Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / Slovenia
Interview date: 17.06.2011
Stranci are a Slovenian alt-rock band who released their second studio album “Kirjetukinor?” two years ago. Besides a genuinely, arrogantly cocky rock n’ roll punch, it also delivers real substance, and the moments of arranging brilliance on it show that Stranci are a quartet with serious musical mileage who know exactly what they want. Here’s our chat with the band’s singer Peter Schmidt and drummer Dare Gozdnikar.
RockLine: A solid four years passed between your debut and the new record “Kirjetukinor?”.
Pero: Yep. When it comes to writing material, we’re never in a hurry. When we create, we want the ideas to come on their own. We don’t want to force something that wouldn’t feel like it comes from us. We never set ourselves deadlines. In those four years we also changed bassists, and the recording phase was long too. We reworked the sound over and over until we were completely happy with it. In the last year before the release, we hopped between three studios before we got the thing finished.
Dare: We recorded from the summer of 2008, and the release was ready in November 2009.
RockLine: You really got noticed at the end of 2008, when the song Rdeča raketa showed up on the Val 202 compilation “Imamo dobro glasbo”.
Dare: We applied to the open call, filled in all the forms as required, and the jury picked us. That’s it. It was the first Val 202 compilation, with a really nice selection of bands.
Pero: Rdeča raketa was later recorded again with the Kombinat choir, and that’s the version we put on the record. At the end of the LP we also added an edited radio version as a bonus track. It’s the same version of the song that’s on the Val 202 compilation.
Dare: We thought the idea of working with the Kombinat choir was a great fit. A punchy text drawn from the verses of Srečko Kosovel, together with a choir, works really well. We’ve known the women in the choir for ages, so working with them was honestly the most natural thing for us.
RockLine: If you roughly cram today’s Slovenian alternative rock into one basket, your album is one of those that stand out from the average tide of alt-rock releases, where you have to fish out the pearls. It offers realness, tangibility and rich messages, a real arranging intelligence that actually touches the listener and shakes them up. It cleverly combines moments of goofing around with the dirty directness of rock n’ roll. You can feel a mature band behind all this, one that knows what it wants to achieve. Can you each describe the road Stranci took to this point? To the release of “Kirjetukinor?”
Pero: Guitarist Matjaž and I have worked together for a very long time. He came in as the bassist of Baby Zdravo, and after we fell apart, he invited me into the band Lokalne pizde, where I played drums. In the meantime Matjaž released an album of his own project, which was called Stranci. Later he decided to try bringing the music to the stage, so he needed musicians, and that’s when Dare and Matjaž got in touch…
Dare: Yep. In the Salamonov oglasnik classifieds I spotted an ad saying they were looking for a drummer. I’d just moved from Ljubljana to Celje at the time. I’d started feeling the urge again to get actively involved with drums in a band, and that was that.
Pero: Matjaž gathered us from all corners and we started working through his material. It was his material. Everything. Music and lyrics. That’s how the first record came about. With this record, “Kirjetukinor?”, Stranci presented themselves for the first time as co-authors of the material and of a record we made together, as a band. That’s probably why it feels more direct and punchy. It’s also true that, with the exception of our bassist, who’s half my age, we’re all people with some mileage, and we’ve all got quite a few good and bad experiences behind us, successful and failed projects and so on… We approach Stranci honestly and with our whole soul. In this band we operate completely unburdened. It’s about release and enjoyment, not chasing fame and fortune. That’s what binds us, and I have to admit we’re a really great crew.
Dare: Honesty comes first, it’s the only thing that counts. No pretending has any business in Stranci. There’s no joking around here. Well, if I’m exaggerating, there is, but it has to be serious goofing around, like “let’s mess around, but seriously!”
RockLine: That’s one of the basic axioms of a healthy rock n’ roll message. Let me ask a question in the style of a “teenage fan”. Where did the name Stranci come from?
Dare: Okay, I’ll answer with a stereotypically xenophobic example. It happened that when we were negotiating a gig at some venue, negotiating and negotiating, we never got the show, because we have lyrics in Serbo-Croatian too. So that ex-Yu thing, translated into the Slovenian version, and on top of that the band is called Stranci, they decided against it and the deal didn’t go through. Why not Multiball, why not Siddharta? Those names are even more banal and even more detached from the geography of this region, which used to be one shared Yugoslavia. It seems to me there’s some instilled phobia behind this question.
RockLine: I’ll admit it. When I picked up the album and read the band’s name, I told myself it was going to be yet another round of the millionth lemonade in the style of Zakonišče crooning and similar whining, and then the album totally knocked my socks off, especially in terms of mature arrangements….
Dare: Nice of you to admit it yourself. Today that’s a real problem. What counts first is outward image and the band’s name. The question is how many people even put the music first these days.
Pero: When our name “carried on”, meaning when what started as a modestly conceived project actually took hold, the name picked up a whole bunch of additional meanings. Even though it’s basically a Serbian and Croatian word, in Slovenian you’re always somewhere “off to the side”, “on the margins”, you’re marginal. Later we came up with the spin-off “Stranci – stari znanci” (old acquaintances), which is typical of Slovenianness, of the character of our nation.
Dare: Then our bassist started writing “Stran-poti” (side paths) on his blog too. We did have an idea to rename ourselves from “Stranci” to “Starci” (old geezers) for our tenth anniversary. It was a serious idea, but we figured it would drag too much along with it, too much extra work….
Pero: I think the name Stranci is a great pick, since it keeps a little bit of provocation going all the time. Loads of English bands have English names that make no sense whatsoever, and nobody ever bothers them about it.
Dare: Absolutely agree. Every time we say the word Stranci, everybody stumbles over it, and the question of where the name comes from is becoming more and more of a fun experience for us.
RockLine: You recently shot a video for the song Veliki črni bik. It’s an excellent piece of film animation. Can you tell us the story behind it and why you went this way?
Dare: The whole thing is taken from the first Slovenian feature-length cartoon. It was drawn by Zvonko Čoh and Milan Erič, and it’s called “Socializacija bika”. We asked both authors, with a pinch of awe, whether we could borrow the motifs, given that it’s their own work that they spent a solid 10 years making. It came out in 1998, which means they started drawing in 1988. The lyrics for the song were written by the poet Tomislav Vrečar. The track was released on the compilation “Rokerji pojejo pesnike ’06”. We got all the permissions, and also from the guy who adapted all of it. That was Marko Radosavljevič, and he put it all together. A completely new story came out of it, turned upside down.
Pero: The story in the cartoon is totally different from the one in the video. Marko did a great job picking out certain inserts and sequences from the cartoon and stitching them together so that a completely different story emerged. And we’ve been hugely into this bull from the start, considering how it’s animated.
Dare: It’s also the kind of video that breaks from the general Slovenian “democracy” of making videos, where you get footage of the band playing the song plus some girl who has “something going on” in the shots. The idea was for the band to be seen as little as possible, and we minimized it so far that we cut the band out of the video entirely and ended up with pure animation.
RockLine: How does the Slovenian audience respond to Stranci, especially since the release of “Kirjetukinor?”
Dare: Well, the question is whether we can even talk about an audience. We’ve got a loyal bunch of people who come to our gigs regularly, and that’s about it. That said, the reactions to the new album are mostly very, very good and positive.
RockLine: How do you two see Slovenian rock culture and the general state of things in 2012? Is that space still open and understandable in these new times? How do you two feel it?
Pero: You know how it is… as far as I’m concerned, that space is still too open. Today everyone is bombarded with such a volume of information that it’s really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. The live offer has also gotten so wide that there’s too much of everything, and people don’t even show much interest in going to gigs. It’s like people are a bit saturated with everything, and at the same time that makes it even harder for them to choose among so much information.
Dare: The other side is that a lot of things are artificially inflated, with labels and media behind them. On the radio, for example, you’ve got “power play” lists that labels pay for, and they decide which music gets played. Labels even pay music magazines to push certain bands.
Pero: It’s pure manipulation. The radio people say: “Yeah, we play what people listen to!” Wrong. It’s the other way around. “People listen to what we play!” They have no other choice. Sometimes on commercial stations you hear the same song five times a day. It’s much harder to squeeze in today than it was even a few years ago. All those new bands, alternative, new wave, punks, all the new bands with an innate knack for presenting their own original ideas, you used to be able to see and discover them on TV shows. Today that’s much harder. But we do have excellent bands in Slovenia. So we can’t say there’s nothing in Slovenia worth listening to. It’s just that people don’t get to, or have a much harder time getting to, bands with real substance than they once did.
RockLine: Miro Mutvar and his show “Ljubljanska rock fronta” on Radio Ljubljana is, for instance, another such unconquered independent island of resistance and unwavering faith in rock.
Pero: Miro Mutvar and his show are honestly a bright star.
Dare: Yes. We’ve guested on his show. Last time, on his birthday, we called him on air and wished him a happy birthday. And even on the national broadcaster you can still find something smart, like Val 202 with the shows “Na sceni” and “Na Pediestal”. So basically, we’d like to play to a full house too, so in that sense we think commercially. But the first thing is the love of making music, what we put into Stranci is for our own soul and enjoyment. At one gig, a girl came up to us afterwards and said: “You’re the best band in the world for me!” Personally, that means the most to me.
RockLine: What’s the live interaction like between the Slovenian audience and the band?
Dare: The farther we get from the centralized part of the country, meaning the farther we are from Ljubljana, the better it goes for us. In Ljubljana it’s honestly harder for us to land a gig these days than anywhere else in Slovenia. Venue owners and promoters contact us, then they haggle over 150,00€, 200,00€, and in the end you even hear: “Well, I could give you something for travel costs…”. What the hell, why do they even contact us then? There’s no respectful attitude toward bands in this regard today. And the farther you move from Ljubljana toward the outskirts, the better it is, because outside Ljubljana you can still feel an attitude of respect, of authenticity.
Pero: There’s a difference in the audience response too. You play, say, in Cerkno, and then in Ljubljana. A totally different interaction.
Dare: We’ve seen it all. From nobody in the crowd even clapping during the gig, so you could hear a pin drop in the hall, to people not letting us off the stage for more than half an hour after the show. It’s happened that too few people showed up and the organizers sent us home. We’d been hanging around the venue since five in the afternoon, had a sound check, waited until midnight, asked if we could play, and the organizer said: “No no, just go home”. We even got 30,00€. An exceptional gesture. Not just for us, but for the entire Slovenian rock culture (said with a touch of sarcasm, ed. note.).
RockLine: A cliché. What are your plans for the future?
Pero: Enjoying ourselves. The first thing is that we’re here for our own enjoyment. Otherwise, we’re going into the studio in the fall, 8 new songs are ready. It’s all set up. We know what we’ll record and who we’ll record with, we just have to pin down the timeframes. There are collaborations planned on the album again, but those will happen spontaneously, so I can’t announce any guests yet.
Dare: The plan is to release the new album in May of next year and mark the tenth anniversary of our existence with it.
RockLine: Can you already hint at any differences in expression and sound compared to “Kirjetukinor?”
Pero: Hmmm, that’s not so easy. The new song Veliki črni bik roughly shows where we’re headed. This song sounds a little different from the songs on “Kirjetukinor?”, and I can say the new album will be more diverse, a lot more colorful than its predecessor.
RockLine: Since you mention diversity. There are four of you in the band. Character-wise, are you on the same page in musical taste, or do your tastes differ?
Pero: We’re four very different musicians. Everyone listens to completely different stuff, everyone’s perched in their own corner of this rock universe. But when we get together, nobody gets hung up on those differences…
Dare:… and when we finish playing together, we say to each other: “So who’s going to listen to this now!?” ha, ha, ha,….
Rockline: Do you have any young Slovenian bands in mind that deserve attention for their original ideas?
Dare: Personally I’d like to single out Mr. Vontone, whom I heard recently, then there’s Last Day Here, who are very interesting and keep widening their musical horizons. Among the older ones, I’d also mention our longtime friends Shyam. We respect them a lot.
Pero: This new indie rock scene is interesting too, for example We Can’t Sleep At Night and Arčibald Arčibald.
photos: Nina Grad
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