Interview with Smyčka

Smyčka wanted to do an interview. Because I'm pretty fascinated by the band's history and their debut album "Fated" is pretty great, I am delighted to present it to you today.

Singer Julia, drummer Anton and guitarist and founder of the band Vasily told me a lot about making their just-released record, the post-music scene in Russia, and their affinity for Franz Kafka's stories.

Anne: Hi! Thank you very much for taking the time for this interview! How are you doing these days? How are you spending your time?

Anton: Hello, working hard, doing fine, thank you! For now, I have many activities: my job in the AI research field, the ending of a postgraduate program, Smyčka, local music parties, the weekend tour of a symphonic-metal band, which I help with. If I am lucky, sometimes I find the time to sleep, yeah.

Julia: Hi! Pretty busy and productively!

Vasily: Hi, and thank you so much for having us! I work a lot, rehearse with Smyčka and another band I participate in as a guitarist. Also, I do some organisation deeds related to Smyčka – social networks posts, conversations and agreements about our new material mixing and mastering, video content, etc. When I am free, I try to create new music and lyrics.

"I joined the band after they finished 'Fated'"

Anne: You've just released your debut "Fated" (Read my review here). Congrats on that. I like the album a lot! It's excellent! Are you happy with the outcome of your work?

Anton: Thank you for this high estimation. I joined the band after they finished the album, too, so I wasn't part of the recording sessions. In my opinion, the primary outcome is that the album is finished, released, and now it shows the world our music and ideas, the atmosphere we create. I think that's a good start!

Julia: Thank you! I wasn't part of the album, but I'm proud of the guys. They have come a long way and have done a great job. I like to feel the atmosphere of these songs.

Vasily: Thank you so much! I'm happy that "Fated" is released. It was a huge time gap between the idea of it and its release. Now I am not that happy as I could be if released, for example, in 2018 or 2019. I was pleased while I was making music for "Fated" – it was a challenging but great time, full of creative work, hopes, discussions and sleepless nights.

It's not about happiness for me at the moment. I feel that I've done the thing that I needed to do. And it should've been done much earlier. So now I feel like I am free from "my own" burden of debt. Generally, I've turned a page related to this material and now trying to look ahead. But I hope that our music can support someones who feels desperate or helpless. It's not only about darkness but the resistance to it.

"We recorded the drums in one day"

Anne: How long did it take you to record it?

Anton: As I said, our previous drummer recorded a drum part of the album. Hilarious fact: he did it in a single session! I would have needed much more time for that, I guess.

Vasily: Well, we recorded all instrumental parts quickly – one day for drums, two days for both guitars, a weekend for bass. The most challenging part was vocal. We had three attempts with our former singer, and each shot was poor. So we made a change and started to work with Arina, who finally recorded vocals. It took two or three months to record Arina and about two years to get the vocals done in general. Then there was mixing, re-mixing, and mastering. So the album called "Fated" had a really uncertain fate, and when we finally had everything done, I was tired as hell.

Anne: That sounds like the changes in your line-up have been difficult for you?

Vasily: Yeah, indeed. We began to record it with our former line-up, and by the end of making the album, I was the only person who stayed in the band from original members. It was tough – to work on material that was old for me – with new bandmates. It became my constant "headache".

Anne: "Fated" is about fatalism and tragic fate. Are there any events that you are referring to with it in particular?

"'Fated' is about the zeitgeist"

Anton: As a performer of this music, I feel more like it's about the zeitgeist. On the one hand, the modern world isn't a place of hope and a bright future; it's more like a covert war of intrigues for power and proto cyberpunk going straight to Gibson's. On the other hand, there is the highest level of comfort in the whole human history, and it came to that point, we have so much time to research our inner worlds, to be with self alone. It's a whole new dimension. And this is scary – fear leads to fatalism.

Vasily: Almost not. All of us had tragic situations like deaths, separations, and losses, but I think it's more about inner feelings and life attitude. I know many who see life as a joyful adventure, and it's terrific and ok. But I see and feel another side of being human – all dissonances, non-logical events, suffering and desperation, loneliness and permanent struggle – they are part of our lives too. People make them by their own hands, for themselves or each other – and that's our central tragic fate.

Making such a kind of music, lyrics, and style is the most honest and straight way to express my deep inner thoughts and emotions. I don't feel like I can describe it only with familiar words, so playing music becomes just another kind of language. On the other hand, for me, it's also, a way to resist depressive mood and anxiety.

Anne: Did you always want to make post-metal?

"Post-metal is new for me"

Anton: To be completely honest, I didn't know that post-metal exists before I joined Smyčka. The bassist wrote me that the band was searching for a drummer, and I was like: "What do you mean, post-metal? Is that a thing?". But as I listened to the music, that was a direct hit for me – mood, progressive elements, extreme female vocals, atmosphere of a leaden sky pressing inner essence. I think I've always searched for such music unconsciously, wanted to play it.

Julia: I am not tied to any genre and listen to different music styles. I have always chosen the bands and the music that I wanted to perform if it touched me emotionally.

"I loved metalcore and deathcore when I was younger"

Vasily: When I was much younger, I listened to and played another kind of music – more brutal and aggressive, like metalcore, deathcore, death, djent, etc. I did some project with my mate – we wanted to start a progressive death band. It was a long time ago, maybe 2012-2013.

I think I even didn't know there was a genre called post-metal. But once I got to some local gig where Russian doom and sludge bands played. It was my first look at another side of heavy music. The next time I visited one of The Ocean's gigs in Moscow – it was my first time I've heard post-metal live, and the band was excellent, energetic and groovy. I was utterly discouraged by them.

"Cult Of Luna blew my mind"

Further, I've listened to Cult Of Luna's "Genesis", and it blew my mind – it is a perfect mix of heaviness, atmosphere and power. So I began to discover genre and listened to other post-metal bands. Since that moment, I always wanted to make post-metal but enriched with different musical forms. The death-metal project we wanted to make didn't start. So I left it and wrote some post-like tracks and melodic parts. Some of them then became the base for "Fated" songs.

Anne: Besides The Ocean and Cult Of Luna – do you have any other favourite bands when it comes to post-metal?

Anton: Obscure Sphinx, Russian Circles, Minsk, If This Trees Could Talk, Intronaut, and Vorvaň if we could call them post-metal – after all, there aren't any straight edges to this genre.

Vasily: I am a huge fan of Cult of Luna. I can say I listen to all their albums with great pleasure, and they inspired me a lot. "Dark City Dead Man" is, for example, a track I can listen to endlessly. And I like to play it, too. I love several post-metal bands: Neurosis, The Ocean, Callisto, Rosetta, Omega Massif, Mouth of the Architect, Fall of Efrafa, Obscure Sphinx and Minsk, to name a few.

Anne: How would you describe the post-music scene in Moscow and Russia in general?

"Post-music is not that popular in Russia"

Julia: I got to know more about post-metal when I joined Smyčka. For some personal feelings, it seems to me that this genre is not very popular in Russia.

Anton: I think my lack of knowledge about post-metal before Smyčka talks a lot. It's an underground movement. In Russia, there are still processes needed to build for such a kind of music to grow. For now, this is more on the shoulders of enthusiasts. That isn't necessarily bad – there are a lot of robust and engaging post-metal bands in Russia. In my opinion, Vasily is a real guru in these questions, and I let him list them.

"Saint-Petersburg is the post-music capital of Russia"

Vasily: There are some post-metal bands in Moscow. I can name L'Homme Absurde, Naska, Reserve de Marche, Walls of Ice and the Russian post-metal giants Reka. We are mates with some of them and shared a scene at live concerts. I like Milestone a lot. Sadly they've split up after they released their fantastic album "Blind Alley". Generally, Saint-Petersburg is considered to be the post-music capital of Russia, not Moscow. There are some post-rock, post-metal, post-black bands in SP, and they have a strong community, much stronger than Moscow bands. So they play more gigs, make more videos, parties, etc. It's fantastic for a genre and music situation in our country. We have numerous post-rock and post-black, blackgaze projects in Russia, but they are almost 100 per cent underground in our country.

Anne: Who came up with your band name, and what does it mean? Does it have a special meaning for you?

"Our band name matches with the mood of our music"

Vasily: As I remember, I came to it searching for some gloomy name, maybe having some reference to Kafka. In Czech, Smyčka means noose, and in Russian, it has the same pronunciation for a relatively close word meaning "converging or uniting of some ways". We decided to stay with this name despite some difficulties with its writing or transcription. We are an underground band, so it doesn't matter, I think. It matches well with our music mood and the mixing of genres we use.

Anne: Talking about Franz Kafka. You said that you want to translate the concept of his stories into music. What connects you with him and his stories?

Anton: So many things we face in life are kafkaesque by nature. Force majeure circumstances wrapped in the system. Bustling with zero outcomes. Daily-based absurd. The whole human society organisation leads to existential questions – "who am I?", "what am I?", "where is my place?", "What am I doing in the context of the universe?", "what part of me is just patterns of people around me?" – so many questions, so much time to think, but so little information, which inevitably leads to anxiety and fear, grim reasoning about life. Statistics of psychotherapy clients growth shows us – more and more people have such questions and go too deep in search of an answer. Kafka was the pioneer for the inner journey expressed metaphorically in modern time.

"Franz Kafka had a significant impact on me"

Vasily: I read him all my life. I can remember when I was a schoolboy; it was the New Year vacations, and I've been reading "A Castle" late at nights. For me, it was super exciting and captivating and had a significant impact on me. Many people will say that it's boring like hell, but I read it as an intriguing detective. I know there are ones, who consider Kafka strange, complicated, even overpriced, and so on, but for me, he is a pure realistic writer with just a special optics to look at life, with some different point of view on it.

When I became an adult, I started to recognise his plots in life around – bureaucracy, futile and unconscious actions, absence of logic, misunderstanding between people. And I appreciate that lots of time, his heroes are not obedient and conformal – they try and search, investigate and even fight with realms they are in.

Anne: What's up next for Smyčka?

"We have a pool of new songs"

Anton: Success. Maybe I should say, in my opinion, to play the music you like, to express the emotions you have is already a big part of prosperity. But it's also essential for us to share this. We want a dialogue with people who feel the same and who want or even need this music. In more practical terms: we want to achieve teamwork with new mates, try some new formats for us. Let it be a little surprise! Everything to make concerts and releases regularly – an ambitious plan for the long term, but it's real because there is so much to say, discourse, and expression!

Julia: Something completely new, but with the recognisable style of Smyčka.

Vasily: I don't know. I had several plans when I started this project, but many of them didn't work out. So now I am very cautious in my expectations and predictions. Practically – we rehearse a lot to get back to the scene and play live. We are beginning to mix our new single. Hope we'll release "Fated" CD's and make some video content. And I have a pool of new tracks that want to be played and recorded. Anne, thank you so much for the interview! It's so lovely – all the best for you!

Smyčka – "Fated"