“I try to make order from chaos.” — in talks with Martyyna about what is written in the scars
Published August, 2024
by Timon Láska
Finding out that cliché can work as a profound feeling, the Prague-based Czech producer and DJ Martina Svobodová took on the temporary expressive phrase that our destiny is written in the stars and turned the focus on herself. Her debut album, released on the esteemed Mexican label Infinite Machine, delves into the feelings of emotional and physical intimacy, seeking self-understanding by healing the wounds life can inflict on each and every one of us. “I discovered that music is the best form of expression for me,” – the singer/producer reveals about Written in the Scars, a release full of glitchy breaks, deconstructed sounds and heavenly vocals. It’s a style she describes as emo-electronica.
Timon Láska spoke to Martyyna for Easterndaze about the presence of loneliness in her music and life, the involvement and influences of her EDM platform KSK, and the struggles of putting out music as an emerging producer.
Written in the Scars marks your first release since your debut EP Awaken, which came out 4 years ago. How have you changed since then?
When I made Awaken, I had almost no experience with production, and looking back in it today, the EP feels rather unpolished, but all the more dynamic to me. Back then, I didn’t even notice some of the things that I would now just smooth out or polish up naturally. I tend to get caught up in the details, I get stuck in them, and the sound editing takes a long time. Besides that, I struggle to fully devote myself to music, and I feel that all the other things outside of composing hold me back a lot.
Your work and music are currently intertwined in your PhD studies. However, for some time you were trying your best to keep the two meticulously separated…
I found out that music is the best means of expression for me. When giving interviews, it occurred to me that quite often the authors did find the connection between my music and my work.
I didn’t see it myself at first, but the more I work on my PhD project, the more I’m starting to see that the theme I’ve chosen accentuates the spontaneity of elements in architecture a lot, the expressive elements of it that I enjoy in the field. That this is actually what I do in music as well. I’m gradually discovering that I have a similar workflow in both “jobs”: when I write texts for my PhD, I produce an awful lot of stuff, then I have to sort it, edit it, compose it, and try to make some order out of the chaos. I do the same with music.
The current form of the album is very much about the vocals. Over the four years I’ve been getting to know my voice, learning how to work with it. My general taste in music has shifted a lot too. Dynamic club music doesn’t influence me that much anymore. I’m looking for calmer forms of electronica, and all of that has seeped into the production.
But the partial inclination towards dance elements is quite noticeable on Written in the Scars. You are the co-founder of one of Prague’s most important club platforms, KSK, and you’ve also been a DJ there for a long time. I dare to assume that the influence of electronic dance music has managed to make its way into your new album.
I rather feel that it’s the other way around. I felt exhausted by playing every weekend in a club in the middle of the night, working with the audience, thinking about what stuff to play and when to play it in a particular time slot. Although I love DJing I need to balance it with production. My live shows are very much a listening experience, and I’m comfortable with the environments, people I meet and shows and festivals I get to play at.
But club music has undoubtedly influenced my work. On the album you can hear songs with very strong rhythms and beats, other songs are defined by abstract melodies where the drums are very much neglected, and I give more emphasis to vocals and lyrics.
So let’s move on to the present. You have released your debut album on Infinite Machine, the label behind the releases of several fresh projects and sounds of contemporary experimental music, such as Bungalovv’s Donde Hubo Fuego or the sparkly ethereal EP Luminous from Argentinian producer Qeei. But you’ve released Awaken on BCAA before. What made you go for Infinite Machine to release your album?
I was primarily looking for a bigger label where my music would fit, which turned out to be more difficult than I thought. I was getting responses that most people liked the project, but it didn’t fit into the style of the stuff they were releasing – some labels are more focused on pop stuff, others on PC music, and some were looking for even more experiments in sound.
I got to Infinite Machine through the producer and my friend Bungalovv. Charlie Juarez, who runs the label, got the demo even earlier, but it took a while since he listened to it and at the moment I had given up hope for an answer, Bungalovv contacted me that he just listened and would like to release it. The whole process from recording of the album to the releasing was difficult, but I’m grateful it got released on Infinite Machine. Charlie was a really nice person to work with.
It also seems to me that you have a bit more in common not only with that form of experimental sound Infinite Machine focuses on, but also with the people you mentioned. The uper-mentioned Qeei also released her music on Infinite Machine thanks to Bungalovv, and you both had Fausto Mercier as mix/master…
We presented Written In the Scars live for the first time at Lunchmeat Festival, but after that show the whole album just had to be re-mastered. Charlie connected me with Fausto Mercier… so we were sending files each other like ping-pong until it got done. And Qeei is also Bungalovv’s friend, we know each other too.
Releasing this album was just so time demanding and tested the limits of my patience. At one point I was so frustrated that I thought I was really going to try a self-release. Actually, after this whole experience, I’d prefer to just throw some of my upcoming stuff on Bandcamp and let it live there.
Written in the Scars takes us on an epic but intimate healing journey that sometimes doesn’t feel comfortable at all. Even the title ironizes the clichéd phrase that our fate is written in the stars. But you say it’s in our bodies, or rather in the wounds we carry with us. How did you come up with that?
I was looking for an intimidating title for the whole project, and I felt like the whole process of creating it was a kind of self-discovery. The title I chose kind of encapsulates in the simplest way what the album is. It’s very much about emotions, not just the ones I was carrying around at the time of recording. Music always helps me sort out the mood I’m having at the moment and deal with it somehow. I realized that in the same way that music can calm me down, though, the creative process can also piss me off – for example when the songwriting doesn’t flow as planned. I have impulsive emotions stirring inside of me that I have to deal with patiently and through the whole process.
If you can put it into words, what’s written in your scars?
Acceptance of myself, of who I am; with the limits and the things I don’t like about myself. But the scars also show my naturalness. I’ve been working with the fact that you can’t just ignore the intense emotional experiences, both good and bad. I don’t think that the right thing to do is to forget them, you should rather process them, try to accept them. But I don’t want to apply it just to myself and treat it as some terribly intimate process. I’ve been thinking about what a scar actually is. It’s a memory of something that happened to you, it’s a part of you, it stays a part of you, and you don’t have to mask it or remove it. You can continue to live with it, heal and move forward thanks to it.
In the latest issue of Full Moon Mag, you said that the album is not so much about you as it is about the emotions that listeners can find in it. I won’t purposely ask about personal details that you reflect on in your music, since you yourself have stated that it’s not important to talk about them in the context of the album. But I am interested in the story of the song “Every Single Night”, where you sing that a certain entity “raised you alive, watched you fight your enemy while I keep my eyes on you.” What’s behind those lyrics?
It’s about feeling like the eternal loner who I was until recently. I’m not anymore. Now I have a boyfriend who’s the absolute best, waiting for him was 100 % worth it and it all makes sense now.
There are more of those romantic lines on the album. I don’t want to turn it completely into a classic love story piece, but it was part of me: getting to know some people, having brief love episodes, and always getting so caught up in the moment that I started to lose myself in those relationships.
It took me a while figuring out that everything I went through made sense: it made me who I am now. You just learn not to sugarcoat it so much. On top of that, I got hooked on workaholism and was doing 1,000 things at once. Those things helped me forget exactly what I didn’t want to deal with. But at some point, the stuff you don’t want to deal with comes up anyway.
It sounds to me like you’ve been tapping into the power of yourself a lot, but at the same time, you’re not afraid to ask outsiders for help with your own problems…
Yeah, I do not.
I would like to delve into the feeling of being a loner and the role of loneliness in your life and work. Written in the Scars deals a lot with the weak spots you found yourself in. You told CT Art three years ago that loneliness is essential for you even when making music and that being alone is important to you in the creative process. Is that still true for you now? What role does solitude play for you now?
When I produce something, I still try to kind of shut myself away and be isolated with the creative process. But I’ve also evolved: firstly, I’m opening up to collaborating, and I’ve also realized that it’s absolutely OK to ask for help and not spend hours on something where you got technically stuck. In terms of vocals, it was really hard for me to start singing for the first time in front of people. When I picked up the microphone, I was like “jeez, why do I do this to myself?” Now, I’m still stressed, but I do enjoy playing and singing live.
I don’t want to associate Written in the Scars too strongly with your previous EP, but on the album the vocals have a completely different role: they act as the central point of the production, a lot of tracks are built around them, or at least play an important support role in the background. You’ve said in an interview with The Quietus that playing with vocals is a self-discovery, perhaps even an emancipatory process for you. In what way?
The decision to take some sort of singing course was one of the most important ones for me in my entire musical career. It was extremely empowering to gradually discover that very basic things have a huge impact on your voice. Vocal cords are like muscles, you have to train them. If I start preparing a week before a gig, 2 days before the vocals sound completely different. But the “quality” of your voice is also affected by whether you’ve slept well, whether you’re depressed or tired at the moment… You can’t hide anything in your voice.
It annoys me terribly, but I’m not able to work on music when I know I’m somehow limited in time and for example have to go to a meeting in let’s say five hours. I just can’t do that. And when I know I don’t have that time pressure, I just relax and I’m good to go. But I usually get to a phase where I’m recording something, melodies are coming up, and then I’m like: “Wow, now I want a vocal here,” and then I experiment with them and usually create some areas of background vocals with my voice. Then I’ll throw that into a transposition, or I’ll just create a layer of abstract background vocals, and then I’m comfortable singing into that.
You often distort the vocals, personally I really like your autotuned distorted voice accompanied by deconstructed electronics full of glitches and broken sounds. The use of vocals, along with the frequent thematization of personal pain and allusions to nature… I often thought of Enya and her masterpiece A Day Without Rain when listening to it. Did anything in particular lead you to work more with distortion in your voice?
When I first started making music, I didn’t have an extensive pool of synths and all the different instruments that would create the kind of melodies I wanted. Now I’ve got more of them, but I started by taking recordings of my voice, reverberating it a lot, and creating some surfaces that way. The distortion came from the need to have a melody that sounded comfortable to me. The plugins and instruments I had sounded too electronic or too harsh. I was looking for something more personal. That felt like a kind of link to the personal level of what I was doing. The main melodic line of the album is created by transforming the vocals, but they are still basically “mine”.
As much as you said that you don’t want the album to be perceived as your story, I find it paradoxical that the final form is very personal to you…
Now I know that it’s still my story, and I guess that’s right. But I don’t want to pigeonhole the sound form into specific things or personal issues that they relate to. I don’t want the audience to leave with this feeling after listening to the album.
Yes, that’s also why I feel that the vocals form an intimate aspect of the whole listening experience. The electronic production is sonically appealing, but while listening I found myself relating primarily to your sometimes almost heavenly vocal positions. You don’t shy away from labeling your work as emo-electronica. It’s true that I feel the sharing of emotions very strongly on the record. But how would you describe the emo-electronica genre?
There are two groups of producers. Some of them have technically polished production to the max, use all sorts of different plugins, and are precise on a technical level. And then there’s the other group of producers, who may work a bit more harshly, but the emotions come through much stronger from their releases. I’ve always liked that approach more.
Has that always been true for you? Even in your earlier years when you were primarily a DJ?
Yes, all the time. I feel it through the music I listen to. I rarely play or save a track because “it’s got great kicks”. There had to be some emotionally deeper thing that made the music stick in my mind afterwards and I was like “OK, this is great and I’m saving it, this music makes me feel good”.
You told me that you wanted the audience to connect to your healing process that you introduced in Written in the Scars. Could your music also have a therapeutic function in the context of discovering emotions in the audience? Could it heal others as well as it did you?
Honestly, I don’t know if it healed me. I feel like in some moments it rather opened wounds and hurt… I would be happy if it helped someone, of course. I just don’t know how soothing the record is to the listener, since some parts or even whole tracks can’t make the listener rather uncomfortable.
At the very least, if you go through the whole record, it might calm you down in the end. It’s arranged like that on purpose, too. I give space to heavier, more painful emotions in the beginning with a harder sound, so gradually the album evolves to a more soothed mood and represents the final stage of a healing process a little bit.
In the album story, the voice is looking for some relief throughout the album in blending with the other person’s voice, which can also be heard on the record. That’s why the record ends with tracks featuring the vocals of Oliver Torr and Portento. These are simply tracks where the voice is letting itself reverberate in the duet and has found a position where it is safe, calm and content. It’s the journey itself that’s important to me.
I feel like I put that journey into every single track as well. It starts off a bit calm, maybe dark, then it gets some sort of a momentum, it escalates and reaches some sort of climax before the melody reaches some final stillness and slowly fades away. I compose DJ sets like that as well, I feel like there’s always some process going on.
You first performed Written in the Scars live in the form of the AV show of the same name at Lunchmeat Festival with your friend and artist Igor Lorok. Did it bring any enrichment or added value to the already rich sonic foundation of the album?
It made me enjoy performing live. I’ve played live about three times since Lunchmeat and it sounds better each time. If I were to record those vocals again on the record now, they would sound completely different. But I don’t want to think about it like that anymore. Sure, I’d record it a hundred times differently and maybe it would sound better, but it’s a process. I’m just trying to accept it.
You also have some history with Prague’s Lunchmeat collective, don’t you?
Most of the people in the collective are my friends. We’ve been connected through KSK and the Neone space since the beginning. One of the KSK members, Katla, helped with the bookings at the older editions of Lunchmeat. Through her we got to connect with the founders of Lunchmeat and did monthly parties with them at Neone. In 2022, we created a series of events together in the Neone pop-up space. I appreciate them for often including me in events, and for giving us the opportunity to present Written in the Scars at the festival in the first place. They’ve put some trust in us, and their support has been great: they texted the day before to see if we needed any technical help, etc. Ironically, I was most stressed about the Prague show because my friends were talking about it a lot, texting me about how excited they were and I was really nervous.
But in the end, the atmosphere at the venue helped me, and the fact that I knew there weren’t people just waiting for me to fuck something up. I’ve had that attitude coded in myself for a long time, I carry the feeling that people are waiting for me to mess something up, or that they’re picking up on things that maybe I’m not good at, I just carry a feeling of inferiority.
It’s good to realise that it’s actually fine when mistakes happen. I know the other side of it: when I’m at someone’s concert and the performer makes a mistake, I start to find the show much more interesting. It’s so much more human than when everything is perfect.
Did KSK and Neone start together?
No, KSK has a longer history. Originally, we were four girls from university and we started doing little parties in cafes where we played music from our cell phones on crates. Gradually it got bigger, we got support, we could start inviting DJs. We were moving from spaces like NoD and MeetFactory to Neone, and in the last few years we sometimes did parties at Ankali and Fuchs.
What role did Neone play in your musical development?
That’s where I started DJing. Initially we only invited people from outside and as a collective we only curated the events. With Neone I got into DJing, then Igor (Lorok) joined KSK, which gave us a new visual identity, then he also started DJing, we started to combine musical tastes and it complemented each other in the dramaturgy.
Neone had an even more crucial role: it worked as an audiovisual space. There was the possibility of VJing, which was eventually our goal: we wanted to combine the visual component with the music, to give opportunities to visual artists and VJs, to connect these two sides. This approach to light usage in the club culture in general has kind of disappeared, it’s quite an expensive thing. Nobody really dares to do it because you need twice the budget of a club event with classical lights. It’s unimaginable now.
But the visual aspect adds a huge amount of value to the event. Even without the visual component, it’s so hard to do club events these days. There are so many of them, you don’t have much stability or tools to draw a crowd. I’m getting so lost in the scene, I don’t even understand it anymore. I feel like there could be a lot of quality nights with great music, but they can never garner the necessary turnout to pay for it and keep it going. We’ve also done nights with KSK and had to pay extra for some things for lack of attendance. This then gets reflected in the bookings, making compromises for a chance of possible profit and then you don’t enjoy the event you’re organizing at all. And you wonder why you’re doing it in the first place.
This article is brought to you as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthen the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
Lead photo: Iryna Drahun & Igor Lorok