Zerkalo Cynetart Interview

An English translation of the Zerkalo interview with Cynetart magazine(from a festival they recently played)is up on their Blog now. You can see some images and read the text in both German and English there. I'm going to archive it here as well.

Tamash Kestawitz, Victoria Lukas.

TK : What makes you obviously loving the Russian aesthetic of the mid 20th century and the dry analog textures of Heinrich Mueller too, that’s rooted in the beginning of electronic music? Has it something to do with nostalgia?

VL : I am attracted by russian art from the soviet revolution to the end of the sixties, because it’s mostly coming from extreme suffering; and that pain, the lack of freedom, the horror of the soviet daily life, has been powerfully sublimated in many different forms (eg the acmeists, the formalists, the futurists). What interests me is this sublimation.

The meeting with Heinrich Mueller was decisive, together we decided to have a new approach of electronic music, outside of the codes and fashion, which would include scientific contemplation with poetic and sometimes confessional lyrics.

This music is naturally nostalgic because it captures specific moments in time. But it’s not dead moments, they have meanings, they produce emotions, they are “moving”, it’s like cinema. The work of the russian director Andrei Tarkovsky has been very inspiring because among other things he asked metaphysical questions, he was able to accurately recreate memories and visions in his movies, making them permanently alive in time, and this is ultimately what we want to achieve. His aesthetic, is sentimental, it brings out the child in us. He also had a very special and strong connection with nature, which is not perceived as an external object but as an extension of us.

Analogue synthesis, voices and numerical treatment are the fundamental components of our music because they allow us to expand our sound design options.

TK : Why are poeticism, intellectual messages and literary references often missing in electronic music? Is it based on the mostly hedonistic aspects of club culture in your opinion? Should Zerkalo change this imbalance?

VL : Yes club culture is very entertaining but it does not want to think, the pleasure of the body seems prominent here. We think that it’s impossible to physically and conceptually dissociate mind and body, one of the objectives is to accommodate both.

TK : The visual components seem to be an important and inherent part of Zerkalo and the very first releases of your music were special video clips at youtube. So do you ever thought about releasing not only on Vinyl but also on DVD to combine audio and visual?

VL : We really like the idea of creating multidimensional spaces and yes among other things, we definitively consider releasing a DVD which would contain various tracks exclusively as video versions.