After floods comes Potop
Published June, 2014
by Easterndaze
The effect of music is various, to entertain, provide an escape from everyday mundanity, incite, excite, sedate, inspire or bore. Then there is music that evokes certain moods and vibes, that hovers somewhere between reality and dream, between conscious states and the subliminal. That perfectly expresses the circumstances of its origin, but also somehow manages to precisely adapt to the setting of the listener-the receiver.
Putopisi is a selection of four tracks – or sono/journeys – each more than 20-minute long. It is a minimalistic, hypnotising rhythmachinistic seance sometimes venturing into 4/4 technoid territory with random samples of disembodied radio voices, coated in a liquid psychotropic echo. The recordings were created in May 2014 with two WWII military tube radio receivers without antennas “in a leaking studio”, vitebsk 1920, in Brestovik, Serbia by Nikola Vitkovic, a highly active and one of the most noteworthy and diverse musicians to emerge from the Balkan underground. This, coincidentally, was the period when Serbia and Bosnia got mostly affected by cataclysmic floods. The proceeds from the album will thus be donated to the official fund for victims of the floods.
Vitkovic’s father used to be a radio amateur, his vintage radio transmitters and receivers having found new life in the hands of his son Nikola. A droney, hazy and meandering session, the omnipresent aquatic terror present liminally, adding the recordings a hazy, watery, coating.
“I spent two months in a village at my family house. I couldn’t bring anything except the most necessary things, so I decided it’d be the perfect occasion to try and make Putopisi, which I’ve had on my mind for quite some time,” says Vitkovic. “I’m obsessed with those ‘watered down’ projects, which were very prolific / productive with dozens of albums or long box releases and it takes really a mining effort to get through it in quest for some ‘juice’ in there.”
The name of the project is Putopisi, and in translation, it means “travelogues”. The gratification of listening to these tracks is not instant, but even more rewarding. It’s the anticipation of the climax, which is always distant, out of reach, and eventually, sublimates onto the whole listening experiences.
You can get the album (and support the flood victims) here.