Interview with Jadwiga Taba: "I mainly use effects with electronic sounds I fabricate"
Jadwiga Taba is a Polish audiovisual artist who is currently participating in the international project 100 František / Jorge Listopad where she will contribute a musical track. She recently released her fourth album "dom 1919" with her band Nac/Hut Report. It is great that she found a few moments and answered a few questions on the Slovak radio program Bawagan...
Photo: Luca from Nac/Hut Report
I would like to introduce Jadwiga as an artist in this interview. You don't “just” play music, do you?
Yes, a part of music I also do painting, for the last solo music project I created a mini video series too. Occasionally I write some poems, this part of my activity I naturally connected with my musical projects as I use a lot of them as lyrics in my songs.
https://www.instagram.com/jadwigataba/
You can find some of my works on my Facebook and Instagram page, even if in the last period they weren’t updated so much, I think that during the lockdown period I needed to concentrate more on the music, I found it very helpful in this reclusive period.
https://www.facebook.com/TABA-163739880311083
You used to publish an underground magazine; do you keep doing it?
It’s still online and sometimes I still post something there, but mainly it was a one year project. The idea was to make interviews with underground bands from all around the world, always asking the same questions. It seems that generally people don’t have no more the sense of community in the matter of music, considering it very different in as for generes locations etc. So I thought that it would be interesting to repeat some basic questions about local scenes, tools and instruments the musicians use and so on, to see if there’s actually some kind of global scene in some way. At the end of the year instead of a classification of the best albums, as posted by many blogs, I made some kind of collage of all these interviews and the result was quite interesting because you can see that despite of location many things these people have in common, so maybe in the end we could say that thanks to internet we have some kind of worldwide scene.
https://b--rush.blogspot.com/?fbclid=IwAR3eL4QpUYBv3ZHkJjGo3TVQVsCm7ZjZOknHHUKu1t0-A4WRzr5ITZdQ3Og
But let's talk mainly about music. Where did the first musical impulse in your life come from? When did you decide to express yourself through music?
I think that it’s quite difficult to determine the exact moment, I think that when you're a very young kid you’re sensitive to the sounds generally, but I guess it came from TV after all. When I was a kid I watched plenty of kids shows and in Poland they were very musical if you know what I mean, but I guess everywhere is like this. Anyway I had this enormous luck that in the epoque I grow up I watched a lot of polish tv shows for kids from 80´s. and only after many years I discovered that a lot of soundtrack for these shows was produced by Eugeniusz Rudnik, a polish avant gardist, and his collaborators. I think that this for sure influenced me from the very beginning to be sensible to the single sounds and how they are arranged.
The decision about making music came many years later, for sure the crucial moment was when I met my partner in crime, Luca, another member of Nac/Hut Report, our band. When I met him I was much more into the visual arts, and didn’t consider making music as my knowledge about electronic music tools was very little. However we shared a common vision on arts in general, and had a lot of ideas about things we’d like to do, so at some point it seemed obvious that we needed to start a music project.
Photo: Gabriel Kutz
In addition to singing, you also play various instruments and effects, can you specify that?
I mainly use effects with electronic sounds I fabricate and samples, also the feedback sounds of bare cable touch, which is actually a very glitchy sound. I then treat the sounds with multiple delay, pitch and other modulation effects.
I use mostly live electronics, which I elaborate at the moment. I love all kinds of sound oscillators and noise boxes that can provide different sounds each time.
You have done many solo composing, you are member of a band... How do you distribute individual ideas between projects?
Every album is a kind of individual project so to be honest it’s quite easy to divide the ideas between the solo and band stuff. Every time we start to work on new material with the band it’s first of all the research of the main idea for the new disc. Once we have this idea we start to work on specific material related to the idea so usually the projects don’t overlap even in the sense of time. Talking about my solo projects the process is quite similar, even if sometimes I use some material I didn’t use with the band because it didn’t fit to the “theme”, in this case it’s quite instinctive.
You released the 4th album with the Nac/Hut Report project two months ago. How is it different from the others?
The last record is above all much less noisy compared to the previous albums. We decided to make this “hauntology” project - as I mentioned before there’s always an idea first - using the cylinder records from anonymous or somehow not recognized artists from the beginning of the XX century. We managed to cut them and arrange with the electronic parts creating some kind of out of time records, that seems to not belong to any precise epoque.
Which release of your solo career do you consider essential. Can you tell his story?
I would say that the last one "Sen o Czarnej Drodze" because it’s the most complete and mature project. The base composition of the album took me actually not a long time, I think it was a couple of weeks, but then the ideas started to grow around it, and all the story of the haunted recording from the past started to become more and more clear. At some point I felt that the recording was not enough and it also a visual assist throughout the video series.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoaV2PJvOzvDuJnnnzwu9kQ
As a soloist you participate in project 100 František / Jorge Listopad about a Czech-Portuguese writer and director. Inspired by reading his poems, you will have a track on CD, along with other international artists…
I’m very happy to participate in this project. I think it’s a great input, to start from a poem and try to translate it into music or create something that mirrors it. Using the poem of somebody else is an additional challenge and I’m very excited about it. I think that it would be great if there were more projects of this kind that help to discover and explore the heritage of many wonderful artists.
https://www.facebook.com/100-Franti%C5%A1ekJorge-Listopad-108655501284805
Questions: Karolina Válová
Cover photo: Gabriel Kutz
Interview was publicated on Bawagan on August 20th, 2021
https://www.facebook.com/Bawagan-na-Radiu-TLIS-1412254565675120
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