A few days ago I pulled my books off Amazon in solidarity with my new publisher’s anti-Amazon campaign, which you can read about – and possibly contribute to – on GoFundMe. Tilting at windmills? Possibly, but I believe it is still a good cause, and all the reasons for it are explained in the River Boat Books Anti-Amazon Statement, so no need to repeat them here.

For me personally, the decision to join the boycott was not particularly difficult: after all, Amazon has single-handedly destroyed bookstores and publishers all over the world as well as literature in itself, or at least completely polluted its e-book segment: rabidly profit-driven, it has ensured the global domination of an endless deluge of cloned (pseudo-)fantasy, (quasi-)sci-fi and romance scribblings of the pulpiest kind, as everything that doesn’t get consumed instantly by vast numbers of readers – thanks to aggressive (and expensive) advertising, paid reviews, marketing tricks and schemes, etc. – is sentenced to instant oblivion, ensured by algorithms that keep pushing only what sells best and burying everything else under mile-deep piles of dregs. While that is perfectly understandable and completely unsurprising in the world ruled (and ruined) by rampant capitalism of the worst kind, it is also exactly what I so frequently rant against in my own novels. Therefore I had already felt like a hypocrite for selling (or, rather, attempting to sell) my books through such a malignant transnational corporation even before my publisher, River Boat Books, initiated their openly anti-Amazon campaign.

However, the last and most hilarious straw for me was that some time ago, Amazon arbitrarily and with no explanation or warning at all categorised my debut novel Cynicism Management as erotica – probably because some tender soul, possibly belonging to some terminally-embittered housewife, complained about the couple of rather explicit sex scenes that the novel indeed contains. Fine, so in Amazon’s opinion, any book containing a (semi)vivid description of anything carnal automatically means that the book is porn. Classifying my novel as “erotica” might not even have been so detrimental if it, in fact, was erotica… But, as it happens, it is actually a sci-fi satire with elements of cyberpunk, and the cover displays a cyborg cockroach. I doubt that anyone in their right mind would find that particularly sexy, and the actual sex scenes in the novel probably take up about five to maybe ten pages out of approximately 450. I dread the potential review by anyone who’d buy this thinking that it truly is erotica, but (fortunately?) the book had been concealed under a million of books about witches, fairies, werewolves, and sexy vampires already before this fiasco, so it hasn’t seen any sales whatsoever for ages, anyway.

So, yeah: obviously, my decision to pull my novels off Amazon would have certainly been harder had they actually been selling… But since they had already been largely ignored and increasingly “undiscoverable” with each passing day (as they sank deeper and deeper into the bottomless abyss littered with hundreds of thousands of long-forgotten e-books), this boycott is, I admit, no skin off my back. That much is true. Nevertheless, I’d hate to subscribe to my publisher’s “manifesto” and then do the exact opposite behind their back, so I hope this decision still counts as a valid expression of solidarity.

It now appears that the “slight possibility that my first novel might soon(ish) get released on paper, as an actual, tangible, physical book” that I mentioned in my previous (longwinded, as usual) post will become a fact after all. Here’s an inspirational quote for this occasion:

The whole jeremiad that is Cynicism Management (the novel) is going to be published by River Boat Books this summer – where else than on the banks of the Mississippi River. Hell, maybe NOW the devil I keep looking for might appear to me at those fabled crossroads after all, so that I can finally sign the infernal contract…?

The last time I had a good look at my two websites after one of them had been hacked (my fault, I haven’t been updating them promptly enough), I was shocked to realise that it’s been a year and a half since I’ve posted anything here (or on the other site). This wasn’t intentional or planned – it’s just that real life took precedence over all of my “less crucial” interests (which, unfortunately, included all of my ongoing musical and literary pursuits). Due to my relocation from Berlin to the Canary Islands and all of the issues this has involved, what I had once almost thought of as a “calling” of sorts was swiftly downgraded to “hobbies” as soon as reality kicked in. I spent many months fretting over this, especially as the third full-length Cynicism Management album (which had been almost finished by that time) and my related third novel (also well on its way to completion) had screeched to a painful stop. I had no choice but to gradually get to terms with the unplanned hiatus and stop nagging at myself: I figured that music and writing would once again become more important to me once I settled down properly.

The problem is this little adverb, “properly”. While I did set up a small improvised studio in the flat as soon as the renovations had been completed to at least some degree, this did not happen until about a year into the move. There was simply too much to do around the apartment first. However, the improvised excuse for a studio was such a bummer after the relative luxury I had enjoyed in Berlin (where I had been renting a decently-sized room in a highly secure building dedicated solely to rehearsal rooms and studios, and where I had all my instruments including drums and microphones set up and ready to go at all times) that I was simply unable to muster the energy and motivation required to work on anything very seriously. To avoid inevitable frustration with the abysmal acoustics of my temporary workspace, the inability to mix anything at a reasonable volume without headphones, etc., I restricted myself to mere “tinkering”.

Currently I am still at the “tinkering” stage, but at least I can see the light at the end of this particular tunnel now: after many failed attempts to set up a studio elsewhere (rent a basement or a garage somewhere or whatever), my wife and I are now once again resolved to simply build a room in the abandoned basement of our apartment building (a failed attempt at a car garage, don’t even ask) – in spite of some pushback from the neighbours who, obviously, dread the prospect of having someone banging on the drums down there. I’ll clearly have to invest in some serious sound insulation – but that is self-evident, anyway. The place where walls should come up eventually currently looks like this:

The very decision to start cleaning out the mess from the basement and start transforming a section of it into something useful – the place (currently used for nothing but dirt storage) is huge and I only need the part that theoretically goes with our flat – seemed to reanimate at least some of my unfinished projects and bring them back from deep hibernation.

While I still can’t record properly, I’ve decided to finally exhume the material for the potential 10th-anniversary reissue of Tit, the first Cynicism Management album. So I started reworking the songs that are almost a decade old by now (unbelievable…), simply because I still love them and I’d like to finally make them sound as they should have sounded a decade ago. I am not talking about a “remix” or a “remaster” or some “deluxe” version of the album, as is usually the case, but rather about a complete reworking of the songs complete with drum replacement. As it happened, ten years ago, when we were making the original Tit, I was unable to record acoustic drums the way I wanted to… But I managed to record them a few years later, while I had unprecedented access to a suitably-equipped studio. I have stored the recordings carefully ever since precisely for this possibility.

On the other hand, I have also started mixing the upcoming Dog Days album and preparing the material for the last missing ingredient: the vocals, which Monika, the Cynicism Management vocalist upon whom all of the new songs hinge heavily, can record as soon as our real studio is eventually up and running.

On the literary front, Dog Days, my third novel, remains at a standstill (yes, it carries the same title as the album, as the text will contain or refer to audio tracks once again, just like Cynicism Management and Pendulum Pet).

However, my good friend, the US American writer Rick Harsch, has recently invited me to take part in the creation of his next novel “The Assassination of Olof Palme“, which will include contributions from many other writers. The book will be published by River Boat Books and is slated for the summer of 2020. We shall see how the project turns out, but the very prospect of being able to participate in such a nutty undertaking has been enough to make me write again. I must say I like it immensely – especially as I’ll be able to associate and link this work with my own third novel as well as the fourth one (if I ever manage to finish either at all). Ideas abound, but now for the hard part: to make them a reality.

Speaking of literary endeavours… There is now a slight possibility that my first novel might soon(ish) get released on paper, as an actual, tangible, physical book. While I will not reveal anything else until I am sure of it, one of the “byproducts” of the preparations for the potential “paper version” includes the release of a new updated electronic version of my debut novel on Kobo and other e-book platforms. The most recent proofreading/editing run was done by Rick’s friend Larry Riley, who did a fantastic job finding a heap of leftover typos and suggested a ton of much-needed improvements. So even if the book ultimately does not get published on paper, I am profoundly thankful for Larry’s insight – he has contributed a lot to a much-improved electronic version of the novel.

Apart from that, I’ve finally decided to release the three “main” albums by SUR, one of my former bands that would now be 18 years old if it still existed, on the current streaming platforms shortly. While I haven’t seen any reason to do it in the past (as nobody gives much of a damn about such an exhumation), nowadays I don’t see any reason not to do it. These albums will by no means be remastered or remixed or whatever. They will simply be reissued, in their original form, on the new platforms – solely for the sake of making them available to all three potential listeners that may still remember this band at all… But, more importantly, to ensure their continued existence in the form that people, especially the former SUR band members, can actually use. Indeed, we’ve come to the point where CDs have become terminally obsolete. What will I ever do with those boxes full of ’em now that I don’t even own a CD player anymore…?

That’s about it. I probably won’t disappear for a year again after this post, though, because I’ll be releasing Touring My Backyard, the first “augmentation” from the Tit album that I am reworking, as soon as I’m done reconstructing it. Working on that has been all sorts of annoying, I admit… But it certainly brings back memories!

The last bit of “music-related work” I’d had the pleasure of participating in before I packed up my equipment and moved from Berlin had been a field audio recording for the video by Enzo Deiv Caterino (cello) and Orazio Ferrari (double bass), performing excerpts from “Youth”, Enzo’s composition for cello & double bass. The video, announcing a new album that is to be recorded next year, has now been released.

Although we kept complications to the minimum (the duet was only recorded with two overhead mics), I’m happy with the result. The video was directed and shot by Giulio Tarantino, and edited by Sacra Cesana.

My musical endeavours are currently, and until further notice, on hiatus, as in the middle of June the studio in its entirety ended up in boxes and cases:

A few weeks after all the gear had been placed on a truck and then a transport ship container, accompanied with my desperate petitions to the unforgiving universe that it refrain from making someone drop a particularly precious piece of equipment or causing any sort of disaster, everything made it to its destination in one piece:

Now I’ll just have to deal with the trifling matter of finding a suitable place for it all, and then I’ll be able to resume my fabulous career as a studio rat. Hopefully that happens before I’m too old to move on my own, let alone lug all of these damn boxes around…

I’ve recently had the pleasure of doing a field audio recording for the video of Orazio Ferrari (double bass) and Giuseppe Guarrera (piano), performing “Le Cygne” by Camille Saint-Saëns. Even though we kept complications to the minimum (the duet was only recorded with two overhead mics), I’m very happy with the result. The video was directed, shot and edited by Giulio Tarantino.

As I’ve recently exhumed the musical archives of the two bands I worked with back in the 1990s, Ground Zero and Juice Connection (described in more detail here and here, respectively), I decided to also come up with a short “retrospective” of the band we founded at the beginning of the 2000s, SUR.

The group SUR started to take shape at the end of 2001, when Stojan Kralj and I were writing music for the dance theatre performance Lust by Sebastjan Starič:

Together with lyricist, dramatist, theatre actor and former Ground Zero vocalist Marko Djukić we got an idea for a more “poppy”, “trip-hoppy” project with (preferably) a female vocalist. The idea gradually came to life. As it soon turned out that the collaboration between lyricist Djukić and the first vocalist, Urška Samec, would unavoidably be severely impeded due to insurmountable creative differences, Neža Trobec joined the band and we started tinkering away. Initially, SUR was exclusively a studio project with a few full members and several guest musicians. The material was recorded in our home studio, and in May 2004 we self-published our first (and quite successful, relatively speaking) album, entitled “Na jug” (Southbound):

In 2005 we started working on our second album, “Druga stran” (The Other Side), which was released in July 2007:

Both of these albums also saw the light of day in a “tangible” form, as CDs.

In 2009 we released a digital EP called “Kadar mesto spi” (When the City Sleeps):

This was in fact an “unintended” release, motivated by a successful prank we’d miraculously managed to pull: thanks to a bizarre twist of events, the track “Prav ti” from this album had appeared at the 2008 Slovenian Eurovision Song Contest – quite unsuccessfully, of course, in terms of votes… But qualifying for this type of contest with a song written in a relatively complex time signature (verse in 6/8 and chorus in 2 x 10/8 + 8/8 + 2 x 6/8) must be a special achievement in itself. The track was obviously an experiment in the “peculiar pop song format” that we found extremely entertaining… And, to our surprise, the shenanigan worked unusually well.

After our first album had been released, we adapted most of the material for live performances and performed at quite a few concerts. Ultimately we also released a collection of live material, played in Kreatorij DIC in Ljubljana in 2005. Most of the tracks on this album, called “aLiVE in 2005“, are live versions of the material released on the 2004 album “Na jug“. Jure Praper’s instrumental composition “Eqsqueezeme” has never been released anywhere else, and this is its only recording in existence. The studio version of the live track “Ples vampirjev” later appeared on the 2007 “physical” release “Druga stran“. At that time the band lineup was as follows: Neža Trobec – vocals; Monika Fritz – backing vocals; Jure Praper – guitar; Gregor Karer – bass guitar; Martin Smerdel – keyboards; Andrej Hrvatin – percussion; and myself on drums:

Live performances have not become our main focus, though, mostly due to impossible logistics involved in rehearsals (the band members were from all over Slovenia), as well as because of everyone’s neverending work on other projects. Thus most of our efforts remained confined to the studio, where we also kept writing original soundtracks for audiovisual works. During its active period, SUR signed soundtracks for fourteen theatre performances (2002 – Sebastjan Starič: Lust; 2003 – Borut Bučinel: Who Draws Me; 2003 – Branko Potočan: On Our Own Land; 2003 – Nick Pickard & Gareth Boylan: Monolads; 2004 – Boris Kobal: The House of Bernarda Alba; 2004 – Sebastjan Starič: Pepperoncino; 2005 – Tomaž Štrucl: Che Guevara; 2006 – Dušan Teropšič: Dimwits; 2008 – Jure Rudolf: Where Do You Live?; 2008 – Dušan Teropšič: An Event in the City; 2008 – Borut Bučinel: Lullaby of Death; 2010 – Dušan Teropšič: The Upsidedown World; 2010 – Borut Bučinel: Shining; 2012 – Matjaž Šmalc, Aja Zamolo & Sam Sebastian: Sharlatanus Maximus), a short film (2003 – Marko Horvat: Happiness on Sale) and a computer game. Between 2008 and 2012, the SUR collective published a collection of digital releases, featuring all of its original soundtracks for theatre performances:

The Slovenian press imaginatively characterised the music of SUR as “ambiental-rock-jazz-electronica”. This may even be mostly true of our first album, though we preferred to call ourselves “alternative ambient anarchistic hippie progressive psychedelic metal-munching jazzy trip hoppy funky beer drinkers and spritzer aficionadoes”. The full-time members of the last stable live lineup of SUR were: Neža Trobec Teropšič – vocals, Monika Fritz – backing vocals and lyrics, Jure Praper – guitar, Aljaž Tulimirović – guitar, Samo Pečar – bass, and myself – drums and additional lyrics.

The guest musicians and contributors on the first two albums and frequent collaborators in the other projects of the SUR collective included: Marko Djukić – lyrics and vocals, Rok Predin (lyrics, vocals, acoustic guitar), Dušan Rebolj (lyrics, vocals, acoustic guitar), Matevž Šalehar – Hamo (vocals), Vasko Atanasovski (saxophone, flute), Stojan Kralj (bass, fretless bass, guitar), Andrej Hrvatin (percussion), Janez Vouk (trumpet), Marko Zorec (guitar), Jelena Ždrale (violin, viola), Nino de Gleria (cello) and Tomaž Štrucl (vocals and beer-fuelled battle plans).

After our last concert in Slovenj Gradec in July 2007, SUR as a live band was disbanded, as Monika and I had relocated from Ljubljana to the Slovenian coast, and keeping such an “inter-regional” band fully operational had become impossible. In late 2008 Monika and I founded our current band Cynicism Management; while SUR as a creative group that wrote original soundtracks for audiovisual works kept working until 2012. By that time this aspect of my work had been taken over by my “instrumental music & soundtracks alter ego”, Ray Kosmick (and His Porn Groove Crew).

The name SUR may mean many things, most evidently “south” in Spanish, though we liked to tell people it was actually an acronym for “samostalna ugostiteljska radnja” – “independent catering service”… Which also remains the name of the studio where I keep pondering my “masterpieces” to this day.

I’ve recently had loads of fun rummaging through the ancient Ground Zero material (cassette tape recordings of my first band from the 1990s), which I’ve then uploaded to Bandcamp so that all of us former band members could drift down the memory lane a bit. I also took the time to write a brief biography of that band and posted it here. As the whole undertaking has stirred up a lot of pleasant memories as well as a few enthusiastic responses, I kept digging and also uploaded all of the Juice Connection soundtracks, recorded between 1998 and 2002, to Bandcamp.

Juice Connection was the main creative outlet for me for a while, after the unfortunate if completely prosaic demise of Ground Zero. The yarn of Juice Connection started out back in 1998 when my former Ground Zero bandmate, Marko Djukić, invited me to write and record music for a theatre performance he would be appearing in. As it was clear to me that I lacked the necessary knowledge as well as equipment to pull this off successfully by myself, I approached a fellow musician Stojan Kralj with the idea. He agreed and became my trusted mentor and associate, most intensely so during the next few years. We formed the Juice Connection music production team with only us as its full-time members, and went on to produce – between 1998 and 2002 – original soundtracks for twelve full-length theatre performances, a couple of shorter theatre pieces and a TV show about contemporary dance theatre. Later the extended Juice Connection lineup (with myself on drums, Kralj on bass and guitar, plus Aljaž Tulimirović on guitar, Samo Pečar on the second bass and Andrej Hrvatin on percussion) also prepared an extensive setlist of live material and performed at a couple of live gigs. Unfortunately those adorably peculiar sonic excursions have never been particularly “commercially successful” (go figure), nor have they been documented – it would have been a real treat if any recordings of that musical experimentation, sound terrorism and downright jokery existed, but of course we haven’t recorded anything. No – I don’t know what we were thinking.

Be that as it may, while working on various theatre performances, Juice Connection has collaborated with a diverse assortment of guest musicians, depending on what was required for a certain project. Here are the twelve original soundtrack albums that have been compiled almost ten years ago, and now – nineteen years after the creation of the first soundtrack – republished on Bandcamp:

After the last Juice Connection project, I concentrated on the band SUR that I founded together with the lyricist, dramatist and theatre actor Marko Djukić, while Stojan worked on other things. However, Kralj and I have continued working together on various projects to date.

Stojan Kralj and I – the core of the Juice Connection team – have never limited ourselves in terms of what style we would or would not dabble into. While writing music for all the diverse performances we have worked on, we have proved time and again that we can be extremely versatile – sometimes to the point of ending up with exceedingly schizophrenic albums. One has to keep in mind, though, that it is hard to imagine what the music is for and why it is what it is if you don’t actually see the performance. However, we have also strongly believed in collaboration and kept involving other musicians in each of our individual efforts, because that seemed to produce the best and sometimes most surprising results, if done properly. Thus we have recorded a vast variety of tracks ranging from jazz to metal, from ethno to pop, from trip hop to swing, from experimental, avant-garde, atmospheric and ambient pieces to drum & bass, industrial, and even orchestral music and brass band arrangements.

Because of the extremely short development times for most performances, lack of technical and financial resources, and therefore quite a lot of creative as well as technical improvisation involved in each project, the production quality of the resulting work of the Juice Connection team may vary somewhat, especially by today’s standards, while the tracks recorded at impromptu jam sessions may often be less than perfect in terms of technical execution, of course. Nevertheless, these recordings are documents of certain times and circumstances and should be perceived as such. Ultimately we got things done: all the performances were staged successfully, we’ve certainly had lots of fun working on them, and that’s what it all boils down to in the end.

On the tenth anniversary of the first soundtrack we had ever recorded, Kralj and I decided to sift through the material and share it all on Jamendo, in order for it to be documented and perhaps used again by someone who may find it useful. Now, almost twenty years after The Tunnel, it was high time to release this on Bandcamp as well, and post the whole collection as well as a short biography in one place, so that the various facts and names of great musicians who have contributed to all of this don’t get forgotten.

This has been long overdue, but I finally got around to actually doing it: I salvaged the Ground Zero archives from dusty, moth-eaten old compact cassette tapes that I’d had lying around in a drawer somewhere for aeons, tinkered around with audio forensics for a bit, and uploaded the resulting noise to Bandcamp. Here are the results…

Ground Zero was the first band I played drums in. By a sort of youthful inertia, it was formed in 1993 by a bunch of us kids who hung around the stage at what was then my secondary school. The initial lineup consisted of Aljaž Tulimirović, Aleš Kovačec and myself (none of whom went to that particular school), while the fourth founding member, my classmate Mitja Jurančič who was supposed to sing, immediately – at the first or second rehearsals – discovered that he couldn’t actually carry a tune, probably to the eternal gratitude of the band’s few future listeners. I’m not being mean: if Jurančič ever reads this, he’ll be the first to agree. Frankly, none of us – with the possible exception of Tulimirović, who was relatively good on guitar even then – could play very well at that time.

The band underwent the first permutations: Aleš Kovačec on bass was soon replaced by Boštjan Zorc, Aljaž picked up the vocal mike apart from the guitar, and with me on drums we soon made for a classic “power trio”. For about half a year or so we mostly played Jimi Hendrix covers as well as some other blues and rock tracks at high school parties and biker gatherings. When you are that young, you learn fast, and not much time passed until we were tired of vintage rock covers. Zorc was eventually replaced by Sebastijan Roškarič on bass and we started coming up with our own ideas. It soon turned out that we desperately needed a “dedicated” vocalist, and I was very fortunate to run into Marko Djukić as a freshman at the university about a year after the band’s formation. With Marko Djukić on vocals we focused almost exclusively on our own material, abusing covers only as fillers or a kind of jokery, and Djukić also stepped in as the band’s resident lyricist. As Djukić and I both studied English, using any other language for lyrics was never even a question.

The first recording that still exists and has now been “exhumed” dates back to 1995. The other three existing recordings – two from live concerts and a short DIY demo – were done in 1996. During that time we changed the bass player again: Roškarič gave way to Samo Pečar. Later, in the beginning of 1997 (or maybe at the end of 1996), if I remember correctly, we had some disagreements with Djukić, especially as it was difficult for him to attend our never-ending rehearsals and rock ‘n’ roll revelry far from his home every weekend. Besides, ravenous for new knowledge and eager to complicate our lives, Tulimirović, Pečar and I gradually strayed far into the realm of alter-prog-fusion-psychedelia, rendering the ground rather unfertile for vocalists, so we and Djukić parted ways, though on good terms. Of course, as barely anyone but ourselves was exactly crazy about our setlist that ultimately consisted of ten to fifteen-minute instrumentals riddled with incomprehensible, utterly undanceable odd-time meters and other intentional listener pitfalls like malicious breaks, malevolent random-sounding phrases played in unison, syncopated rhythms, atonal compositions and beat displacement, plus ample room designated for random improvisation and on-the-spot “freeform composition”, the band gradually evaporated, without much clamour, sometime in the course of 1997 or 1998, as the band members started pursuing other outlets for their unbridled creativity.

Marko Djukić dedicated himself to theatre, and thanks to him I started writing original soundtracks for theatre performances together with another long-term “associate” of mine, Stojan Kralj. Producing music for audio-visual works is also how I eventually got into the rather arcane music production business more seriously, and I also kept drumming in quite a few other bands. Boštjan Zorc went back to playing guitar (his primary instrument), and he has since been in several bands. He is now a great guitarist and owner of a well-known guitar workshop. Sebastjan Roškarič headed into the realm of magic: he is now an accomplished illusionist. Samo Pečar has become a professional bass player and has contributed to too many bands to list. Aljaž Tulimirović has gone on to form a few bands of his own as well as take part in a number of other projects. Both Tulimirović and Pečar participated in Juice Connection (1998–2002, the music production crew formed by Kralj and myself) as well as played in the live line-ups of both bands I founded later: SUR as well as, for a while, Cynicism Management.

As I’ve already mentioned, the Ground Zero archives were salvaged from mangled old compact cassette tapes. To make matters even more frustrating, most of the material was originally recorded directly from the mixer during rather “unpredictable” concerts of dubious quality, so forget about top-notch production by today’s standards: the recordings did undergo significant digital audio restoration, as far as I could manage it… But without a functional artificial intelligence with a knack for audio forensics, magically transforming this material into anything great-sounding will remain impossible. Nevertheless, all of the former band members agreed it would be a good idea to “immortalise” these fine audio documents by digitising them before they vanished forever. Not that they will have any mass appeal, of course – but they will certainly let us, the former members, take a few trips down the memory lane.