Givan Lötz Interview
Q: What got you interested in creating songs that embrace atmosphere and ambience?
A: I guess it might simply be a result of my listening preferences. I’m as interested in traditional songwriting (i.e. Leonard Cohen) and folk music as I am in ambient music (i.e. Wolfgang Voigt). So It feels natural for me to merge these two seemingly disparate approaches. The goal is not necessarily to create something entirely new as much as it is creating something I would personally want to listen to. From a production point of view, I try to position every bit of music I make in a particular space. I ask myself where a piece of music is occurring — is it in a cave, a forest, a room? large or small? What is the scene or setting? That, in effect, is what creates the ambience. I’m not fond of the super-pop production values where everything seems to be happening in a perfect abstract vacuum — the sound of the space, the noise, is as important to me as the music itself.
Q: MAW is full of lush soundscapes that morph and evolve with nuances. What is the songwriting process like when taking this into consideration?
A: Songwriting starts with me and a guitar or an organ. The music as chords gets generated pretty quickly. I never decide to sit down and write songs — it just happens when I’m experimenting on the guitar as part of my daily playing routine. I just really enjoy playing guitar. Vocal melodies present themselves as I’m noodling away. About half the time vocal melodies present themselves when I submit myself to some sort of drone: fridge hum, electric fan purr, traffic white noise, guitar feedback, the buzzing you hear like bees in your ears just before you fall asleep. For some reason these things activate melodies in my head. Songwriting and lyrics take a little longer. I prefer to wait till the end of the process when I have a bunch of different songs to work on, so I can write across them with some unifying idea. On MAW, the songs deliberately borrow from each other — some lyrics link with each other, some musical motifs are repeated. As mentioned the ambience or treatment mostly occurs at a recording and production level. Some of that droning that led to the initial song has to come back into play. I try not to over-layer things — much of the fullness often comes from a single instrument with just the right type of reverb or room noise.
Q: A lot of your songs to me balance melancholy with beauty. The saying a sad and beautiful world comes to mind. Is this something that you try to achieve in your songs?
A: Yes, quite deliberately. Life is contradictory and complex. I’m drawn to the ideas of the absurdist school — the tragically-comic beauty inherent in our constant search for meaning up against the human inability to ultimately find any; man’s many follies in the face of sublime nature. I find poetry in the everyday, in the transience of earthly joys. At the core of all this is anxiety and uncertainty. My effort to escape it may be futile but the action itself can be meaningful or beautiful. The goal of good art or music or fiction should be “to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” (David Foster Wallace).
Q: What is the energy like performing these songs live?
A: As with the recordings, live performances are dependent on an appropriate space — I’m rarely able to play conventional music venues since I don’t do entertainment or back-ground music. So, I’m left with spaces that you wouldn’t normally associate with live music — I tend to play shows in theaters, photographic studios, galleries, private homes and courtyards. I have an essential approach. It’s about expressing the feeling of the songs without overdoing it. It’s about using what I have, no bells and whistles. Mostly I’m just singing and performing on a processed guitar, sometimes accompanied with a little foot-controlled organ. The result is a more stripped-down take of the recorded versions. A live performance is a sacrifice for me because my music-making process is quite a private affair. A live performance is basically me reluctantly letting a bunch of strangers into that personal space. As such, I expect an audience to be accommodating and respectful in my space. The mood is intimate and intense.
Q: The songs while different certainly bleed into each other in a sense. Are there any songs which you have a proclivity towards for any reason now that the album is released?
A: I’m still very fond of the bonus song that’s not on the LP version. It’s called RETURN. I normally suffer from having too much material going into an album and this time I wanted to edit myself, to make an album that fits in the traditional vinyl runtime of 44 minutes max. That led to a selection of ten songs including RETURN. But then, right at the end of the process, while trying to record something of a medley overture thing incorporating all the songs, I happened on something new which became WATCHTOWER. I had to cut something to include it and rather than editing out the instrumental interludes that bind the songs together, I decided to simply replace RETURN with WATCHTOWER. RETURN at the end of the album links thematically with SPEAK at the beginning — a sort-of reprise or reminder of the ritual treachery of language. And so, maybe it’s apt that it occurs off-album, as something both discovered and revisited.
Q: What does the future hold your musical career?
A: Early next year, I’ll find myself in Finland as part of a month-long artist residency program. The project I have in mind relies on places of emotional resonance — I’ll be ‘listening’ to the contours of a landscape and transposing them into song and object, a distillation of place through music and artifact. I hope to display these findings as a gallery show on returning to South Africa. In addition, a new album called YAW is due for release next year. YAW is a set of 24 short instrumental vignettes written on a uniquely prepared, tempered classical guitar. As a complementary collection, it attempts to do instrumentally what MAW describes with voice and words. I’m also, in between all this, trying to record a demo with a new band i’m part of called Zoo Lake — we have a loud no-wave psychedelic post-punk sound. And I’m constantly writing and experimenting with new sounds and songs for my solo project.
Q: What got you interested in creating songs that embrace atmosphere and ambience?
A: I guess it might simply be a result of my listening preferences. I’m as interested in traditional songwriting (i.e. Leonard Cohen) and folk music as I am in ambient music (i.e. Wolfgang Voigt). So It feels natural for me to merge these two seemingly disparate approaches. The goal is not necessarily to create something entirely new as much as it is creating something I would personally want to listen to. From a production point of view, I try to position every bit of music I make in a particular space. I ask myself where a piece of music is occurring — is it in a cave, a forest, a room? large or small? What is the scene or setting? That, in effect, is what creates the ambience. I’m not fond of the super-pop production values where everything seems to be happening in a perfect abstract vacuum — the sound of the space, the noise, is as important to me as the music itself.
Q: MAW is full of lush soundscapes that morph and evolve with nuances. What is the songwriting process like when taking this into consideration?
A: Songwriting starts with me and a guitar or an organ. The music as chords gets generated pretty quickly. I never decide to sit down and write songs — it just happens when I’m experimenting on the guitar as part of my daily playing routine. I just really enjoy playing guitar. Vocal melodies present themselves as I’m noodling away. About half the time vocal melodies present themselves when I submit myself to some sort of drone: fridge hum, electric fan purr, traffic white noise, guitar feedback, the buzzing you hear like bees in your ears just before you fall asleep. For some reason these things activate melodies in my head. Songwriting and lyrics take a little longer. I prefer to wait till the end of the process when I have a bunch of different songs to work on, so I can write across them with some unifying idea. On MAW, the songs deliberately borrow from each other — some lyrics link with each other, some musical motifs are repeated. As mentioned the ambience or treatment mostly occurs at a recording and production level. Some of that droning that led to the initial song has to come back into play. I try not to over-layer things — much of the fullness often comes from a single instrument with just the right type of reverb or room noise.
Q: A lot of your songs to me balance melancholy with beauty. The saying a sad and beautiful world comes to mind. Is this something that you try to achieve in your songs?
A: Yes, quite deliberately. Life is contradictory and complex. I’m drawn to the ideas of the absurdist school — the tragically-comic beauty inherent in our constant search for meaning up against the human inability to ultimately find any; man’s many follies in the face of sublime nature. I find poetry in the everyday, in the transience of earthly joys. At the core of all this is anxiety and uncertainty. My effort to escape it may be futile but the action itself can be meaningful or beautiful. The goal of good art or music or fiction should be “to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” (David Foster Wallace).
Q: What is the energy like performing these songs live?
A: As with the recordings, live performances are dependent on an appropriate space — I’m rarely able to play conventional music venues since I don’t do entertainment or back-ground music. So, I’m left with spaces that you wouldn’t normally associate with live music — I tend to play shows in theaters, photographic studios, galleries, private homes and courtyards. I have an essential approach. It’s about expressing the feeling of the songs without overdoing it. It’s about using what I have, no bells and whistles. Mostly I’m just singing and performing on a processed guitar, sometimes accompanied with a little foot-controlled organ. The result is a more stripped-down take of the recorded versions. A live performance is a sacrifice for me because my music-making process is quite a private affair. A live performance is basically me reluctantly letting a bunch of strangers into that personal space. As such, I expect an audience to be accommodating and respectful in my space. The mood is intimate and intense.
Q: The songs while different certainly bleed into each other in a sense. Are there any songs which you have a proclivity towards for any reason now that the album is released?
A: I’m still very fond of the bonus song that’s not on the LP version. It’s called RETURN. I normally suffer from having too much material going into an album and this time I wanted to edit myself, to make an album that fits in the traditional vinyl runtime of 44 minutes max. That led to a selection of ten songs including RETURN. But then, right at the end of the process, while trying to record something of a medley overture thing incorporating all the songs, I happened on something new which became WATCHTOWER. I had to cut something to include it and rather than editing out the instrumental interludes that bind the songs together, I decided to simply replace RETURN with WATCHTOWER. RETURN at the end of the album links thematically with SPEAK at the beginning — a sort-of reprise or reminder of the ritual treachery of language. And so, maybe it’s apt that it occurs off-album, as something both discovered and revisited.
Q: What does the future hold your musical career?
A: Early next year, I’ll find myself in Finland as part of a month-long artist residency program. The project I have in mind relies on places of emotional resonance — I’ll be ‘listening’ to the contours of a landscape and transposing them into song and object, a distillation of place through music and artifact. I hope to display these findings as a gallery show on returning to South Africa. In addition, a new album called YAW is due for release next year. YAW is a set of 24 short instrumental vignettes written on a uniquely prepared, tempered classical guitar. As a complementary collection, it attempts to do instrumentally what MAW describes with voice and words. I’m also, in between all this, trying to record a demo with a new band i’m part of called Zoo Lake — we have a loud no-wave psychedelic post-punk sound. And I’m constantly writing and experimenting with new sounds and songs for my solo project.