“It’s incredibly liberating.” Oliver Torr and Oblaka on supersonixx and personal histories of experimental club music

Nora: First supersonixx’s event description is kind of a parody of how these texts are usually written. You talk about FOMO, the urgent need to show up at supersonixx to flex your knowledge of obscure genres or to brag about music that influenced your teenage years. So what album or musician defined you two in particular? 

Ladislav: Just two days ago I was listening to playlists on YouTube which imitate those CD compilations with 90s dance tracks, such as Dancemania. There’s stuff like Mr. Wayne, Culture Beat, 2 Unlimited and others. So I was enjoying this big nostalgia for music that formed me. I also realised that rap and hip-hop are the number one genre amongst young people today, whereas, for my generation in the ’90s it was mostly dance music. Especially techno and house, that’s what everybody listened to. And it was everywhere – it was on TV shows, it was on the radio.

Oliver: And any specific album at 16?

L: I had some compilations from XL Recordings, where there was some dance … also Scooter for example. I had this album from Scooter that I listened to constantly. I was also already into techno, raves, and listening to NSK when I was 16. Tell me what you got on there…

O: My mom used to do aerobics, so that’s the kind of stuff we had playing at home. Also classic things like Depeche Mode, synthpop stuff, some obscurities here and there. But I think the thing that hit me the hardest personally was the first Human League record (Reproduction) when I was 14. Later on, we had a punk band, so we listened to a lot of Bad Brains, Deftones and others. That early post-hardcore/punk… And then it slipped into electronica. I was into all kinds of UK bass music but also a lot of shoegazey stuff and bands related to that whole era, also experimental music.

L: What about Ecstasy of Saint Teresa?

O: Ecstasy, for sure. I met Muchow recently and didn’t know what to say to him. I was a total fanboy for what they were doing with Ecstasy.

L: I just remembered one other thing that massively influenced me, and that was that my dad used to listen to Mike Oldfield a lot, and it’s still in my head to this day. Every time I hear it on the radio, I feel this really strong nostalgia. And it’s just like a specific feeling of that time.

O: I had this experience recently with Gary Numan. His stage presence is incredible, the guy looks as if he fell from another planet. Also, his lyrics paint this sci-fi world that I wanted to be a part of, reflecting some distant reality. I think that’s maybe what I’m trying to do now only with sounds – making music that doesn’t sound like it’s from the Earth.

And then from my father’s side, there’s Bowie, his style and attitude to the “art life”. It took me a while to understand his music properly in-depth, but his approach to creativity or the music he did in his Berlin years is great. And then of course Endless Illusion! Now I’m not trying to sweet-talk, but Endless Illusion was kind of the first thing that brought all of those elements together into something that seemed fresh for me at that time.

L: When we started around 2010, there wasn’t much of anything like that, it was mostly house music. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but we wanted something other than the Hague sound and acid, something darker.

How did your collaboration and the whole series of supersonixx begin?

O: Endless Illusion invited me to join them in Futurum when I was about 20 years old. I played the worst set I’ve ever played there because my hands were shaking so badly.

L: I really don’t remember that.

N: But apparently it didn’t put them off.

O: Now, for a long time we’ve been trying to push a specific sound with Láďa, which also has a lot of parallels with this, let’s say, post-synth, darkwave sound, philosophically speaking. There I see a lot of connections between what’s going on in the so-called hybrid electronic scene. Most of the people who make this music have a specific DIY approach which is more about expression than technical abilities or composition per se. 

I did a series of more experimental club nights in Ankali some years back but they were not so well attended, but we decided to give it another shot and this time I guess it’s working out better. 

L: We’ve always been into more artistic approaches. Oliver is close to people from art schools, I was close to that through graffiti. So we’d meet in different places, there was something in the air for a while, and this type of event was missing in Ankali’s programming.

You were talking about a specific sound, both of you are also working with modular synths which made a comeback in the electronic world about a decade ago. Even though it’s disappearing again now – what does this instrument mean for you two?

O: It has always been a personal thing for me – I am not at all a modular purist, I don’t like that about the “modular scene”. The modular is just a tool, the same as a computer or a contact microphone. For me what the modular did was not in terms of the actual thing itself, but more in the mind. Coming from a compositional background, the modular opened my head to just sounds. Not harmonies, but more noise and expression in that realm. I was a big fan of East Coast synthesis, a more exploratory approach to music making, people from the San Francisco Tape Music Center, etc.

Overall I think modular is a bit redundant and a very privileged way of working because it’s terribly expensive and you have to have the time to learn it. I was working in a synth shop in Berlin for a year so I kind of just fell into it by having the privilege of getting stuff cheaply, being able to build my modules – and then working with Bastl Instruments. I think you can just work with recordings made with a phone, process it in a free software and get more interesting results most of the time.

L: I think you’ve accurately captured the greatest value of the modular, that it somehow frees you to be creative. It teaches you to change the sound, and how exactly it can be modified without the constraints of a preset. I can implement ideas faster. But nowadays, technology has mixed it up so much that you can’t tell what’s better – if modular or a purely digital process. 

O: I think the main thing is that it expands the sonic palette you can imagine.  For both of us, the modular is something that has changed the way we think about music more than the sound itself. I guess it’s similar to the approach of a singer-songwriter who plays guitar, but has a piano at home and looks for things to do on it, but then records them on the guitar. Modular and other tools or techniques like circuit bending take you somewhere new, it’s a good technique.

Now back to supersonixx and the whole electronic music scene – how do you feel it’s evolved since clubs like Ankali and Fuchs2 were founded, how has that transformed local music or the opportunities for you as artists?

L: Shall I start?

O: Well, you have to, you’re the club historian.

L: It’s almost impossible to compare it to ten years ago, it was a completely different world. First of all, it’s become very professionalised, the whole playing, the financial rewards and the attitude of people – both the demands of the audience and the event organisers are at a high level. Recently, when I played at this club in the Netherlands, I realised that I’d experienced many events in Prague with a better vibe or approach to the visitor and thought to myself, that maybe we are already on the same level. Everyone talks about Berlin too, but I often find it very grungy, or I don’t feel comfortable in some clubs.

I also think that the local crowd demands pretty progressive music, there’s at least a part of the audience that’s cool with a lot of broken beats that I would have been afraid to play before. It’s incredibly liberating. For example, at the very first supersonixx event, I had this great feeling that people came there for the actual music. I don’t want to say that we play some highbrow stuff, but I feel like we’re looking for more challenging tracks that aren’t really for everyone perhaps. But I felt like that’s what those people came for and there was a really good, I’ll say the word, community vibe.

O: I went on tour recently and we played in some cities, where the overall experience wasn’t so great and most people left during the more experimental sets because they just weren’t into it. And then we performed in Prague and then the next day in Berlin, both those cities are perhaps more progressive in terms of the audience, people are standing in front of the stage and are attentive even if it’s an experimental set. 

When we played that three-hour b2b with Láďa at supersonixx, I felt like the whole set was a bit of a fight between the two of us over playing our favourite thing, not caring if it’s danceable, and the crowd was really into it, which felt really fulfilling. 

L: I remember a time when I was afraid to let go of things and I was so bound by some expectations. But especially in Ankali, I feel completely free, being sure that there won’t be anybody showing me their phone to ask if I’ve gone crazy (that’s happened to me many times). In Holland, for example, I completely cleared out a club once. In primetime, to the last person, even though I played the same way I played a week before at Ankali, where the vibe was totally amazing.

So we’ve managed to raise a generation of listeners here on some kind of community basis that is much more open-minded in this sense? 

L: Definitely, you could say a strong generation of producers as well. The Prague, or Czech, producer scene is very strong now. I could name ten or fifteen interesting experimental producers that I could easily put in any mix and recommend them. I find that unique for such a small city.

O: I also think it’s important to bring up the topic of making a living within the context of the Czech electronic scene. You still have your day job, right? Can you imagine being in a position of not having one and earning money just with music? 

L: Well, I can imagine it and I would love it if it was a reality, but unfortunately it’s not. I’ve never got to the point where I could make a living out of it.

I’m sorry to interrupt, but it seems to me that the question of how one can make sufficient money in culture in general is quite a pressing topic right now. Do you both know anyone within your scene who makes enough in music, not just playing but also producing or is that more of an exception?

O: It’s more common in Europe than in the Czech Republic. I know of people who can make a living like this, but it is a privilege perhaps. But it’s not as easy as it looks I guess, sometimes you just sit behind the computer for like 15 hours. I wouldn’t want it in any other way though.

L: It’s hard work, you have to think about it twice. I guess the biggest mistake I made in that regard was never moving to another country. If I had done that ten years ago I’m pretty sure I’d be doing music for a living today. I kind of naively believed that my generation would be the one to open the doors here, to go play festivals abroad and stuff. I’ve given it all. I’ve put the effort into releasing on big international labels and making a name for myself so that I could make a living by music afterwards. Which is pretty standard procedure for anyone from Germany, Holland, or the UK. And it usually works out within three or four years. It’s 15 years later and I’m in the corporate world. We still don’t have the infrastructure here for that process, for instance, for people to travel abroad. Or it’s only happening through a close connection to the country, maybe for Czech Centres or through Soundczech.

O: Exactly as you say.

L: I wanted to be booked mainly because of my music, not just because of the friendships or the fact that you’re trading gigs with someone, which is of course nice too. And it’s happening now, but I think if I had gone to Berlin those 10 years ago, it might have been different now. It’s like when I listen to American skaters who say that to become a pro they have to move to LA, that’s where all the companies and the hubs are. People say Berlin’s not worth it anymore and it’s at full capacity, but that’s not true. There are still people who work in affiliated media, they can write about you and it helps your work.

O: And there are also people from music businesses. When I played there the other day, a person from Ableton came up to me after the gig and said she wanted to see my MIDI mapping or something, and my Ableton crashed, so she gave me her email to send her the crash report and the next day she emailed what I did wrong haha… I’m not saying that this is exclusive to Berlin, but it’s more likely to happen there. For a while I regretted living in Berlin for a year and a half, it seemed like a waste of energy. But then I realised that it wasn’t like that at all, and on the contrary, it changed a lot how I view the music industry/scenes.

Oliver, you’re in Athens now, can you compare the local scene to the one in Prague and explain why you moved there? 

O: I need constant stimulation in my life, dopamines. My work is dependent on the space I’m in, I like to absorb the vibe and that transpires into my work. In Prague, I stopped having new or stimulating experiences in my day-to-day life. It’s also a bit too ethnically homogenous. In Athens I live in a much more diverse and unrestrained environment, so after I walk down the street I have much more energy to make things.

I don’t want to romanticise Athens too much, life here is hard for the locals, there is racism, the government is right wing, there is a lot of poverty, terrible police and many other problems. But coming back to the question – there isn’t a scene such as in Berlin or London for example, just people doing a lot of DIY things. I don’t really know how to explain what’s going on here – It’s more of a way of life than anything else.

N: When I was in Athens this September and I was chatting with people (mainly from the graffiti and art scene, not outright musicians), it seemed to me that there’s an enormous amount of interesting underground stuff happening, but there’s not a lot of institutional and financial support for it, or official places to run things.

O: Yes, but it also makes the scene more real. Some of the nicest shows I’ve seen or played here have been in squats and other aggressively political places. It’s rough here, when something happens, people go to the streets to fight the cops. And somehow that’s more fulfilling to me than meeting in a pub at six o’clock every day for a beer to complain and talk about others.

Láďa, and now a question for you – when you mentioned graffiti and your involvement in this community, it reminded me that a lot of electronic music collectives are nowadays connected with the street scene. I assume it comes mainly from the communality and subculturality, but how do you personally perceive this connection, has it influenced your music in any way? 

L: Definitely. It’s much more linked together now than it used to be. I remember the time when graffiti was strictly hip-hop, everyone listened to rap. At some point, after we started doing our first music events, I began to notice that there were a lot of writers coming in who maybe later on started listening to some electronica. It just started to mix organically, also because there was a more alternative branch of graffiti that wasn’t the true-school, such as people from various artistic fields. Before that, it was mainly people around Vladimír 518, and then suddenly there was the whole post-graffiti and artists from illustration, for example, who started to work with completely new graphic elements. And they also broke down various prejudices and established traditions, which brought a fresh wind.

Of course that was influential for the music. I feel like one of the benefits of painting is that it teaches you to think outside the box. Of course, you’re breaking the law, that’s one thing, but the other thing is that it’s an activity that’s excluded from all social and cultural structures. Graffiti operates completely outside the established framework, it has unwritten rules that are passed down from person to person. So in that way, maybe it shatters your comfortable position, and it can help you to look for more marginal things, even in the music. 

O: It seemed to me that you and Endless Illusion were one of the first to tie all this up. When I was 19, 20, and came to a house music party, its image didn’t make much sense to me, I didn’t feel it reflecting anything that was real, more like mirroring wealthy cities’ style. And suddenly there you were, the sound, the visuals, the way you looked, the whole body of work made total sense to me. The art was there as a complex thing, a system of several interacting links.

L: I’m glad to hear that. There are also some pretty fun details, such as that Vladimir has been doing graffiti videos since the 90s – Kick the Shit!, and I made a soundtrack for one or two of the episodes. When I was in Berlin years later, a quite famous DJ, Lola Lutz, caught me and said she loved the track selection. So even though this seemingly unrelated thing, you can influence something completely different. 

O: I think it’s mostly about being real. If you’re true to yourself – that perhaps transpires to the listener somehow. 

L: Yes, authenticity.

O: I guess whatever the sound sounds like, if you’re being true to yourself it’s probably gonna be good. If you make things which are “real”, then maybe other people who do real stuff somewhere else will catch on. And it’s so human, kind of back to basics – that’s what I like about it the most.

The upcoming edition of supersonixx will take place on November 25.
A limited amount of tickets is available in presale.