Location: Orto bar / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Interview date: November 26, 2008
Morso are a fairly young band from Rijeka, Croatia, that grew out of Tha B Inside. These are musicians with plenty of experience and know-how. Their guitarist Matej Zec, for instance, is a regular member of one of Croatia’s leading bands, Let3. The music Morso make is a really interesting synthesis of the “retro eighties” rock treasure trove of “new wave pop” and “post punk rock” sounds, into which the band weaves the contemporary sounds of “indie” rockers like Interpol or Editors. On top of that, Morso add a dash of artsiness that you can feel at every turn of their music. They’re perfectionists who, besides crafting the music, also take care that their stage costumes match when they hit the concert stage.
The band recently released their studio debut “Izlog” (RockLine review HERE) on the Dallas label. That’s how Morso (together with the band Vatra) landed a promo show for the “Izlog” album at Ljubljana’s Orto bar. Before the gig, over a beer (because it just doesn’t work without one), we sat down to chat with the singer and main visionary of the band, Stanislav Grdaković.
RockLine: Is tonight your first time playing in Slovenia?
Stanislav: As Morso, yes. Before that we had Tha B Inside, and we played in Slovenia a few times with that band, including at Orto Bar. But tonight is the first time we’re playing here as Morso and with this lineup.
RockLine: And how does it feel to be back on stage here in Slovenia tonight?
Stanislav: It feels different everywhere. It’s hard to explain. Really, it’s the vibe and the feeling that are set by the people, the audience that comes to our shows. It even happens that you play twice in a row at the same place, and the feeling you get from those two gigs can be completely different.
RockLine: Your debut “Izlog” is a special record.
Stanislav: If that’s how it comes across, it means a lot to us.
RockLine: Truly. Did you polish the material for the album for a long time? How old is the material, or rather, how long did it ripen before you recorded it?
Stanislav: The material is three years old. We were a bit late. It was really complicated to put this kind of music together with two vocalists. That gave us a lot of trouble, I mean the vocal arrangements themselves. The songs were actually ready within half a year, but we weren’t completely happy with some of the arrangements, so the whole thing dragged on, because we had to record them again.
RockLine: I’m asking because, for a studio debut, this record seems like a real phenomenon, both in terms of production and in terms of musical expression. It’s recognizable, it’s its own thing.
Stanislav: If that’s how it sounds to you, then that’s great. That’s why the recording took so long. We were really chasing the most perfect sound possible.
RockLine: Especially the atmosphere that rules the album, with those programmed sound loops added in the background.
Stanislav: Yeah, yeah, yeah… Electronics and rock! If that’s how you took it, that’s awesome. That was the goal of our record.
RockLine: There are seven of you in the band. Is it hard to stay on the same page, do you ever get into fights?
Stanislav: Over stupid stuff. Like who cheated who out of a slice of pizza at the “catering” and the like. Total silliness. Unimportant things. Not worth mentioning.
RockLine: Where do you get your inspiration for writing music?
Stanislav: Inspiration comes from life, from hanging out with people, from all kinds of interactions in everyday life. A lot of those feelings come together and then it just “clicks”.
RockLine: Listening to your album “Izlog” feels like spinning the new wave of the Rijeka rock scene, for the new millennium.
Stanislav: We took something old and added something modern. Sounding like Rijeka is a compliment for us. The bands that come from Rijeka, I’m thinking of the older ones, are a kind of role model for us. We all in the band listened to that music the most and also saw it live the most, because it was right there at home. If we managed to sound modern but Rijeka at the same time, that’s really good for us. The fact is that Rijeka has a lot of bands, and that’s already a tradition. But what’s interesting is that bands show up in waves. Right now Rijeka is in a wave again, so at the moment there are surely 20 great bands on the scene. Six or seven years ago there weren’t nearly so many. The current situation is really wonderful. Genre-wise, too, the picture is very colorful when it comes to these Rijeka bands. And every band that takes on a genre and stands behind it with its own vision really sounds convincing in its expression, so right now we can boast 10 or 15 truly excellent bands working in Rijeka.
RockLine: Among them, for example, is Father…
Stanislav: Father are at the top when it comes to modern metal, then there’s Pasi, who are excellent, when it comes to punk, and Mandrili in rock funk, … I’d rather not list any more, so I don’t forget someone and do them an injustice. Each of these bands is very solid and very high quality in its own genre.
RockLine: And now there will be more gigs in Rijeka too. They say the Palach hall is up and running again.
Stanislav: Palach actually reopened some time ago, but they weren’t allowed to organize concerts in the hall. And this coming weekend (November 29 and 30, 2008, ed. note.), Palach will come back to life as a concert venue. The No. 1 place for putting on concerts in Rijeka is still the Stereo hall. That’s still where you can organize the best-quality concerts in Rijeka. Well, Palach will catch up in time too. A completely new crew has taken over running the hall.
RockLine: Do you have any more gigs confirmed for Morso? What are the other plans for the band?
Stanislav: Since this September we’ve played about 15 concerts in Croatia. That’s quite a lot for us, because we hadn’t played together much before that. Right now we’re also working on recording a video. We’re playing in Rijeka for New Year’s, and we already have five more shows lined up. Otherwise, I hope that in the short term we’ll play as much as possible and successfully present our studio debut “Izlog”.
RockLine: Who writes the lyrics in the band?
Stanislav: I write the lyrics for the most part. I prepare a kind of sketch and present it to Ivana (Ivana Bartolović is the singer of Morso, ed. note.). We talk through what we like and what we don’t, then I cut certain things out, leave them out, adjust them. Then the keyboardist joins us, because he has the sharpest sense in the band for fitting the lyrics to the melody. He adds certain thirds and fourths, I mean in terms of arranging, does additional corrections and takes the whole thing up a level.
RockLine: Those lyrics are extremely interesting to me. They feel retro eighties. Back then people liked to write lyrics that were deliberately minimalist and so often came across, if I may be a bit unfair to the artists, as deliberately “illogical”…
Stanislav: Our lyrics are very complex. We’ve gotten quite a bit of criticism from people over this, because they didn’t understand them.
RockLine: But that’s the essence of artsiness.
Stanislav: Artsiness is our goal. We write lyrics so that absolutely anyone listening to our music can find a piece of themselves in them. So the lyrics let them sail off into their own world with our music and use it to find parallels in their own life and in how they see their surroundings and themselves. So a line that we put together can mean many things at once. That’s why it’s up to people to take from those lines what belongs to them. To each their own.
RockLine: You in Morso have this art component in your character, which you can feel in the lyrics too.
Stanislav: Art incorporated into pop.
RockLine: It comes across as extremely appealing and distinctly your own.
Stanislav: What you’re saying is interesting, because not long ago we were the target of lots of “mainstream” criticism. Exactly what you’re praising was what the critics held against us, and that’s why they tried to hold us back. The easiest thing for us would be to churn out those 10 worn-out phrases in our chorus lyrics too, like most bands do, and everyone would be satisfied. But that’s not interesting to us.
RockLine: So the main thing is to follow your own feelings, your own perceptions….
Stanislav: Yes. We have our own ideas and our own vision, and we follow it.
RockLine: What can we expect from tonight’s Morso show here at Orto bar?
Stanislav: We got 40 minutes for the set. The album “Izlog” is a bit longer, so we’ll have to skip two songs from it, but otherwise we’ll play practically nothing but material from the debut.
RockLine: Have you given any thought to how seven people will squeeze onto this smaller stage here at Orto bar tonight?
Stanislav: Honestly, that’s always a pain for our band, wherever we play. But we’ve adapted already. We have a kind of scheme we use to sort it out. The two guys in the band who handle the sample programming, we “push” to the edges of the stage and then it somehow works, ha, ha, ha….
You can read the report from Morso’s launch show for their studio debut “Izlog” at Ljubljana’s Orto bar (together with Zagreb’s Vatra), held on November 26, 2008, HERE.
photos (Morso concert, Ljubljana, Orto bar, November 26, 2008): Aleš Podbrežnik
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