Welcome to the SONICA artist podcast in which our guest for today is Svetlana Maraš, a Shape platform artist for its 2020 edition, nominated by SONICA. But in life, she’s a composer and sound artist from Serbia that works at the intersection of experimental music, sound art, and new media. At the SONICA festival edition of 2020 that is called Vrt, ki ga preganja raj or Paradise Haunted Garden, she will present two works. One will be an installation in the Equrna gallery that will be open from 8th to 27th of September and the other will be a four-channel installation in a garden that will be presented during the festival. Next to her radiophonic, electroacoustic, and other sound compositions, she’s also a composer in residence and artistic director at Radio Belgrade Electronics studio. Svetlana, thank you for talking with us today. 

Thank you for having me and I’m glad that the event is still taking place.

Yeah, while we’re geographically very close together, Slovenia and Serbia are few hours of travel [apart], you sadly probably won’t be coming to the festival in real life.

Unfortunately, no, it’s really sad. But actually, I haven’t been travelling since March although I have been doing some work abroad, remotely like everybody else. But no travels since March actually, which is very, very weird because I kind of got used to it in the last couple of years. There are the periods where I’m home in Belgrade just working on new stuff, then there are these periods when I travel and give concerts, lectures and this year feels a little bit different. But you know, it’s really a minor thing considering what’s happening around us, so I think I am able to adjust to it. 

Well, music and all of its connected spheres are what brings bread to your table. After graduating from ALTO University in Helsinki, you settled in Belgrade, and as you said in another interview that wasn’t exactly a conscious decision from the start. But in the past few years that you’ve been living in Belgrade, you’ve extensively travelled the world for your artwork and you’re also very integrated into the city’s cultural and music scene. Could you tell us a bit why is it important to nurture local scenes and how does Belgrade tie to the global and cultural music happenings?

Well, the motivation and also the circumstances behind the fact of me living in Belgrade are more of a personal than a professional kind. The fees of whatever you do in experimental music are the same for everybody regardless of what country they come from. And to be making a living from it in a city like Belgrade is kind of way easier. This is one of the things that really provide me with the possibility of being able to do my work uninterrupted. And then this became a very functional scenario, it worked for many years. Now of course the situation is changing for everybody, so we will see how it goes and how do we develop our work in this new context and situation. But then being based here, living here, I also felt the need to also give back to my local community, where I grew up, musically also. As much as we can over here in the local scene, we are trying to do things although we are very, very constrained by the fact that almost no budget for culture. But once you’re friends with the people going through exactly the same thing you are and you have all this empathy and solidarity and this is giving birth to a lot of enthusiasm and power to do things despite having all these difficulties that I have mentioned. But I think still that’s not sort of enough, because there is a lot of very qualified people, lots of possibilities, but we are lacking infrastructure, support and now it would be a total paradox to talk about this in the situation of the coronavirus because everything got just a lot worse. 

This overlooking of certain spheres of the world, for example, the Balkans are not very known for its experimental music circuit but with Shape, the platform you are on as an artist this year, at least inside Europe there is a want to connect different scenes geographically and different festivals that are involved into the music circuits, the more established part of the music industry. Have you thought about if platforms like shape need to be also localized, maybe inside the countries themselves or inside the region to help develop these scenes also from the grassroots perspective? 

Absolutely, it is obvious that Shape is a good networking platform that allows you to find out also about other musicians and other festivals that you didn’t really know of. And if we would have the same as you mentioned in the Balkans everybody would benefit a lot. We are lacking a sort of networking which is not quote-on-quote official networking. Not that we need anything official on the paper because people, who are active on the scenes in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, we know who is active and we keep in touch. When there is a possibility to organize something for one another, I think we do that. But I don’t think is enough. Maybe a Platform like Shape would allow this exchange to be in the first place more constant and then also together we could build a sort of event. It would be beneficial to everybody. As I said, these are really tough times to plan, to actively work on developing things like these because we don’t know how things are going to develop. And I want to add something related to networking but more of this international networking. It shows in this situation of the coronavirus where everything kind of stopped for a while and we’re all living in the uncertainty of how’re going to proceed with what we do and as I mentioned already how we’re going to make living out of it. So, it shows that this networking has a really strong potential that can really go beyond these constraints that we have now. For example in March I was terribly afraid of what is going to happen and how am I going to work, how will I make a living like everybody else. Because we all depend on these events and commissions and projects. And as we got used to living with this situation I think that in general I can see a lot of things happening, which is not only the streaming as it was in March and April, but I think people are looking for new formats, organizers and producers more specifically were looking for new formats of collaboration and it seems to work, if you take a look of events, which are not being canceled, which are still taking place. That means that of course, we cannot have a live audience or not in the capacity that we had before. But experimental radio features or podcasts or commissions of finished pieces, compositions that could be played on the web in this or that way. I think it somehow continued; this flow of events seems unstoppable. This is a huge quality of the networking that we’ve done before Corona, which is enabling us to somehow continue. 

We might dive into also one of your presentations at the SONICA festival, where you will present a composition in the garden, which is this year’s festival theme: gardens as paradises, paradise as something haunted but also the very clear human intervention, the technological intervention in nature. Could you tell us a bit about what work will the visitors see or hear and how did you adapt to the garden, to the nature concept?

Well, the piece is built for it, basically, I knew the concept before I started making it. The piece is made to be presented in the garden in Koper, in a very nice garden with some antique sculptures, which are permanently there, it’s like a proper garden and what we imagine by a garden, with the trees around. I really like the idea of working on something like this, because as we are all stressed and anxious about our future, about our present, it really helps thinking of the things that make us feel good. Thinking about the gardens, especially for us, living in the city, who don’t even have a terrace or have only a small window to the street (laughter). And all this noise and traffic around, being stuck at home since March, it really helps thinking about some distance places and spaces, where you feel more relaxed. And the garden is a symbol of something like that for me, but it is also a symbol of something, which is fruitful, which gives birth to something that we need to live, not only to survive. Taking it like this, I was really inspired to work on the piece because it really makes you think about something positive. We are surrounded with a completely dystopian scenario and we can as well draw inspiration from this, which wouldn’t be any awkward or strange, it comes naturally to reflect on times you live in but also this look into the future, which is a bit more positive, a bit more relaxed is also something that pandemic brought into the artistic context. Imagining a better future.

I would stake my hand that this is probably the first piece you’re doing site-specific for a garden, but you’ve done pieces for basically everything: for the radio, radio documentaries, your own compositions for orchestra, for the EMS Synthi 100, but in all of them, there is kind of underlying presence of you misusing digital software or creating glitches or following a more improvisational path instead of using classical structures of music composition. How did you tie the positivity of the piece, the safe paradise concept of the garden to your music?

Something changed in the past year or so, but what you are talking about is the technique and these constructive solutions that you can hear in the majority of the works that I’ve done so far. But somehow in the past year or so the technology and the technique that I’m working with got a lot more blended with the ideas that I’m trying to achieve with my works that are non-musical. There is some programmatic quality in many of my works but somehow I think, at least in the last four or five works, I think this technique and the process itself stay a little bit in the background. Much more than it used to be before. I would like to mention that with the concept of the garden, you are absolutely right, I have never done that kind of site-specific work. But with my previous installation called Soundscape cabinet, which has two aquariums, two water tanks and machines just moving this water, also on the surface, if you look at it, it is robotic machines, moving the water like this or that, but if you just listen to the sound of it, what I actually aimed for is getting this feeling of a Japanese garden, or something, which can be very abstract, just some randomized water flow, which brings so many associations, so many meanings. In a way, this concept is underlining some of the works that I have done, and I feel comfortable.

I’ve read in one of your descriptions of a project, something that really caught my eye, that you’ve used or at least you used to use mainly digital sources for the sounds that you use in your music, your compositions but that you’re searching or maybe deliberately making them sound like something that you would found in a field recording. We perceive it as a very natural sound. What is of interest to you in that? Because mostly, when people work with machines, with modular synthesizers, with complex hardware, the interest for them is showcasing the mechanical soul of the machine. Guiding it further and further from the human normal sound.

The starting point is important. I’ve never felt so attracted to sampling nature in this literal sense. Making field recording or anything like this. But that doesn’t mean that I am not so much influenced by the sounds that I hear and the way that I listen to the sounds around me. Therefore, I don’t feel detached from this world, from this realistic sound world, that I am surrounded by. I am just using different tools to get to it. Also, when you’re using digital technology, when you sample the sounds by using the microphone, recorders, whatever you’re using, the technology is leaving its mark. It’s not the objective reality that you’re capturing, it is still one out of many perspectives. Just as my starting point is a little bit different, starting from the digital sound, the digital sound is mostly what I work with, 99% of it comes from the digital realm. Not only in terms of sound but also with installations in terms of technology, this is where I start from. I think we can also approximate certain aspects of the sound that surround us in an environment by using completely different tools such as digital technology. I like thinking about it as the inversed music concrète. It is a kind of concrete sounds that we end up with, just coming there in a different way. Maybe you can also see it as a form of virtual reality of sound to recreate nature by using digital technology. What I relate to this experience a lot is working in the 4D sound studio, which really provides you with the listening possibilities that you can relate to how we listen when we are outside much more than how we listen with stereo speakers or I don’t know what number of speakers. This is one aspect of my approach to sound that you’ve mentioned and another one is what I like when I work with digital sound. You mentioned before that a lot of my influence comes from improvisation because I also used to play improvised music a lot. There is a certain flow that you can get with acoustic instruments, that is not so certain versatility, that is not so common for the computer sound or for even modular sounds and this is something that I am aiming to achieve with the sounds that I usually like composing. I am playing with a lot of different software and hardware but in the end, I just like composing the sounds, just working on these tiny little details, to make them sound, or to make these modifications that they go through time and all these manipulations sound very natural and spontaneous. And to achieve this you need a lot of pre-composition and pre-thought in order to do this.

The range of knowledge has to be really wide and I think your CV, in what bends and talks and books you’ve given on definitely showcases that. For the last question, I just wanted to ask you a bit about your work at Radio Belgrade’s electronic studio, which houses a very famous asset, also synth EMS Synthi 100, that you basically restored and started artist residencies and educational programs connected to it. As a composer working with this Synth, did it change or did it have any influence on how you do music in other projects?

I guess it is more of the opposite; how I do music otherwise, I adapted this to working with Synthi. I am still getting the sound out of it that I would get from a computer or something. This is not so uncommon because I’ve seen by guiding the residencies in our studio and organizing programs and activities, I’ve seen a lot of people working with Synthi and really utilizing it to get their own sound as this Synthi really has so many possibilities and whoever that tried working with it knows that it is kind of limitless. At one point you have this instrument, which is analogue and very old, but the way it’s built and the way it works, it does have certain constrains, but sometimes this constrains are really the way towards new results. And what I’ve seen is that people can really achieve their own sound, regardless of how knowledgeable or not are they with working with the Synthi itself. You can simply hear their own style that they would do in some other music with some other instruments. There is something very humane about this instrument that really comes about whenever you work with it. And for me, before I didn’t work a lot with modular synths, but Synthi is very different from other modular synths, especially for the very broad and complex patching field, which really feels like a computer set-up. This is how I approach it anyways, like some kind of object-programming, where you just connect this with that, not so many cables like with other modular synths, everything is pretty neat and pretty clear, what you’re doing. In a sense, it is a really amazing compositional tool. That is what it was built for: it was built to be a workstation. And now, today, the workstation that we know mostly uses a computer, but at that time, as they didn’t have this sort of studio equipment, this was meant to be one instrument that you could use to both make the sounds and process the sounds and there was this small sequencer, where you could record not the sounds but the voltages, but you could still automatize some processes. I would like to go back to what we talked about in the beginning, about making networks. With the limited budget and possibilities that we had at the radio, we did organise a lot of things and events and residencies, but making a network, between for example the surrounding countries at least to be able to have residencies by artists from Ljubljana, from Zagreb, much more than what we had before. It really [requires] a framework for this and a network, but I think it would be absolutely possible and I would really like to take part in this as long as I am part of the electronic studio, to make something like this happen. So, this is maybe also a call for action, for all of our neighbours, our colleagues that the studio and the synth are open for experimentation and play. 

Synthi will be [featured] in a small, limited amount through my installation that I am building for the MoTA collection and this installation is a sound object, called Modulation Box and it contains the sound of EMS Synthi 100 but played through a very small lo-fi speaker and the patch is engraved into the stone, which is fixed on this box. This is the way the synth will visit you this time at SONICA! (laughter)

This is really great to hear, thank you for the really in-depth nice interview and hope to see you in any of the next editions in Ljubljana or somewhere else.

Thank you so much for also having very good questions for me and I am really happy that SONICA is happening, in a new format, but still is taking place. Thanks to everybody for organizing it and for being such a great host. 

The podcast features sound excerpts from Modulation Box sound installation and Post-excavation activities radiophonic artwork by Svetlana Maraš.

The podcast was produced with support from SIGIC - Slovenian Information Music Center.
Svetlana Maraš is an artist supported by SHAPE Platform, which is co-founded by the Creative Europe.