DIET: DOLEN - 09.09.24
This summer, we took our equipment back to Bulgaria. We visited our long-time friend Nikolai, who has been living in Bulgaria again for a while, where he develops and builds modular synthesizers.
Nicolai had arranged two gigs for us at an electronic music festival, and we were eager to meet other acts, exchange ideas, and hopefully make music together. The first gig was a disaster. The festival was somewhere in the mountains and had barely any attendees. The organizers were unwelcoming, and there was hardly any live music. Instead, the kind of DJ sets were played that we’ve been avoiding for years. Disheartened and in a bad mood, we left the first festival. The second gig was scheduled for a week later, near Sofia.
In the meantime, we traveled to Dolen to visit one of Nikolai's long-time friends, Vesko and Marija, who live there with their children and have spent years designing and building an impressive property out of raw stone. The property lies in a valley between the mountains, with a stream flowing through it, which we could constantly hear bubbling in the background during our recordings. Vesko had been part of the Vataff Project in the past – a fusion project combining electronic music with traditional Bulgarian instruments and vocals.
The recordings for this release were made over two evenings in Dolen. On the first evening, we set up our equipment in Vesko’s studio, located at the lower end of the property. We began playing, and Vesko kept bringing out new instruments (flutes, horns, drums) and started accompanying us. Gradually, our sound moved into the background, and Vesko took over with solos on his instruments and vocals. This is how tracks (01, 03, 05, 06) came about.
On the second evening, more of Vesko and Marija's friends joined us. At Vesko’s suggestion, we set up our equipment on the stage of the amphitheater located in the valley. We started playing and improvising. A group of teenagers from Berlin, who were visiting a friend in Dolen, stopped by, and the sound echoed through the valley. But cold wind whistled through the valley, and soon we were playing alone for the guests who were drinking and chatting inside the house. The rest of the tracks (02, 04, 07) for the release were created that evening.
On one side of the setup was the drum machine, fed into and modified by a modular synthesizer, which expanded and distorted its sound. On the other side, improvisation took place on a small monophonic analog synthesizer. The improvisation was looped, and more improvisation was layered on top of the loops. Additionally, a digital organ plugin was used. In the recordings from the second evening, you can constantly hear a microphone that was originally intended for Vesko’s vocals and instruments. Instead, it captured conversations, the echo of our sound, and even our own comments.
The second evening led to conversations with Vesko in the following days about improvisation, our setup, and his own experiences with electronic music and performance. He encouraged us to face each other while playing to maintain constant eye contact. He also suggested simplifying our setup, which led to the removal of the keyboard and the live improvised solos for the second gig. We spent the days preparing for the next gig, deciding to play less and incorporate pre-produced audio material to focus more on working with this material. This approach aimed to help us dive into playing together faster and avoid the creative slumps that sometimes occur during live improvisation.
TRACKLIST:
1.die Fünften
2.die Neunte
3.die Dritte
4.die Achte
5.die Zweite
6.die Sechste
7.die Zehnte
