INTERVIEW: KOKAN DIMUŠEVSKI

/, Blesok no. 119/INTERVIEW: KOKAN DIMUŠEVSKI

INTERVIEW: KOKAN DIMUŠEVSKI

I Like It When I Am in Insecure, Deep Waters!


BLESOK: What will be the further story of this “Private Music” of yours? After the concert at the Museum of the City of Skopje, will there be more performances around the country? Are there maybe any chances that it reaches the international audience?

DIMUŠEVSKI: The next station was the Cultural Centre in Kavadarci, and in July we travel with Kirovski to Malta. They invited us to perform at their Philharmonic Hall in La Valetta. The material that is already recorded can be easily sent to all your acquaintances and friends in the world. We have also started the negotiations to perform at Kolarčev University in Belgrade, then in Niš… One leads to another. However, it is significant hat this will not be hermetic material. The one that we performed and the audience heard and saw in Skopje. This concert will be upgraded. Some pieces will probably be left out, and others will start to live… I don’t want every concert to be the same. My intention is to always have new pieces, to add some new moments, to always be interesting. For those to whom we play it will always be new, but it should also be new for us as musicians. To be exciting. If you play the same concert five or six times, repeat the same matrix, in the end it becomes like working in a bank. At a counter. You become a clerk and you just ask how much the honorarium will be. I want my work to have excitement. To have something that we ourselves as performers do not know. To have new things before us. To have question marks. To be nervous from each other at the concert

After the LEB i SOL explosion, the first albums, awards and recognition, you were the first “disobedient” one. The musician that left the band at the moments of big glory and decided to be the main character in his own film.

DIMUŠEVSKI: LEB i SOL are just a segment of my life. A beautiful, big and significant segment of my career. But it is only one part of me. I have always worked on theatre music as well, on experimental music, electronic music… even when LEB i SOL was active. Only, the band is bigger as energy and the people channel all of their attention to it. They don’t see which one of its members does something in the meantime. As for me, I did not wake up and go to bed with LEB i SOL. It was only a segment of my day. If the day lasts for 24 hours, LEB i SOL was only four hours to me. In the remaining time I worked on something of my own which had absolutely no connection with the sound, style, arrangements, playing in the band.

Then I wrote music for many films, many theatre plays… I also received the JRT award for a radio phonic piece in 1987 if I am not mistaken… It was a race with 22 million people, not with only 2. It could not fight the fame of the band. Even now, my colleagues composers call me a “rocker”, “jazz musician”… and I am more of a classical, serious or contemporary composer than they are. But once they see you on stage with long hair, with a pony tail… the image remains. That’s the way it is.

How do you see LEB i SOL today? Is this a closed chapter for you?

DIMUŠEVSKI: Definitely. Do you know what was the last LEB i SOL album – “And So On…”? This, according to me was the continuation of “Racna rabota”. This is the music that was supposed to come after it. That was the direction in which LEB i SOL should have moved. That is why LEB i SOL fell apart. One person was pulling towards contemporary music, jazz, jazz-rock… another one to Zafir Hadžimanov-type of music, singing, rock-and-roll… his idol was Goran Bregović and he only pulled towards some folk motifs… that is how the energy was wasted. We all started thinking only with our heads, not to listen to others… and he magic was gone. For me, the best LEB i SOL album is the third one, “Račna rabota”, released by PGP RTB in 1979. It was followed by “And So On…”. What I am saying is maybe because of vanity, but it seems that it is still enough that the musicologists analyze the music, arrangements, the sound recording, the whole story… as it was all done and come to some conclusion. “And So On…” is one of the most serious, most mature albums of LEB i SOL. It was supposed to be album number four of the band. They skipped this path and started to work on something else. That is any I left LEB i SOL. There was no more challenge for me there. There was the excitement of the first and second album. There were some crazy ideas there, with the third album we moved even more forward, and then they returned to the very beginning.

AuthorLjupčo Jolevski
PhotographyTatjana Rantaša
2018-09-20T12:41:47+00:00 May 12th, 2018|Categories: Sound, Blesok no. 119|Tags: , |0 Comments