Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Location: AKC Metelkova, Menza pri koritu, Ljubljana
Interview date: December 5, 2012
This time I’m serving up a gorgeous, in-depth conversation with the Pegam brothers, co-founders of the legendary Brežice alternative army Demolition Group. Last year they recorded and released their electro-ambient debut SinnScapes. After several decades of sporadic, lesser-known work, it puts a little more creative nectar out there for listening beyond the Demolition Group dominion. As fate would have it, the audio recording of the interview session, which we first thought was lost, finally turned up after a year. A few days before the Slovenian eagles of superbly articulated sweet noise touch down again, we’re leaving the crossroads of the mainstream for the lesser-known side boulevards. Sinntetic Liquid is a totally relaxed trip into the unknown, and before last December’s gig at Menza the brothers gladly took time to talk about the multidimensional disconnect that has always been sparking in the Brežice collective thanks to a surplus of creative energy.
Rockline: We’re lucky you’ve given the Slovenian audience a peek into the alternative world of what some of you do in your »spare time« besides Demolition Group. Sinntetic Liquid delivers an exceptional level of quality, but it’s a soundscape that needs a bit of explaining. How did the two Pegam brothers come to pour their more synthetic electro ideas onto a record and offer it to the world?
Matjaž Pegam: Basically, Demolition Group was born out of a similar kind of electronic combinatorics. With Gast’r’bajters, in a period I won’t call the fading-out period, we switched from making noise organically to something synthetic. You could also say Gastrbajtrs started out with some electronics right at the beginning. The first record (Ni življenja brez ljubezni, 1983, ed. note) had plenty of electronic elements too, although the technology was different back then and so were our material means. Then what happened was that with Gast’r’bajtrs we went full circle toward a more organic band with a horn section, drums and other organic elements, and then came another switch. In the middle of all this search for our own voice we slid into a kind of factionalism and, in a way, started creating the seeds of new side bands. Practically every week some new project was kicking off. The main one, the first, was Demolition Group, then we had Del Masohistics, which was again a variant of something new, then we had Sinntetic Liquid, and I could go on. Each of these factions started living its own life. Demolition Group developed into a band, again spiced with some electronics and experimenting, and then it reformed into a rock band as you know it today, while the rest stayed on standby. Now and then we’d play a bit with it. I had a lot of material made and written, and at some point I decided it was time to pull it all together, so Joco and I more or less made it real and shaped it into songs.
Rockline: At first glance the record reminds me of fragments we already got with Deep True Love, and even more so with the second half of Neovangelij, where the official part was followed by tacked-on remixes and electronic collages. Is this a logical continuation and extension of that, and how long has the project actually been alive now (with interruptions)?
Matjaž: The association you made is interesting, and I hadn’t thought of it that way. With Deep True Love we just happened to meet Gregor Zemljič on some occasion and he did a remix of one song. That remix wasn’t the result of our conscious work on electronics, on these synthetic ambients like my brother and I did on Sinntetic Liquid, but the idea of Sintetic Liquid has been alive since ’85, ’86, ’87.
Jože Pegam: The idea goes back to when we broke up Gast’r’bajtrs. First one guy went off to the army, then another, and you couldn’t work with Gast’r’bajtrs since there was no drummer, bassist, guitarist … We made up for it back then like this: with samples.
Matjaž: The idea of Sinntetic Liquid was generated back then, but then it got pushed aside for a long time. I got back into it (this music, though not in the form it was released) four or five years ago, no earlier. That was also down to the fact that technology had taken a step forward in the meantime. In the last ten years making music got easier and the possibilities technology offered changed in leaps and bounds. At some point I started with a half-hardware setup and half AKAI samplers, MPCs, then moved on to a hybrid of computer, software, synths and the original gear, and finally, when I decided we’d release this, I created everything on the computer. It’s all totally synthetic, except the saxophone is organic, and even that is mangled beyond recognition in places.
Rockline: Listening to the record, you get the feeling it’s more about unspooling feelings, impressions that two people generate together on the fly. Was it a jam session, or was the composition set bar by bar?
Matjaž: My intimate idea was to create pure ambient music, even without songs, just a flow of washes. That’s why I named the record SinnScapes: a web of synthetic structures, soundscapes flowing into one another. But once we started working it over seriously, a set of songs ended up taking shape. I had (well, had, because it’s a bit out of date now) at least five times as much material made, and two or three times in a row, by negative selection, I cut out parts of songs or whole compositions, until I was left with those final 10 songs of five minutes each. That was the original idea. Of course it didn’t work out so that the ideal lengths and proportions fully succeeded in practice. Some songs are longer, others shorter. The forms, to go back to your question, were totally open. Logical transitions between one part and another did exist, but the final shape was set by the sax itself with its phrases and melodies.
Rockline: Given that the only organic part is entirely the saxophone, while the rest is synthetic and can be manipulated with a computer and electronic gadgets, how do you feel about it? Is it some kind of artistic schizophrenia everyone has planted in them? Do you find it easier to get into these seeds of totally free flow and complete freedom, or is it easier to function within a band, where it all has a common, consensual note of shared articulation and building?
Joco: With Sinntetic Liquid it was about a surplus charge. The music we made over Matjaž’s backing tracks went down on the first take. Matjaž set the frame, the form, then called me and said »Dude, come over! Got time?«, and we sat down and started working and recording. Everything went first take and the way we recorded it is how it stayed on the record. All the phrases just clicked, and there was no excessive overthinking about how and what to do. No deep debates along the lines of “here I’d like this and that.” We sat down and started working, and that’s what’s interesting to me: everything was recorded first take.
Matjaž: You have to be glad that Joco and I are sons of the same mother, so there was no need for adjusting. We’d talked about music a lot anyway, and that’s still the case. The process was, like Joco says, totally intuitively free. Maybe only two songs are the kind where we finished things off more, which you can feel on the record. Especially where the phrases are more pronounced, there was more interaction between Joco and me, or, to be precise, between Joco and the machine, or between Joco and the music. The other songs are the product of a purely intuitive flow, of Joco’s playing, which he did …
Joco: It just clicked!
Matjaž: When he heard the music from the speakers, he played his stuff exactly the way you can hear it on the record. In that context it’s flawless.
Joco: Mind you, no rehearsal!
Matjaž: In that context it’s a totally different concept of work than with a band, where the band as a whole is several individuals (more people, five or six), and that demands the music be generated differently. Someone brings an idea, another lays it down, a third adds verses … It’s a group jigsaw that demands personal interaction between members. Working with a computer was an interesting experience for me, because before the impulse to put something organic into the whole, which ended up being the sax, you’re on your own mental planet and basically depend exclusively on yourself. That’s OK on one hand, because you don’t have to make any compromises, you determine everything yourself. On the other hand there’s something missing too, because you’re alone and don’t get the creative input other band members otherwise contribute. We as rockers don’t know how to make music except in interaction with others, and here I had to set up interaction with myself.
Joco: Basically what you do here is sit down, take an instrument and start playing. And the results were beautiful in the end.
Matjaž: Very!
Rockline: The third member of this lineup could be the audience, so I’m wondering whether you’ve ever presented the project live, or whether there are plans for something like that in the future? Any tendencies toward a stage setup?
Matjaž: So far no, and I won’t say I’m not interested, although for the last two or three years that we’ve been working with Demolition Group, the band has demanded a lot of intensity and effort. Since I released Sinntetic Liquid I haven’t turned on the computer to make music, but I feel a desire growing and building in me to maybe start developing this toward a stage presentation too … But I also wanted to say: with DG we’ve produced a lot in the last year and a half. The record looks easy, but it was a project that took so much time, energy and a certain procedure to get there. Right now, putting Sinntetic Liquid on stage … I don’t know if we have time for something like that at the moment, because it has to be made interesting enough that it’s not just a Mac with Joco beside it …
Joco: (laughs) How would that look …
Matjaž: It’s kind of a show too, and if an audience comes, something like that has to be happening on stage to grab your interest and make people say: »Aha, OK, there’s something here!« It can’t be playback with someone playing sax along. I’d like to be on the mix, because that’s fun for me, but on stage I’d need two or three people to give the thing some shape.
Joco: I couldn’t replay everything I played now either, because I’d have to sit down and study it … (laughs)
Matjaž: You’d have to rip the songs, right? (laughs) Sure you would.
Joco: With great pain … (laughs)
Rockline: To close, Sinntetic Liquid has found its words. Might we get a follow-up soon? Maybe in the spring?
Joco: Spring is when cycling season starts, and since we torture ourselves with that together, I doubt it’ll happen then … (laughs)
Rockline: Mountain biking?
Matjaž: Occasionally mountain, but more road.
Rockline: A healthy mind in a healthy body …
Matjaž: We’re just at the age where you have to do something for your health … (laughs) Anyway, let’s get to the answer to your question. My pathological wish, which I didn’t manage to realize on the record, to make a purely ambient record, is still one of the options: no songs, the thing just flows, I make 50 minutes of music in one piece, it runs somewhere in the background and you can do whatever you like alongside it.
Rockline: Like Brian Eno?
Matjaž: I didn’t want to say that directly, but Brian Eno fascinates me, even though I find it extremely hard to listen to those ambient records of his.
Joco: You’ll find it easier listening to your own …
Matjaž: I don’t like listening to my own records, or it rarely happens … I don’t know if I’ve listened to Planet starcev even once, because this time I’ll get my fill at the concert. Same with the last live record. And I last listened to Sinntetic Liquid when I sat in my daughter’s car, turned it on, and she had this disc in. But sitting down, taking the disc in my hands and purposely listening? That doesn’t happen. I’d rather make records than listen to them.
Joco: It’s kind of like looking at yourself in the mirror every day …
Rockline: Well, don’t you?
Joco: Well, when I brush my teeth, yeah, but undress and stare in the mirror for an hour … (laughs)
Rockline: There has to be a little narcissist in this ego game, right? (laughs) It’s easier since you have your own label …
Matjaž: We had our own label already in the mid-eighties (cassettes back then), and we went so far that we printed records ourselves, recorded records ourselves and distributed them.
Joco: And imagine all that dubbing and those cassettes today … (laughs)
Rockline: That was real DIY!
Matjaž: We recorded, produced, printed the cassette labels, printed the posters ourselves …
Joco: Even pasted them up ourselves …
Matjaž: Mailed them around, so that was a creative and happy period. Back then we were called Opus Manum, and I read somewhere that we were actually running the first independent label in former Yugoslavia, or even in Eastern Europe, as one Serbian critic wrote, which is something special. There were no labels then. There was Jugoton, Helidon, ZKP wasn’t releasing records (it only started at the end of the eighties), and Jugodisk and RTB were all we had, so getting to a record was closer to science fiction. Today it’s more democratic and more in the domain of business and capital, and things flow more freely. But democratization has also led to stuff being made far more indiscriminately these days. That’s part of the times, though: the more people make and record records, the more they play, the better the production gets and the more choice and quality music there is.
Rockline: To wrap up, I’d ask for just the final touch and the classic: a message to the readers from your side …
Matjaž: Since I’m a practitioner, I don’t go in for any great intimacy. To the readers I’d say this: go to gigs, buy records, because that’s how you support bands so they keep producing new music and keep up the work they do from the heart and for you. That seems to me the key message, because that’s the only way rock’n’roll can survive!
Joco: I completely agree with my brother, since he wrapped it all up so nicely!
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