album. At the current production time, I was on the one hand very interested in creating tracks that follow more of an typical ‚dark ambient‘ direction, including and involving melodies and harmonies in the form of dynamic soundscapes and a somehow almost epic or cinematic structure in their dramatic progression. But at the same time, I became more and more fascinated with experimental sound design. I wanted to compose sounds and pieces that are more influenced by musique concrète, acousmatic or electroacoustic music that sometimes follow different rules in their compositional structure. Here the sounds, their design and processing are a very essential part of the actual composition. In the end this production process resulted in two different releases, of which the more experimental album is now called «SFAIRA».