Interview: Vera Miloševska – Ljubojna
The usual reproduction of already recorded and published music, music that one can listen whenever he wants to, is an idea not attractive enough to us. Together with the visual projections, the music becomes elevated up to the level of being a completed experience for the audience. We simply felt that our music demanded exactly that itself, says Vera Miloševska, the vocalist of Ljubojna music band.
#1 Vera Miloševska (vocal), Oliver Josifovski (bass, samples), Petar Hristov (clarinet), Bojan Petkov (acoustic guitar), Najdo Šakirov (electric drums) и DJ Jordan (gramophones) are the musicians that make the present team of the music band Ljubojna. The band plays a kind of a mix between electric, ethno, traditional and contemporary music, and in the last three years of their existence, they made over 50 concerts around the world: Toronto, Istanbul, Moscow, Venice, Rome, Marseille, Paris, New York… They have the album P.S.O. behind them, published in October last year. Besides the music score from the highly rewarded theater play (directed by Ljupčo Gjorgievski at the Bitola Theater) – Parite se otepuvačka, this project contains the additional music compositions that Ljubojna has produced during making this theater musical score – recorded in Plovdiv, in February 2005. At the studio sessions, Zlatko Origjanski (a member of the cult-bands Lola V. Stain and Anastasia) participated as a guest.
The band stands in front of eventual new challenges, and the interview with Vera Miloševska offers some answers about that…
After a few months break for the band after the publishing of your debut-album, Ljubojna finally had the Skopje promotion of the edition. Why did you wait so long to do this?
– Well, it’s known that we had the primary promotion P.S.O. in Bitola in October that year, at the Bitola Theater – as an institution where the whole project has began. In November, the album finally reached the national market. Meanwhile, some smaller projects happened for which we made the music… We had mutual project with Risima Risimkin on the ballet-performance Diary for Us. It seemed as we waited for the right moment to promote our album in Skopje. We thought a lot about this promotion, because we intended to do it as a multimedia performance with a video-projection.
#2It’s quite understandable – if one has in mind the music you create – a music with a lot of energy and artism – that you extract your music roots from the Macedonian soil and tradition, isn’t it so?
– The usual reproduction of already recorded and published music, music that one can listen whenever he wants to, is an idea not attractive enough to us. Together with the visual projections, the music becomes elevated up to the level of being a completed experience for the audience. We simply felt that our music demanded exactly that itself. It’s a music in which a lot of silence lays. A music with a lot of silence within. That’s why we needed exactly this kind of a space to perform – calm and quiet place, architecturally light and empty, and simply decorated, as well. This part of the Mala Stanica Gallery is exactly the way we needed it. It’s a strangely intimate, for “a few people audience”. Indeed, a few people were invited, too. The video-projection was on three video-beam projecting screens placed as some kind of windows, and in front of which – with absolutely no interference between this two media – our short music concert took place.
You weren’t alone at the stage: you’re friends where there too…
–At the stage, we were the full band that stands behind the project Ljubojna. We also planned some eminent musicians as guests and some other friends of ours – responsible for the computers and the digital elements of the performance… So, at the stage were also Goran Trajkovski from Mizar, Branko and Pece from Foltin, Gian and Olivier from Project Zlust – all people that extremely open-heartedly helped us to gain exactly what we wanted: to enable the “full-experience performance” for the audience.
This promotion should be an introduction into the serial of performances of Ljubojna in the summer period ahead.
– For now, only our participation at the First Performing Balkan Art Festival, the Solun Art Fair in the neighboring Greece. After that, we have several small projects in mind, but it’s still too soon to speak about them.
And – how close you are with the preparations for the eventual new album? What provokes you to create in this period? Will you remain firmly on the music line you promoted and will you maintain this kind of a musical quest?
#3– Well, we are thinking about a fresh influences into the music we create. We often discuss it. I just can’t say if we are preparing for the new album or not, because creating music never has exact beginning and maybe even exact end – as a project… The music circles within us. And when you at least expect it, the music flows out spontaneously. Although, the creative composer’s (author’s) music is the music that provokes us the most. Because it’s the most vivid and the most full-blooded music in any sense. I believe that every one that contemplates within himself as a being – has that creative impulse, that inner-urge for creation. And that’s never limited on only one or few types/styles of music expression, but in contrary.
In this situation of a living and vividly pulsing music stage, with a lot of various styles and different energies, you certainly position your music spot on national plan – where do you position your band Ljubojna in the contemporary Macedonian music stage?
– The actual Macedonian music stage starts to move and to “get alive”, but it still merely walks straight. The only “danger” what stalks all the real art, is the trap of mechanical and artificial reanimating of what is (already) masterly made before. In that sense, the music is in progression when not compared with some previous matrixes, or when not “polluted” with inadequate remakes. And when one doesn’t talk – much more than one creates… Only then, the music can reach its mature progressive art-form. Here somewhere at this positions stands the credo, the stands, and the real place of Ljubojna.
Translated by: Petar Volnarovski