OM Gossip #9
New tape, festival, life gets in the way of living etc.
Exactly 4 months without doing a newsletter is not exactly, I guess, what newsletters are about; but as for me, I am pretty hesitant to just write for the sake of it - because information pollution isn’t exactly what OM is about. Instead I used, and most possibly, needed some time to adjust to the new situation, doing undeniably exciting things like meeting friends and hugging them. Ah yes, that sounds good. I needed time to hug some people. And of course, to prepare the next round of releases and a festival, which will result in - yada yada - even more hugging.
Out today is a new tape by G.E.K. (Gud Er Kvinde), who deliver 5 songs for trombones, synthesizers, and wild instruments like this:
Gud Er Kvinde („God Is A Woman“) is the Danish duo of Maria Bertel (here in an absolutely stunning duo performance with Nina Garcia) and Johannes Lund. They sparsely release music under this moniker. They do have a myspace site. They both played in the Danish version of the Jooklo Duo, aptly entitled Jooklo Danish Group. Maria is playing in one of my all-time favourite bands, Selvhenter. Johannes‘ solo performance at the Kraak Fest 2017 would have been the sole reason for me to take the trip, because I love his solo meanderings, but instead I caught a bad flu and missed him.
I saw G.E.K. live at the 2019 (I guess) Troglobatem Fest, and shortly after that, we started exchanging ideas until now, there is this beautiful new tape out, in an edition of 80 hand-dubbed cassettes.
And as these projects evolve, a dear friend from Norway, Juliane Schütz, was invited to hop on board and did an intense video for one track, but more on that later. I also sat down with Maria & Johannes for a short interview:
Beneath joining forces as G.E.K., you two play together in a handful of other different groups - what kind of magic is happening when you meet and play together? What do you value about the other‘s playing?
It wasn’t written in the stars that we would play together. It took us some years to even try. When we did it was like stepping out on uncommon ground, but still having the feeling that this really could be mind altering. We think it was a mix of stubbornness and curiosity that made us insist on the duo. We both had to remove ourselves from comfort zones, habits, and taste, to be able to play together. But now we have been making music together for more than ten years, and we found ways to work and maybe matured a bit too. The magic is, that it keeps being interesting and taking us new places.
You two are prolific in playing - be it as part of the Jooklo family, in duos with Nina Garcia (Maria) or John Chantler (Johannes) or with Selvhenter (Maria) - but you don‘t record that often. For me, personally, recording things often is a painful process, because I am struggling hard with finalizing things. What is your relationship to recording?
We do enjoy having a lot of collaborations going on at the same time, therefore it is sadly not possible to record and play with GEK all the time.
We [also] have mixed energies in our approach to recording. And we don’t always agree on how long to be in the process. But we found a way to honor each others‘ pace. On previous records our tendency was to document our live work, to freeze the process and make a record from that place. The last album Mahatma was the first album where we expanded our vocabulary a bit. We recorded the music without playing it live, and then afterwards we had to find a way to play it before an audience. This tape was made the same way.
Audience - good point! How did the pandemic influence your work? I know friends who recorded session after session and others who stopped doing music completely while living in this bleakness - or, as one close friend put it: „No input, no output.“
The pandemic also left us fairly paralyzed. It took forever for us to record and get work done. We love your friend‘s phrase „No input, no output.“
Despite feeling paralyzed, the record sounds, at least to me, pretty positive and life affirming. Was it a conscious choice to avoid the darker and heavier atmosphere that dominated „Mahatma“? Btw I love how both recordings convey the same feeling of calmness, and yet differ so much.
On Mahatma we already, as you mentioned, moved in to a calmer more slower direction. Especially if we compare it to previous records. When we started to record the new music, we took some elements from Mahatma and tried to develop those using them as central features. Like a home built bass instrument which got a central role on the tune ‘Malva'. At first we tried to let a monophonic instrument - trombone, sax and even flute play a leading solo role on this tune, but it didn’t work at all. We ended up flipping the roles, so the bass and synth’s minimalistic roles was the central element, and the trombones took up space around instead.
Yeah, the whole record sounds pretty much like you cut away everything that might be too much and carved out the essence of the songs, it‘s not so much based on instinct, but more on pinning down a certain vibe. Knowing you two come from a background where noise or a loss of control is to a certain extent a vital part of the equation, I guess leaving some space by itself might be a struggle sometimes - or are you totally through with freakouts?
We are never done with freak outs :)
And here goes the video for “Malva” by Juliane Schütz. In Juliane’s words: “The imagery used for visualizing MALVA stems from handmade manipulations on 35mm film, bathed in various household chemicals whilst documenting the tandem process of beauty and destruction in real time. The random and mostly uncontrollable ways in which the film roll and the chemicals react to each other is like watching two lovers exchanging their last kiss before parting ways, powerful and vulnerabe simultaneously, just to find each other again.” - Nothing to add, but see for yourself:
And mind you, here are some infos which might be interesting if you live in the same timezone as us: OM FEST 2021 is coming up next weekend. Festival will happen in Nuremburg, Germany, Day One at Desi, Day Two at Z-Bau (find the FB events here and here) - so the next newsletter with more infos is on its way. Until then, dissolve yourself in even more G.E.K live in 2019.
End transmission #9.
Get vaxxed, don’t be a hater,
Ambassador Kaputt
