Metallic Symphony, Polet, Aug. '06 (review)

When your new album The zone came out, most of those who know our home scene mentioned, that you softened the rawness of sound from the beginning through searching for melodiousness. Is that kind of authorial researching not the only honest and proper way of music? Would you not say that meloudiousness tamed the rawness?! In a tribal tradition I still understand it as a definition of The Stroy being »the tamers of industrial noise.«

From a radical view: there is no sound without the silence, therefore the noise disturbs us only when we desire silence. After a decade of working with noise as such it is understandable that we want to structure it more and more, surround and restrict it with sounds we comprehenend as its opposite. And the opposite of noise in music is tone. Of course we do not execute our research this logically. Most of the wind instruments and »the harp« are constructed by our Alex, who did not have a very exact plan while getting there. We are not that interested in aesthetic perfection when we make them or in harmony of their sound with the existing tone scales. We are very pleased when we manage to lure out sounds, weird enough that we are unable to describe them. This is when we know we are on the right track just as if we would find a new word to enrich our vocabulary. I do not see any contrariety between melodiousness and rawness in this matter, on the contrary, I see their necessary supplementing and an interactive game between the two, spinning the whole thing round. Noise is like a wild horse: if you tame and train it, it will take you where you want to go.

Some people are classifying you with the likes of Les Tambours Du Bronx, with their beat infuenza!? Personally I think it is a totally missed perception of the sound and contents of The Stroy collective. To be more precised, it is similar, in rock jargon, to comparison of a duo The White Stripes with the blues echo of John Spencer Blues Explosion. Is this only the »intellectual« flash of wit by our music experts or do they think alike abroad as well? In Singapore per example?

Many fake intellectual critics who like to experience music through a telescope of prejudice and have never met any of us in person at our gigs, find the comparisons of The Stroy with Les Tambours Du Bronx or Einsturzunde Neubauten very noteworthy. I think this tells us more of their narrow-mindedness than of our work. Do not get me wrong: in a company with these two groups we feel like brothers-in-noise – all the way back to the futurists. As far as the judgements of us are concerned, it is not important whether the critics are from here or there, but if they were / - or were not a part of our live performance.

What was the metallic feed-back like in the valley of Singapore? Are there any differences in listening-viewing perceptions of your music? Do you notice them?

As you cannot see inside of human heads, it is impossible to speak of their perceptions, but you can observe their reactions. About 30.000 people in Singapore have seen our gigs in three days and we found their reactions very interesting. During the performance none of them whistled or shouted and they applauded us when they were completely sure that the tune had ended. They are very polite but nuts about taking autographs and mobile pictures. This would not finish after each performance, the pleasure was mutual, I have to admit it had never happened before, not on such scales. They were truly fascinated by our Strojna and Vinkl: beardless locals could not be more amazed of Vinkl's meter long beard, petite local women have not seen a strong woman before like her before.

Surely it has been a long journey for you until this album came out. Especially because of widening and enthroning the new instrumentation. Who took the superior role – you towards the sound or was it vice versa?

What existed before: an egg or a hen? Like I have already mentioned before, we are never sure of how our working process is going to finish, of the final sound. Most of our instruments have a very confined sound, therefore we must count that in while working on compositions. That is why we have so much control over rhytmical structure, where very few things are left to chance. We could name the third relation to sound as a »controlled ignorance«. It is the matter of minimal technical knowledge, meeting invincible passion. Our Pihušek, per example, constructed an instrument with a mouthpiece of a trumpet from one side, a horn of the locomotive on the other and a bent pipe from the central heating in between. Afterwards he encountered it without any technical knowledge about wind instrumentation and now its sounds bring shivers down peoples spine and makes us laugh histerically at our rehearsals sometimes. I am not sure I have answered your question but hopefully you get my point of our relation towards the music, just as complex as relations with women.

The Whale tune, my favourite, crystallizes all the history and future of the sound »the machine sound«. You managed to exceed a ritual disciplined harmony with the blowing improvisation, representing an archetypical composition, which Yellow and the newage trance performers could learn from. How afraid were you (if you were) of being trapped in recycling your own discography? I am asking this because your instrumentation, despite its plurality, does allow it to happen.

This question is just as problematic as the shaping of music itself, it is never creatio ex nihilo. In this context I guess I can say that a difference between a genius and an average composer lays inside the fact that a genious knows how to blur traces of his influences better. The other side of sound recycling is improvisation. If it stopped to recycle itself, the improvisation would die away, every jazz musican knows it very well. This was one of the reasons for the rise of Nuts, our experimental subtribe, which performs on smaller staging and nurtures a more playful approach to our sound. Eventually every musician has to ask himself what is the motive of his creation. Money and vanity are two good reasons but not good enough for us. If it happens that we have nothing to say, we stop working. It is as simple.

To what extent The Stroy on its last album reflects the spirit of the contemporary? The title itself, The Zone, contains mimesis of everday life which is despite the size of the openness and freedom also partially ghettorized. At least in our heads.

If our music does not reflect the spirit of the time we live in, then the project has failed. The spirit of time in music is nothing else than some sort of poetic reflection of everday life in which our creation is anavoidablly buckled up. As urban musicians of today and future, too, hopefully, we do not care much about the tradition and classical ideals of beauty. We are very aware of disharmony and disorder this world is signed with, we know that aesthetic ideals are not given by God, but created by daring and brave souls, where thus beautiful souls feel safe and sound. The concept of the album idea, The Zone, is clearly explained on the cover, where it says: "The Zone is every place that signs and entrances us to become seekers, researchers and collectors". Therefore it is not about the ghetto issue, but The Zone from the film by Andrei Tarkovsky. It is about seemingly abandoned places, where you find your peace and quiet for at least a moment, even though nobody understands it.

Miroslav Akrapovic