July 17th, 2013 | E-mail interview by NINa | Submit for an interview | detailed review | Read other Fabryka interviews
NINa: You're experienced and trained musicians who had played in many bands before. Are the biggest challenges for people pursuing a musical career caused mostly by money or other people?Elio Isaia (vocals, guitars): It's a combination of the two I guess. Band wise, most of the time, it is really difficult to make things roll smoothly. With the very young they are filled with passion and it's not a piece of cake to coordinate everybody into a systematic work process. The young are impulsive and a musician need be patient. A band is not about ego, even there where there may be one main creative mind.
Unfortunately our human experience, because of its nature, makes it difficult for people to not be concentrating on their selves. Its not about Ego, it's about love, compassion and cooperation. George Harrison resumed it very well: "All through the day, I me Mine, I me Mine, I me Mine".
Money, now that is interesting. I know many artists that had to make ends meet and eventually had to give up on their true vocation to satisfy their hunger. A musician must spend tons of money on gear, lessons, commuting to gigs, accommodation and yet many clubs tend to forget, or willingly disregard the fact, that music is a lot of damn hard work, and as such it must be compensated. If I fill your club then you must be commercially grateful to me and retribution must be adequate. However, there are not very many Lorenzo De Medici out there. A lot of people starting a club do it not out of inspiration, they do it because they did not know what else to do in life.
NINa: Ancient Greeks coined a term - catharsis - to describe a way of purifying one's spirit through emotional art. The vast majority of society today refuses to make any deep research in terms of looking for higher values. Instead, they seem to feel comfortable with shallow entertainment delivered by mass media. Since you sound like spiritual people interested in fine arts, what constitutes meaningful, ambitious art to you? Where do you look for it?
Elio: The Romans used to say "Dividi et impera". Which is very symptomatic of today's society. Isolate the individuals within your population and rule them. Keep them busy, feed their minds with constant, disorienting input of bashing but useless data, in order to make them feel busy though they are actually doing nothing good for themselves.
Its very simple and, in its simplicity, very clever. The more junk our mind is fed the lazier it becomes and the easiest it is to keep on feeding it junk food, because junk food tastes good although it does not hold any nutritional value whatsoever.
Art, on the contrary, is not about passivity, it's about pro-activity and sacrifice of the self. Its about hours and hours of studying your craft in order to achieve that sublime moment when, talking about music for instance, you are simply one with your instrument, no more thinking, just doing. That requires, and you will find the same in any other discipline taken seriously, the ability of saying no to friends because you must stay in to practice. It calls for patience because achievements are, for the most of it, agonizingly slow to come.
Art is about the here, right now. In the end only the performance matters and your mind must be devoid of any peripheral thought. Your concentration and knowledge of your craft should allow you, in theory that is, to become the performance. It requires a lot of time dwelling in repetition and people, now days, don't have patience for it, they want something new right away, they need to be constantly satisfied with something amazing. Although this might make a challenging and demanding audience, stimulating the artist, it surely makes a very poor art.
NINa: Is it more enjoyable when things one desires are difficult to obtain and hold? Does frustration stir up creativity?
Elio: You must work to get good results and when the results come and are good you feel gratified. Instant gratification is fleeting and it is, as the word itself suggests, very short lived. If you work hard to obtain something eventually you will also have built some strong foundation to start working on something else afterwards. The harder you work, the more skills you acquire and the more daring your future projects may become.
Life is a project and, although external stimulations are hard on people, it mainly depends on you whether you do something or not. Life is creation and creation takes time. A new born baby takes nine months and the sum of years of the lives of its parents in order to happen. However, it takes a moment only to take that life away. Building takes time, sacrifice and skill, destroying is fast and ignorant.
So yes, the harder you work, the more you learn, the more your creative process is stimulated and the more fun it gets.
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Pictures come from UN-reason archive, all copyrights reserved by their respective owners. Questions proofreading: Mike 'Vesper' Dziewoński.