How the album A Sense of Destiny was recorded.

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I'm back from touring with my project Crime on the Bunny. This project was named after my album that I released during the pandemic. During a holiday walk, I found a stuffed rabbit discarded in the bushes. I figured it had been dumped there by antisocials. But the rabbit was still laughing. I could think of various atrocities that could have been committed on him (he had a huge hole between his legs), but he was still laughing. The next day I set about creating this act. I used Pat Mastelotto's drums and the album ended up being part of a double CD of 10 Poems for ronroco and Crime on the Bunny. The tour turned out pretty well. The clubs were almost completely empty, but me and Joe Ragan were happy to play live.

On my last tour with The Buzzfish project, Gerg and I were talking about the effects of Covid on us. Gergo mentioned that he didn't have the motivation he had before. There's still a feeling inside him that it could happen again. We will simply be stopped and subjected to a public lynching by the politicians. Who needs culture? Why money for culture? Culture can wait. People have other problems. They need to shop and pay their loans...

I completely agree with Gergo. I have also lost some of my motivation. Sometimes when I was making an album I would imagine how I would surprise the listeners at specific points in the songs, how I would make them think, how I wouldn't repeat a phrase one more time, how I would make them feel anxious and then how I would bring them out of it. At the end of the album there is a happy ending or at least nostalgia. I leave three dots in them at the end, which I like to put in the lyrics...

I don't see the audience in the studio anymore in those crazy pandemic years. I've returned involuntarily to my beginnings. I do it for myself. I want to surprise myself and my musical colleagues. I don't want to impose anything on anybody and, as Gergo Borlai used to say, there's already this feeling in me that somebody can shut us down again with a wave of the hand. Gergo lived in Spain during the pandemic. He couldn't play the drums for a month and a half. His rehearsal room was at the other end of town, where walkouts weren't allowed. When he got to his kit after a month and a half, he started talking to it and went to make coffee. Some of the musicians had stopped playing for good. They just couldn't take it. I had similar feelings and thoughts. But I knew that I could only escape by working, that is, by creating. Arve Henriksen and I were in constant contact and we recorded a lot of music together. For example, our album Unexpected Isolation, which got a lot of good reviews. It was a horrible period that marked us all. Two years. Someone gets two years in jail for drunk driving or petty theft...

I'll come back to the point. After the Crime on the Bunny tour, I got Covid. It was the exact week of my birthday. To avoid infecting my family, I stayed in the studio. The course was difficult. I had fevers, lost my taste and smell and was very weak. I decided to use my stay in quarantine creatively. I watched Kieslowski's films and every night (mostly on acoustic guitars) I recorded short ideas to send to Arve.

Gradually these became our latest album, A Sense of Destiny. The very first song, Alma and a silhouette of hope, was written on the first night of quarantine. I imagined little Alma, who died at the age of five. When it happened it blew me away. I had never seen her in person. She was the daughter of an acquaintance of mine, but it shook me up a lot. I had already thought of her when I was recording Sculpting in Time, but I didn't know how to make a song that portrayed her. Now it's happened.

When Arve sent me the recorded trumpet for the first song out of quarantine I knew I had it. Arve's trumpet drew it. When I heard Arve play, tears started to flow. I imagined little Alma, like a pencil-drawn little girl, playing happily in the meadow. Chasing butterflies and picking tiny flowers.

We worked on the album with small pauses. I had to go to the US and Arve had other projects. Gradually we were talking on the phone and coming back to individual songs. My grandmother died. I couldn't go to the funeral because of my trip to the US. Since 2006 I have a project in my head in which I would like to use string instruments and an old female folk voice. Maybe it would just be a song... I could never grasp this project. It kept getting stuck in my thoughts. Maybe someday... But, seeing how folklore is being rewritten now, I don't really feel like it...

The song Ancient dreams reminds me of my grandmother. Arve's playing is like a human voice again. It's a monologue of an old woman crying and enjoying herself at the same time. She has accepted her fate and is leaving at the same time...

A few months after my grandmother died, my grandfather died. Grandfather was a musician and the head of the brass band in Fričovce. He was very proud of me. He's in the song Friendship and Shadows behind the pillars. Friendship is a silent memory. A lonely ronroco along with my breathing recorded by the microphone.

Shadows behind the pillars is an inner scream. Anger at the fragility and brevity of human life. The bitter and unchanging fate. Before my grandfather, my good friend Peter Migaš's father died.

The composition The Sky contains a Tristan chord. It's like a scene from Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is the music that plays in that film.

The song The Hope is a joy beyond life. We are here and we still have the people we love around us. In the end, love wins and saves the world.

The penultimate track Before the rain is like a scene from a nostalgic movie. It's evening, it's raining, music is playing from the turntable and mixing with thoughts. The last track Remaining memories is meant as the closing credits of the film. Here the whole story is shown in flashbacks.

The final sound of the album was done by Helge Sten. He is truly a master. He understands the aesthetics of this music very well.

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