Location: Rock Cafe / Postojna / Slovenia
Interview date: 21.01.2010
If the English have Blackfoot, we Slovenes have Bwase nwge! Bwase nwge are a band from Ilirska Bistrica. The quartet is made up of Gorazd Brne (guitar), Janez Rutar (bass), Marjan Mrčnik (drums), and Nevijo Kmetec (vocals). The lineup has been around for about two and a half years and loves to play garage-wrapped rock n’ roll, the kind that tends to attract adjectives like stripped-down, direct, snappy, yet melodic, despite its alternative leanings. After winning the fourth concert of the Epic RockLine Contest series, co-organized by the Ljubljana-based music lovers’ association RockArena and Rock Cafe from Postojna, the guys were in seriously good spirits. If nothing else, they earned themselves another gig in the semifinal of the contest.
RockLine: What drove you to enter this contest?
Gorazd: We were surfing the internet a bit and totally out of the blue stumbled on the call for entries. It read interesting enough, so we grabbed the chance to play.
RockLine: You’re from Ilirska Bistrica. What’s the rock scene like there? I’m guessing you’re not the only rock band from there, are you?
Gorazd: Just the year before last we started organizing a festival of Bistrica bands in Ilirska Bistrica. We got into organizing it as the main players precisely because all of a sudden a whole bunch of bands popped up in the area our band comes from. So the interest grew in having an event where these bands could show themselves to people on a stage. And so we had nine bands at the festival already in the first year. The event was a success, we committed to the tradition, promised to organize another one, and last year the number of performers went up, with 13 bands playing.
RockLine: Can you tell us a bit about how the band got started? How did you find each other, and what inspires you most, whether you’re at rehearsals or on stage?
Gorazd: All of us in this band grew up together in the Bistrica club MKNŽ (Mladinski klub Nade Žagar ed. note) We hung out there and went to concerts by loads of good bands. With some earlier members, we already had a band together called Trabakula. Trabakula means an Istrian boat with two masts. The band lasted about two years. At the start it was me and our former bassist Tea Jelen. Drummer Janez Rutar joined us, and that’s how the first lineup of Bwase nwge was born. Nevijo joined this trio and the instrumental lineup finally got its “word”. Tea left us, Janez jumped from the drums over to bass, and a buddy from the Trabakula days, Marjan Mrčnik, came back to take the drum seat. Most of Bwase nwage today are former Trabakula members.
RockLine: How do you make your music? Do you take cues from some other band, or do the ideas just fly out of you spontaneously and then you build a song around them?
Gorazd: I can’t really tell you much about influences. They’re surely there, but that’s for the audience to judge when they come to our shows. If they are there, they’re totally unintentional. We try to create our own original music and to be innovative about it.
RockLine: How do you build a song? Who kicks things off?
Gorazd: Usually I come in with a riff, but we can’t forget Tea Jelen either, who contributed a lot of ideas for songs. Then comes the buildup in the studio, based on the chemistry in the band.
Nevijo: Basically, they record some idea. I get the recording and then I write lyrics to the music. Of course, it has to fit the musical idea in a musical sense.
Gorazd: That’s how it goes. First we make a raw instrumental. Then come the lyrics, so the vocals. Once that’s done, we agree on some extra arrangements to liven up the basic structure of the songs.
RockLine: Have you ever thought about beefing up the stage show in the future, making the whole thing live even more dynamic or dramatic, or are you happy as is? I don’t know, just kidding around… Nevijo, would you throw on a Native American feather headdress, or something like that?
Nevijo: Yes. That’s always welcome. Back in Trabakula I used hats, straw hats, we glued on mustaches.
RockLine: Marjan, how does it feel with your new “employer”?
Marjan: I joined the band two months ago and this is my first gig with Bwase nwge. I won’t tell you anything deep. I locked myself in the rehearsal room and learned the songs as fast as I could.
RockLine: Are the guys happy with you? Let that beard grow a bit more and you’ll look like Nick Oliveri from Queens Of The Stone Age.
Marjan: Well, that’s how it is. It’s still growing down below, but up top it’s all fallen out already, ha, ha, ha…
Gorazd: Anyway, we’ve got a lot of material left over from before. It just needs a bit more work. Those raw song ideas.
RockLine: So is there already enough material for your debut album?
Gorazd: Yes. Enough for an album. Besides wanting to put out an album as soon as possible, we also want as many chances to play live as we can get. And now things have really opened up for us. We’ve just landed a gig in Koper, in early March. We’re playing there with another Bistrica band called Diego. That’s 05.03.2010. In mid-February we play in Ljubljana.
text edited by: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Martin Prezelj
Photo Gallery
