Amek nl_32: Shentov, Simitchiev, Lukanov - Pain and Power

A new release, an upcoming gig, and an interview

We are back with our first release for the year, a release concert, and an interview with Slow Slow Loris who are returning to Sofia eight years later.

Shentov, Simitchiev, Lukanov - Pain and Power

“Pain and Power” is the second collaborative album of Ivan Shentov, Martin Lukanov, and Angel Simitchiev. Even more minimal in instrumentation and music, it was recorded throughout various sessions with the live element being a main driving force of the creative process, alongside the heavily amplified sound of processed guitars, rudimentary synths for portable gaming consoles, and devices, electroacoustic improvisation, field recordings and everything that lies in between.

Grab it on tape or digital here.

Slow Slow Loris & Shentov, Simitchiev, Lukanov at Fabrika Avtonomia, 28/11

On November 28, SLOW SLOW LORIS return to Sofia to remind us what we experienced at their first concert back in 2016. The event will be opened by the drone trio Shentov, Simitchiev, Lukanov, who will present their second full-length album "Pain and Power."

RSVP to the donation free event here.

Eaten By Sound – An Interview With Slow Slow Loris

Slow Slow Loris is a duo mixing voice and electronics in a musical amalgam where melody meets noise, the emotional meets the coldness of avant-garde, and freeform music meets the punctuality of rhythm. With five full-length albums and various tracks published by labels such as Cloister Recordings, Zaetraom, Staaltape, and Syrphe among others, they return to Sofia for their second show here. Here’s our brief conversation conducted while Slow Slow Loris is on the road for the second leg of their autumn tour.

It’s been eight whole years since your previous show here. What has been happening with your duo in this period?

Most recently, we moved to a house in the woods in North Carolina, USA. Robert has been fixing it up for the last two years, and this summer we moved our belongings there. We are keeping a small base in Berlin, where we spend some months every year. We hope this intercontinental lifestyle and nature/city combination will work well for us. Other than that, we have released four albums since then. Three of them are on Cloister Recordings, and one on Zaetraom. Of course, we have played many shows. During the pandemic, a side project was started with Robert’s guitar songs and Angela learning the bass. We haven’t had time to develop it further but hope to do so once we settle into our new life.

This period marked some of the weirdest and toughest events of our times: pandemics, wars, and political uncertainty. Does this reflect in your current music, and if yes, how?

Yes, of course, all of this influences our music, but we would say it does so in an indirect way. We don’t try to make a song about, say, political unrest or war, but some of our music reflects the pain of it. One song definitely alludes to the climate crisis, but it tends to be buried in the poetry.

With ANY coming from dance and choreography, and G6PD coming from the club and experimental music scene, have you noticed a larger change in the respective fields you are inhabiting/coming from? 

Angela feels like she is so removed from the dance and choreography scene that it would be hard to comment on how it has changed other than the obvious changes such as more performance themes around queerness and gender fluidity.

For Robert, the club music times seem far away and a long time ago. It was a very vibrant scene in the early to the end of the 90s and felt to him like Punk 2.0. There were no stars and many events were free or not expensive with a very DIY feel. Everyone could be part of it and just enjoy themselves. Today it seems the opposite, as in, being very commercial. Once the door bouncers started choosing who could come to the event and who was turned away, the whole thing died for him. 

Your show in Bulgaria is part of the second leg of your Autumn tour. How did the shows in the US go? Did the scenes you visited feel different? What are your highlights among the acts you shared the bills with?

The US tour was quite enjoyable, but we feel like we are just starting to find our way there. It seems that there is less money for arts there, and people are a bit burdened with handling multiple jobs. House shows are more common since it’s more expensive to operate even an underground venue there. For the most part, we felt very welcomed and celebrated by those who came out to the shows.

We were both pretty blown away by Leif Hunneman’s project, State Vector Collapse. He builds his own synths and plays epic industrial drones with them. It was really impressive. Angela also really liked what Dei Xhrist, an artist from Manchester, NH, was doing with her voice. Oh, but we saw so much… especially at a festival in Rochester where over 250 acts played – too much to comment on.

Has the Slow Slow Loris live experience changed in recent years? Do you explore some new territories with your sound-sculpting, with your voice, and with the ideas behind the music?

We would say the creation process is still pretty similar in that we don’t try to sound a certain way; we just do what comes out through improvisation and refine it later. There is usually always a quest for balance between beauty and edginess, avant-garde and flow, power and vulnerability. But even though the ideas behind our process are the same, we are sure the sound and the performance have developed in certain ways as we grow, but it is hard to say exactly how!

We can say that because we use a lot of field recordings that we gather from all over the world, the sound of the songs is constantly changing. Also, the effects on the voice have changed over the years, and we use different synth sounds and stringed instruments. However, there is a constant element in the songs – probably Robert’s punctuation of the lyrics and Angela's distinct voice are what make it always sound like SSL.

Angela loves taking voice lessons here and there when we have the money and time to increase her vocal possibilities, but she also likes just letting different moods and emotions find their own new nuances in the voice. Robert is forever developing his guitar voice – we hope to use it more in the unnamed side project or in Slow Slow Loris one day. As we settle into our new studios in the woods in NC, we too wonder how we will develop!

If you put yourselves in the shoes of those people who missed your first show here or those who were there, why should they come to Fabrika Avtonomia for your gig this November?

Because we want to love you and eat you up with our sounds. Come celebrate our 10-year anniversary before the world goes to shit.

What have you been listening to or reading while on tour? Any recommendations?

Robert has made his way through the huge book called “A History of Goth.” Angela is sucked into the news at the moment, fretting about the new presidency in the USA, but will soon start the book, “The Surrender Experiment,” by Michael Alan Singer.

Zines

We have some new zines in our distro. If you want Women of Noise #2, Untitled #8 or Noise Receptor #12, hit us up at amekcollective@gmail.com