06.08.2019 by Marc Schwegler

Country Music – Workshop and Platform

Anna Sagström und Daniel Iinatti are the two brains behind the collaborative music platform Country Music. Marc Schwegler met the two creators in 2018 for an interview. Originally published in zweikommasieben #17, we upload the piece in the context of our review of Norbergfestival [German Only] that is co-curated by Daniel Iianitti.

Country Music releases music and text via a website, putting out a string of tracks restricted to a length of eight minutes. The tracks, which aren’t available on either the ubiquitous music stores or streaming platforms, are by Nkisi, HAJ3000, Estoc, and Osheyak—i.e., key members in a global scene of club-oriented producers whose sonic experiments lead them further and further from the dancefloor. The releases are accompanied by a trenchant, idiosyncratic visual language and aesthetic as well as far-reaching conceptual considerations; and Country Music also sells various design objects. At the center of the project’s philosophy and activities are questions of periphery and marginalia, and of the working and living conditions resulting from a post-industrial economy.

Marc Schwegler How did you get to know each other?

Anna Sagström Daniel was in a collective called Yoga Center, which ran a project space in Gothenburg. I myself was running a project space in Stockholm. We released a couple of USB sticks—TCF did one, we did one ourselves, and we also invited Yoga Center to do one. That was maybe five years ago. Although I was working in visual art, music has always been a keen interest of mine. So I think I was always attracted to Daniel’s field of knowledge and the energy around music and art. I then had this vague idea that I emailed him about, and we started discussing doing something that was in between art and music, based around certain themes that we have now incorporated into Country Music.

Daniel Iinatti I guess we didn’t realize it in the beginning, but we both grew up in similar cities.

AS Yes—postindustrial cities that used to be prominent at a certain point in Swedish history. I come from a steel industry town called Fagersta that was built for 30,000 people, but nowadays only twelve thousand are left. It’s a bit like a ghost town—there are a lot of defunct and empty spaces. I also felt that we’ve both been a bit outside of the establishment by choice, especially in Stockholm.

DI The town I grew up in, Laxå, was blooming in the 70s. We had like 10,000 people there, and growing industries. In the 90s those industries started shutting down and it started to decline. It’s not a ghost town per se, but it’s one of the few towns in Sweden where the population is shrinking.

AS Globalization should theoretically make smaller cities more accessible, but actually it’s the opposite—everything is being horizontalized. That’s what has been interesting to us: things starting to shrink and decline, times slowing down, and people adjusting to that. And the other thing was space: how different it is to be surrounded by unused space. And what happens when you combine those two things. That’s the paradox we’re interested in: this weird texture of time and space. Later in the project, we started to speak more about what the periphery could also mean more generally. Now we have a much wider and generous understanding of this concept. Geographies are more complex than we thought in the beginning. At first we had this idea that our producers should come from the countryside. But then we realized that a lot of people actually leave those environments and move to the cities…

MS I didn’t know that there’s a rural, post-industrial Sweden. Is the postcolonial notion of a “global south” misleading in the sense that some of the fragmentation in the north gets overlooked? In America they say that the recent success of populism is based upon re-focusing on the so-called “forgotten men and women” of fly-over country. Is there something to that?

AS That’s a tricky political territory to speak about. This is where I’m torn: on the one hand I do believe the frustrations of the Rust Belt and all that. At the same time, I think there’s a responsibility to be socially progressive. And I don’t know how to have it both ways, exactly. Our ambition has always been to have a wide geography of artists. So far, we’ve basically just had people we know, and now we’re trying to reach out to a wider group of people—just to pick up something global in the idea of countryside, whatever that might be, with inclusive politics. We have a lot of friends with visa issues, or different issues related to class and race. I think that has heightened our sense of marginalia or periphery. And we also started to think a lot about how the periphery relates to work. I also worked a lot in industries—I used to work as a cleaner for a time. Being in all that dust and dirt feels like the opposite of progress, somehow. We’ve been involved in so many jobs, like extra jobs and side jobs. We thought that this rarely gets discussed. You present the culture and art that you produce while you’re doing all this other work to finance it. And your art has to be pure and presentable and you’re not supposed to present the struggle. I think—especially with music—it’s hard to keep up and go out and club and dance. So we wanted to shift the perception. The producers that we know don’t have the time to go clubbing all the time. When they produce music they think of other ways to consume music—you listen to it at work or in a wide range of situations.

DI I guess that’s also what we wanted to present with the imagery online: the different situations— outside of a club environment—in which you can perceive the music we present.

MS You also present a very peculiar aesthetic of labor with your images, though. One could argue that especially the workshop that you feature so prominently points back to an economy before the industrial revolution…

AS But it’s actually my former workplace where we went back to to take the photos—I returned to the workplace I actually got fired from. I always came too late and I hated the copy-in cards. After a while they said I needed to start at 7 a.m. because it was a workshop, and after a couple of months I was just like, “Argh, I don’t want to ever go back there.” But we thought it might also be quite meaningful to do work that has come out of all of these frustrations and of the times being at that workplace and listening to music. So I just asked my former bosses. And it was quite a funny photoshoot—all my former colleagues were working and they thought, “What are you doing here?” They thought I was weird, anyway. But of course everything we do is super aestheticized—for example, the brightness is turned way up. We talked a lot about aesthetics and what they represent, and how you could appropriate an aesthetic that is used in a lot of workshops—one that’s somehow a working-class aesthetic, but not necessarily a cool one. We went for black and yellow, which symbolizes factory work and labor, and also certain sports teams and things like that. I don’t know. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we try to celebrate and criticize something at the same time. “Could there be such a thing like vernacular design?” we wondered. Our main logo symbol, for example, is taken from a construction company…

DI …Which is actually the company where my mom and dad used to work!

MS So there’s a deliberate attempt to represent and highlight certain individual and biographical issues with Country Music?

AS Biographies are often stripped in terms of social and political backgrounds. I think we’ve been bringing our biographies into this project for the first time, and that’s something that’s quite relieving. It’s a reality that in order to do art, a lot of times, you have to be supported by a day job—or by your parents. And we just want to highlight the struggle and the many different identities that people have to put on.

MS Involving your own identity runs counter to certain notions of fluidity in identities…

AS Yeah, exactly. There are some restrictions and frustrations that come from being marginalized, from being someone not physically able to participate in certain scenes for various reasons—maybe geographical reasons or also other reasons. Estoc, for example, one of the earliest artists we released, spoke a lot about using the tools of oppression—harshness, hardness—and turning those around to create something empowering. From the beginning we’ve focused on hard music. With a lot of people we’ve emailed or people who have emailed us, there’s this interesting feedback loop, just like a raw energy in material. There seem to be things that people just want to get off their chest. The text by Jennifer Boyd we published, The Theory of the Strange Girl, tries to theorize this and asks if there could be such a thing as liberation in a quite limited space.

MS Could you talk about your notion of time a bit? Music is obviously a time-based art form—but you’re also interested in time in a more fundamental way. On your Soundcloud page, for example, there’s the claim: “Tools forming, under time.”

AS We release tracks based on this format of eight minutes—that’s also an allegory for what I mentioned before, because people do all these temporal shifts and turns within these eight minutes. It’s like the many different tempos people need to operate in all the time. But we’ve also realized as the project has evolved that we wanted to let the music speak for itself. In the beginning we tried to stick to certain concepts and were more concerned with presenting texts and making statements. Now we’re starting to just evolve and find formats.

DI We’ve invited all the producers on pretty much the same parameters. They use the eight minutes relatively freely, however they want. Our producers are not traditional club producers, per se, but they’re in the club music realm. And this provides them a space to produce something outside of certain restrictions, something that doesn’t need to be played at a club. The eight minutes give them space to elaborate more on intros or outros or structures of songs.

AS We’ve always given them the option of empty space—but actually only two people have done it. Digital releases don’t have a particular timeframe; you can just start to compose and let it run. We tried to highlight the materiality of time by giving a specific frame. Some people think it’s too short, some think it’s too long, a lot of people do tempo shifts or whatever. You can fill it out. That’s been interesting for us. I do think that having a format that everyone has to follow gives you the opportunity to think more about certain aspects.

AS Exactly. How do you even divide it and think about it spatially? We’ve been talking about maybe cutting it in half for future releases to give multiple alternatives of how long the release should be. To make it even more intense. Like four-minute or two-minute releases. Or sixteen-minute ones. Maybe we’ll do some 30-second specials. From the beginning, the format was also tied to a workday. When you work and you listen to something, it’s quite easy to keep track of time—like in eight-minute structures. You can give yourself a time structure without using technology or other things. In the beginning we also wanted to do much more extreme things—fourty-minute mixes, several hours. Or then we wanted to do low-volume release. But when you actually start to talk to producers, you realize you should not be too controlling and over-conceptualize things.

MS What music is country music to you, then?

AS I guess Lento Violento could be considered country music. I don’t know. But that’s quite an interesting and also under-examined genre, I think. There’s a certain folksiness to it. A lot of high-tempo and hardcore music also seems to come from suburban spaces.

DI The producers we’ve invited so far come from a wide range of genres. I think that’s also how we would like to continue in the future. The hardness will still be a vital part of it, but in different ways. For example, our next release will be with B.yhzz—and I don’t know how to genre-fy that. He’s doing a very specific track for us, made with his grandfather’s old farming tools. And he’s making noise with them, I guess—it’s the least club-oriented track we have so far.

AS In American country music you think about all this sentimentality, emotionality. And we thought about how to get some of that through. Like in hardcore, what would this emotionality sound like? It would sound very different, of course, but it probably still has those moments. It’s also a music that helps you cope with things. That can be in so many different ways, depending on what people need. I don’t know if any of the tracks we released are different or emotional, but I would sure hope so. It does seem like people go out of their way when they produce for us and they try to get some feelings across.

MS Did you think of the whole project as a publishing operation? You could just call it a label and put out 12” vinyl…

DI We’ve actually talked a lot about this. We’re not a label. We’re not representing the artists we put out; we support them and try to invite them for shows, but…

AS …we don’t have catalogue numbers.

DI We’re not planning on putting out any physical releases. We’re not releasing on iTunes or Spotify.

AS We do want to be more of a generating force around conversations. We take artists that we like, we meet them, we try to come up with ideas and bounce them back to artists, just to put music in circulation. And we offer what we can, which I do think is to try to create a platform, somehow.

MS Can you talk a bit about the nights you organize? How do they fit into this platform?

DI It’s an essential part of the entire project that there are physical meetings. So far we’ve done only three nights: one in Berlin, two in Stockholm. The first one we did was in this bar called Nivå 22. It’s an infamous bar in Stockholm as it’s one of the cheapest. I was playing, HAJ300 and Swedish Lento Factory. We also released the text by Jason Pine that night. Stockholm is kind of posh everywhere you go. There are some people, though, that try to do something different—for example the Drömfakulteten collective that Kablam is also part of. Since everything else in Stockholm is very expensive and there isn’t really a nightlife because there aren’t any central night clubs, this night was crucial. It was very central and we made it a free party—no one paid entrance. We were playing gabber and hardcore music in this really small bar.

AS And then we did release the text as well—the first one, done by Jason Pine. Because we thought that distributing text would be an interesting format to play with. Even in a club you get these weird spaces; someone is in line for the bathroom or hanging out at the bar. We started to do these readings at the same time the party was going on, which was kind of special. There’s super-loud music and suddenly you have this very immersive reading. And you could see the bar staff reading the text. I thought that was great—just finding the gaps and the shifts in between the dancing and its fast pace. To catch people when they least expect it and release those texts. For the latest one in Stockholm, we also had an exhibition as part of the night.

DI The club itself has a small gallery in the basement, which we were able to use for a month.

AS It was an installation with a strobe light… And a special audio track where everything was stretched out to 24 minutes. That was contrasted with the strobe and a spinning globe on the ceiling. We did do a couple of combined exhibition parties in Copenhagen, Helsinki, and London in the spring. It’s all based upon an extended network of friends, and that’s what has been so great about Country Music. Even if it has a pretty opaque aesthetic with a lot of strong elements, I still think that a lot of people find it to be quite inclusive, and it does seem like people relate quite a bit. We get calls for collaborations and those sort of things, and that has been the main reason to do it.