Interview with 30Hz Dirge
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Khocico: You've chosen the dirge of 30Hz frequency for the name of your project... why this particular one?
-Kacper: The name was chosen by accident. We'd heard that under special circumstances the 7 Hz frequency may stop the heart beat. We've got no idea where 30HZ comes from. We just came into conclusion that we accept the change. We avoid the expression „ mournful”. It's just a strong expression of the „song” - Song of 30 Hertz.
-Mariusz: 30Hz is a frequency close to the human ear audibility threshold. Some people hear it, the others don't. I'm not saying that only the people with good sense of hearing may listen to our music though.
K: Is, in your opinion, a marriage of classical instruments with electronic ones a happy one? Why did you decide to join them into your music? Most artists creating industrial prefer blends with noise, electro or ambient...
-Kacper: I think human is keen on classifying and pigeonholing. Perhaps it makes sense for those in CD shops, but for the artistic process limiting oneself to certain borders is not good. You start obeying some set rules and miss many important things. The abundance of most weird sub-genres proves that.
Actually it's unimportant whether you use classical instruments, synthesizers or wander round the city with a microphone. The music is overpowering phenomenon that enables combination of all sounds in the world. It's only up to you what you want to talk about.
While working on “Stendecade” I didn't know of the projects similar to ours. We needed such ways of expression that would reconstruct the tragedy of “Stardust” flight or to picture a man who decided to keep silent consequently. I myself call it a soundtrack to a film that has never been made.
-Mariusz: Nowadays when both classical and electronic instruments are put into digital recording and plotted on the screen, their individuality obliterates.
Of course in the era when there were no computers and there were only instruments made by craftsmen each one sounded differently.
Then you couldn't , for example, get the sound of violin by means of a piano: today by using electronic pianos you may play absolutely anything. However, my opinion is: why use samples if I can get the sound from the piano, guitar or a clarinet. If the musicians of those times had had all sorts of synthesizers or generators at their use they wouldn't have skipped them in their works.
And why the others don't use living instruments? Perhaps because they 'play industrial'.
There are many sounds coming from living instruments in our music (guitars prevail), still, these are transformed by various effects that make them hard to recognize. And here comes another combination, but this time it's deeper.
K: What are you live concert like? Do you use any visualizations? If so, what do they base on?
-K: 30Hz Dirge, is our „second child”. We're a members of 3-persons formation Pinkroom. It's rock music which intertwines with the sounds of 30Hz Dirge from time to time. As to the tour, it's Pinkroom that is going to start one after having recorded the first album. It's almost ready.
Visualizations – yes, very much so – there will be lots of metaphysics and anxious images to it. I made the first last year. They are two short film forms entitled "Magnetic Field".
-M: It's hard to make concerts with the music of 30Hz Dirge, after all most of it is computer processed. I'm personally against all sort of 'performance' when the concert is about one guy standing on the stage manipulating with his laptop and the visualizations are being shown on the wall.
We have concerts of 30Hz Dirge in plans, but in a different form than on the album. As to the further plans, we want to play a concert with a use of living instruments used on the album and drums aside from computer. The concert would be about great impromptu based on the themes of the album while the guitars would be transformed on the spot and therefore their sound wouldn't remain their original sound.
K: Tell us more about your new publishing ("Stendecade")
-K: This release is 3 years old and it's not new at all, but still - the latest one..
In the meantime we've come up with new material, largely finished at this stage.
You'll find more identifiable instruments there. Even if there will be vocals, you shan't expect it to be wiser than the music.
Getting away from the question a bit, we shall get back to working on "Inner Bell", our second release, after we will have finished working on the aforementioned Pinkroom stuff.
-M: The idea for the title and the record was born when I watched a show about a plane that vanished mysteriously above the Andes, sending out a message saying "S.T.E.N.D.E.C". The wreck of the plane was found half a century later in a place totally different from the one it disappeared from the radar screens at. "Ear Wax" was inspired by a Czech movie in which one of the characters decided not to say anything for a very long time. As he concluded, he heard more things, much better. The record was a spontaneous affair and is a full image of our feelings at that time. It's a memory, a "picture of time" in which we have discussed our thoughts.
While creating the material we didn't think about the genre, or other musicians composing similar "entities". What's more, we didn't try to use ready-made sounds offered by contemporary virtual instruments. To be honest, only after recording the material, we slowly began to learn of musicians with similar interests
K: Mariusz mentioned that he was surprised by people who try to separate themselves from those noisy sounds... but for most of the people they are unbearable , so perhaps it would be better to ask why they attracted you so?
-M: My words were more about irony. I mean, in today's pop music songs are being made from the same "mold" (similar melodies, same sounds, beats, etc.), so the most creative and valuable parts are those cracks and hums not removed by the producers.
We still have fans of old, analog sounds sounds, vinyl records on which there are many distortions, making the sound a bit different with each spin.
As for the latter part of the question, I am absolutely negative about that. Noises are a part of our life; more than anyone can imagine. In reality, noises don't aggravate. Please notice, that when the day ends on TV, they broadcast a weird image and a terrible screech. If they showed some humming and ants, everyone who fell asleep in front of the telly would not get up to turn it off.
Further on. Is the noise made by the sea "impossible to bear"? It makes me sleepy, personally.
I can bet that if someone was imprisoned for a longer time - in an echo-less sound-proof chamber, in true silence, it would become unbearable pretty soon. It's like leaving a loud gig - the silence surrounding you "hurts".
Generally, the best proof for noise and crackling surrounding us and making us a little addicted to them is a certain discovery:
"The universe was born in a Big Bang. Soon after that the background radiation came into being. In the past it was made of very hot fotons, but since the universe keeps expanding, nowadays it's there only as microwaves. Background radiation can be witnessed by anyone - for example, on a dead tv channel.
The phenomenon was discovered accidentally by Wilson and Penzias, who received the Noble Prize for it in 1965. Initially, they didn't know what they discovered. They tried to understand why their antenna used for astrophysical measurements continues to produce noises. To get rid of it, they removed dove nests - only after consulting an astrophysician have they learned about the hypothesis coming from the inception of the universe."
That's not all - sometimes noises of particular frequencies are used in hypnosis or treating disorders. Selected noise frequencies, coming one after another, can introduce the "alpha" state in one's mind - similar to the state of mind activity humans experience after using amphetamine.
-K: What I love about those 'noises” is that every time I hear something else in them ( sometimes melodies which seemingly aren't there). It's a very vivid “dirge”.
K: Those electronic sounds are quite capricious – was it a willingness to tame them or rather to let them run free that made you create music?
-K: At first there are talks that inspire different images that appear in our heads. Those images sometimes provoke conversations. Then the living instruments appear and they're are being deformed in a long and complicated process. It's not completely controlled by us, we allow the accident to happen. We don't know when to stop: these are the most important and occasionally the most difficult decisions.
-M: It's as if asking a piano player whether he wants to tame a piano. Every musician wants to get to know and control his/her instrument to get an inspiration or artistic hints from it. So do we, trying to control our sounds we surrender to them somehow and follow the traces that are marked by them. As they say, it's all mathematically countable. So it is, it's countable, but you have to create a pattern first.
K: Presently there area at least two types of artists – those who ascribe ideology, manifestos to their music, and those who absolutely reject that. What is it like in your case?
-M: May the music say as much as it can!
-K: and that's that.
K: How was 30Hz Dirge formed?
-M: There was a time we didn't have a so called place for rehearsals. The hunger for creating was so big and unbearable that we decided to do something about it. It's only now that we may speak of working on the album; then it was just feeding a starving silence.
K: Are there any artists you could call your inspiration?
-K: Of course there are.
If I was to create such a list though, it would be a very long list and it would become longer and longer in the course of time. The most important thing about them is that before they started creating any music, they had learned to listen to it humbly. And that's the greatest inspiration I may thank them for.
-M: A musician always listens to many sounds; not only on the CDs but also to those that surround him. Sometimes it's the nature that is the inspiration. On „Stendecade” we did something we may openly call ours. We didn't know the genre or the artists. Perhaps someone will find some influences in it, but it proves only one thing: that the others feel similar things. And that cool, the fact that you find your soul mate that creates in the similar way instead of meeting 300 dull ones that „ feel the vibe” and dance according to the rhythm.
K: What are your future plans? Will the promotion of "Stendecade" be connected with a tour?
-K: We didn't concentrate on promotion which resulted in us having boxes full of CDs. We have the whole life to get rid of them (laughs). We're wondering now whether we should distribute it as a form of some kind of an action.
If we have enough time we'll end up our work on "Inner Bell" this year.
-M: There has been none and still you're conducting an interview with us (laughs). And seriously; it's only now we start appreciating the importance of promotion.
There will be some actions connected with realization of our plans. I hope the wider group of people become interested in noise that are a bit abnormal.
Greets!
30Hz Dirge
www.30hzdirge.com
Other articles:
-Kacper: The name was chosen by accident. We'd heard that under special circumstances the 7 Hz frequency may stop the heart beat. We've got no idea where 30HZ comes from. We just came into conclusion that we accept the change. We avoid the expression „ mournful”. It's just a strong expression of the „song” - Song of 30 Hertz.
-Mariusz: 30Hz is a frequency close to the human ear audibility threshold. Some people hear it, the others don't. I'm not saying that only the people with good sense of hearing may listen to our music though.
K: Is, in your opinion, a marriage of classical instruments with electronic ones a happy one? Why did you decide to join them into your music? Most artists creating industrial prefer blends with noise, electro or ambient...
-Kacper: I think human is keen on classifying and pigeonholing. Perhaps it makes sense for those in CD shops, but for the artistic process limiting oneself to certain borders is not good. You start obeying some set rules and miss many important things. The abundance of most weird sub-genres proves that.
Actually it's unimportant whether you use classical instruments, synthesizers or wander round the city with a microphone. The music is overpowering phenomenon that enables combination of all sounds in the world. It's only up to you what you want to talk about.
While working on “Stendecade” I didn't know of the projects similar to ours. We needed such ways of expression that would reconstruct the tragedy of “Stardust” flight or to picture a man who decided to keep silent consequently. I myself call it a soundtrack to a film that has never been made.
-Mariusz: Nowadays when both classical and electronic instruments are put into digital recording and plotted on the screen, their individuality obliterates.
Of course in the era when there were no computers and there were only instruments made by craftsmen each one sounded differently.
Then you couldn't , for example, get the sound of violin by means of a piano: today by using electronic pianos you may play absolutely anything. However, my opinion is: why use samples if I can get the sound from the piano, guitar or a clarinet. If the musicians of those times had had all sorts of synthesizers or generators at their use they wouldn't have skipped them in their works.
And why the others don't use living instruments? Perhaps because they 'play industrial'.
There are many sounds coming from living instruments in our music (guitars prevail), still, these are transformed by various effects that make them hard to recognize. And here comes another combination, but this time it's deeper.
K: What are you live concert like? Do you use any visualizations? If so, what do they base on?
-K: 30Hz Dirge, is our „second child”. We're a members of 3-persons formation Pinkroom. It's rock music which intertwines with the sounds of 30Hz Dirge from time to time. As to the tour, it's Pinkroom that is going to start one after having recorded the first album. It's almost ready.
Visualizations – yes, very much so – there will be lots of metaphysics and anxious images to it. I made the first last year. They are two short film forms entitled "Magnetic Field".
-M: It's hard to make concerts with the music of 30Hz Dirge, after all most of it is computer processed. I'm personally against all sort of 'performance' when the concert is about one guy standing on the stage manipulating with his laptop and the visualizations are being shown on the wall.
We have concerts of 30Hz Dirge in plans, but in a different form than on the album. As to the further plans, we want to play a concert with a use of living instruments used on the album and drums aside from computer. The concert would be about great impromptu based on the themes of the album while the guitars would be transformed on the spot and therefore their sound wouldn't remain their original sound.
K: Tell us more about your new publishing ("Stendecade")
-K: This release is 3 years old and it's not new at all, but still - the latest one..
In the meantime we've come up with new material, largely finished at this stage.
You'll find more identifiable instruments there. Even if there will be vocals, you shan't expect it to be wiser than the music.
Getting away from the question a bit, we shall get back to working on "Inner Bell", our second release, after we will have finished working on the aforementioned Pinkroom stuff.
-M: The idea for the title and the record was born when I watched a show about a plane that vanished mysteriously above the Andes, sending out a message saying "S.T.E.N.D.E.C". The wreck of the plane was found half a century later in a place totally different from the one it disappeared from the radar screens at. "Ear Wax" was inspired by a Czech movie in which one of the characters decided not to say anything for a very long time. As he concluded, he heard more things, much better. The record was a spontaneous affair and is a full image of our feelings at that time. It's a memory, a "picture of time" in which we have discussed our thoughts.
While creating the material we didn't think about the genre, or other musicians composing similar "entities". What's more, we didn't try to use ready-made sounds offered by contemporary virtual instruments. To be honest, only after recording the material, we slowly began to learn of musicians with similar interests
K: Mariusz mentioned that he was surprised by people who try to separate themselves from those noisy sounds... but for most of the people they are unbearable , so perhaps it would be better to ask why they attracted you so?
-M: My words were more about irony. I mean, in today's pop music songs are being made from the same "mold" (similar melodies, same sounds, beats, etc.), so the most creative and valuable parts are those cracks and hums not removed by the producers.
We still have fans of old, analog sounds sounds, vinyl records on which there are many distortions, making the sound a bit different with each spin.
As for the latter part of the question, I am absolutely negative about that. Noises are a part of our life; more than anyone can imagine. In reality, noises don't aggravate. Please notice, that when the day ends on TV, they broadcast a weird image and a terrible screech. If they showed some humming and ants, everyone who fell asleep in front of the telly would not get up to turn it off.
Further on. Is the noise made by the sea "impossible to bear"? It makes me sleepy, personally.
I can bet that if someone was imprisoned for a longer time - in an echo-less sound-proof chamber, in true silence, it would become unbearable pretty soon. It's like leaving a loud gig - the silence surrounding you "hurts".
Generally, the best proof for noise and crackling surrounding us and making us a little addicted to them is a certain discovery:
"The universe was born in a Big Bang. Soon after that the background radiation came into being. In the past it was made of very hot fotons, but since the universe keeps expanding, nowadays it's there only as microwaves. Background radiation can be witnessed by anyone - for example, on a dead tv channel.
The phenomenon was discovered accidentally by Wilson and Penzias, who received the Noble Prize for it in 1965. Initially, they didn't know what they discovered. They tried to understand why their antenna used for astrophysical measurements continues to produce noises. To get rid of it, they removed dove nests - only after consulting an astrophysician have they learned about the hypothesis coming from the inception of the universe."
That's not all - sometimes noises of particular frequencies are used in hypnosis or treating disorders. Selected noise frequencies, coming one after another, can introduce the "alpha" state in one's mind - similar to the state of mind activity humans experience after using amphetamine.
-K: What I love about those 'noises” is that every time I hear something else in them ( sometimes melodies which seemingly aren't there). It's a very vivid “dirge”.
K: Those electronic sounds are quite capricious – was it a willingness to tame them or rather to let them run free that made you create music?
-K: At first there are talks that inspire different images that appear in our heads. Those images sometimes provoke conversations. Then the living instruments appear and they're are being deformed in a long and complicated process. It's not completely controlled by us, we allow the accident to happen. We don't know when to stop: these are the most important and occasionally the most difficult decisions.
-M: It's as if asking a piano player whether he wants to tame a piano. Every musician wants to get to know and control his/her instrument to get an inspiration or artistic hints from it. So do we, trying to control our sounds we surrender to them somehow and follow the traces that are marked by them. As they say, it's all mathematically countable. So it is, it's countable, but you have to create a pattern first.
K: Presently there area at least two types of artists – those who ascribe ideology, manifestos to their music, and those who absolutely reject that. What is it like in your case?
-M: May the music say as much as it can!
-K: and that's that.
K: How was 30Hz Dirge formed?
-M: There was a time we didn't have a so called place for rehearsals. The hunger for creating was so big and unbearable that we decided to do something about it. It's only now that we may speak of working on the album; then it was just feeding a starving silence.
K: Are there any artists you could call your inspiration?
-K: Of course there are.
If I was to create such a list though, it would be a very long list and it would become longer and longer in the course of time. The most important thing about them is that before they started creating any music, they had learned to listen to it humbly. And that's the greatest inspiration I may thank them for.
-M: A musician always listens to many sounds; not only on the CDs but also to those that surround him. Sometimes it's the nature that is the inspiration. On „Stendecade” we did something we may openly call ours. We didn't know the genre or the artists. Perhaps someone will find some influences in it, but it proves only one thing: that the others feel similar things. And that cool, the fact that you find your soul mate that creates in the similar way instead of meeting 300 dull ones that „ feel the vibe” and dance according to the rhythm.
K: What are your future plans? Will the promotion of "Stendecade" be connected with a tour?
-K: We didn't concentrate on promotion which resulted in us having boxes full of CDs. We have the whole life to get rid of them (laughs). We're wondering now whether we should distribute it as a form of some kind of an action.
If we have enough time we'll end up our work on "Inner Bell" this year.
-M: There has been none and still you're conducting an interview with us (laughs). And seriously; it's only now we start appreciating the importance of promotion.
There will be some actions connected with realization of our plans. I hope the wider group of people become interested in noise that are a bit abnormal.
Greets!
30Hz Dirge
www.30hzdirge.com
Other articles:
- 30Hz Dirge - Stendecade - 2006-02-04 (Music reviews)
