Nac/Hut Report is a self-contained being. Currently Kraków-based, Polish-Italian duo has some brushes with the familiar, taking influences from dream pop, industrial and even musique concrete, but always to bring the uncanny out of them. Nac/Hut Report forges their poetics album after album, relentlessly and reclusively, without any care for trends or scene connections. The latest emanation of this process, an album titled Blue Afternoon, has been released recently on enjoy life label, while Jadwiga and Luca agreed to answer a couple of my questions.
[MOŻESZ PRZECZYTAĆ TEN WYWIAD PO POLSKU]
Jessica McComber: How does a song begin its existence for you? As a melody, a sample, an idea?
Jadwiga: It’s different for every album. For the last one, we started mostly from a piano melody.
Luca: In the beginning, we’re always trying to create a harmonic part that would fit in a loop that could go all the way through a song. Jadwiga took care of this part for the last record. We always work with live performance in mind, when we have this sample-based foundation with layers upon layers of sound on top of it. A loop or a sample is always a basic building block for our compositions. We never create separate structures for verse and chorus, but go for something more abstract, that we could go over and over without any time limitations.
So your tracks are designed for live performance from the start, right?
L: Even though we don’t play live a lot, we always thought that if we’re going to present our music to somebody, it would feel rather weak if we couldn’t fully recreate what you hear on the records.
J: With electronic music, especially of the kind we make, you don’t have the same limitations that live bands have, so creating it for a live setup may give it dynamics that it may not have otherwise.
L: That’s also why we avoid computers when playing live and use machinery only.
Tell me about your new album. Does it have an underlying concept, something like old radio jingles on Absent or wax recordings on DOM 1919?
L: Well, for Blue Afternoon, we were thinking mostly about… death.
J: Death, but also melancholy. The title Blue Afternoon refers to the vibe we’ve been trying to achieve. It’s supposed to be a soundtrack to a sad, gloomy afternoon.
L: We’ve had some discussions about the death of music, which I believe we’re facing in recent years, and from that came the idea of recreating a condition of something dead and lost. To think about music in the context of death, rather than life.
Would you like to elaborate on that death of music part?
L: I believe we’re living in a very strange time for music, especially that of a more difficult kind. To say that music is dead means that people stopped getting something really present in their lives from it. It turned into something that they just consume. I guess capitalism can kill many forms of human expression and art.
Would you say that this is the case of art turning into content?
L: Definitely. Music is now everywhere, but the level of attention towards it is too small. Even if some really innovative music came out now, I don’t think any of us would realize it, because there is way too much of everything. I perceive this as the end of an era. Art and music as we know it is dead. So the idea was to make a dead album, and maybe try to recreate some very old music, or at least our perception of it.
J: Like a ghost of the past music.
So this could be connected to hauntology?
J and L (enthusiastically, in unison): Yes, yes!
From that it would follow that your music deals with memory.
J: Yeah, absolutely.
L: The memory of the music itself, I guess. But on the last album in a way we’re trying to evoke the idea of memory in general.
J: It’s trying to remind you of what music used to be, more than composing something entirely original in the times when the concept of originality doesn’t seem as relevant anymore.
But Jadwiga, I somehow got an impression that you don’t entirely agree with Luca’s assertion that the music is dead.
J: Well, I agree with what he has said now, and this concept of dead music has been elaborated over some time, but my opinion is that on the one hand, you have this massive quantity of music that has devolved into content, but on the other, now there is a chance to discover a huge amount of really original stuff. So it’s not dead in the sense that you can’t find any new interesting music to listen to, but I agree that the way we perceive and share music isn’t what it used to mean in the past. Maybe it’s more difficult to keep a scene alive and reach people who may actually dig what you do.
Also being a musician as a full-time job isn’t a viable option for most people anymore.
J: Maybe for musicians that have started their careers a long time ago, but for those who are beginning now, it’s not something even imaginable.
L: I remember watching an interview with one big-time musician, who has said that in the past, the kids were saving their little money to buy a record, but now they want it for free, and to spend their money on apps on their phones. That’s a joke, of course, but there is some truth to the fact that music isn’t perceived as something important that you should be dedicated to in any way, even economically.
How do you navigate the fact that you’ve been doing this for such a long time and still are so deep underground?
L: I never had any high expectations, being fully aware our music isn’t very easy to digest for most people. Maybe we’d like to stay underground with a little bit of credibility.
J: The exploration and experimenting was often more important for us than any kind of accomplishment from, let’s say, a commercial point of view.
Let’s talk a bit more about the sound itself. Imagine that someone who doesn’t know too much about stuff like Einstürzende Neubauten and other experimental music, asks you what is so cool about making music from all those noises and random sounds?
J: There’s a lot of fun to this, because there is always something unexpected. It’s not like you’re trying to nail a melody perfectly, but more about adventure and freedom to mix together things you’re not supposed to, and maybe find something you just feel is right. You can use your intuition and expression to do something that seems to work according to your sensibility.
L: The adventure is for the listener as well. It’s pretty easy to make something straightforward and predictable. With most music, you need to hear the first two or three chords to know what’s going to be next. The adventure starts when you explore a territory that is uncomfortable. Maybe what was adventurous in the past now has become something like a topos, but it’s always an interesting experience to start hearing something and not know where it will go.
J: In the last album especially we tried to combine recognizable, old songs with some noise. You can find a different match for something you’ve known so well.
L: A good example of this would be Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy. You hear the first three chords and you think: “oh, this is going to be a 60s type of song” and then there’s all this noise and different atmosphere. You have an expectation, but you get something else.
On the other hand, your discography feels quite monolithic, in a sense that you’re always going towards one specific, unique vision.
L: Most of the time we’re trying to make an experience out of an album. I usually don’t like albums that try to do too many things at once, I always preferred albums that are like a wall, a whole thing. Who knows, maybe that’s the limit of our creativity.
J: I like to make things that are sort of magmatic. Just like when you listen to some pop music, you might remember a hook or a piece of melody, but you get more of a general vibe from the rest. We try to reproduce how music can be distorted and blurred out by memory.
Have you ever considered doing a side project with something completely different from your main discography?
L: Couple years ago we did something along the lines of our idea of a pop album, with drum machines, but our type of composition.
J: But it sometimes has some verses and choruses even!
L: Maybe it will be released one day, but we are not sure about this.
Do you think your countries of origin have an influence on the way you think about art? Is there, for instance, an Italian angle to Nac/Hut Report?
L: Not that much. I’ve grown up in a weird period and a weird place, left Italy a long time ago and never really been influenced by Italian culture. Maybe the only influence came from the fact that we were heavily influenced by the USA at that era. I grew up on American culture and it was fine for me, as I’ve found lots of great music, books and films. I don’t recall ever hearing an Italian band and thinking “wow, this is as good as Sonic Youth!”. It might be a weird thing to say, but I’ve never had real contact with Italian culture.
In this case I’m not sure if you’re the right person to answer my next question, but I’ll ask it anyway, as this is something I’ve been wondering about for some time. Do you have any idea why the industrial and noise music scene is so strong in Italy? Starting from Maurizio Bianchi and Atrax Morgue to the contemporary experimental underground, there always seemed to be a lot going on.
L: Well, it’s connected to what I’ve just said. Some parts of Italy, especially in the north, are very open to outside influences. This was the case with the industrial scene in the 80s, when many young Italians absorbed records from Germany or UK and decided to make their own version of this music. Some parts of the country were under condition that could be described as cultural colonialism, but it brought some interesting stuff as well.
Well, in this there are some parallels to Polish underground. A lot of especially older Polish stuff boils down to “X but Polish”, like Siekera is basically a Polish take on Killing Joke.
J: Luca says something like this all the time when I show him Polish stuff from the 80s.
L: Even the 90s, like Myslovitz was a Polish take on britpop. Well, this idea of taking outside influence and making it your own seems to be pretty universal.
That being said, I consider Maurizio Bianchi for example as someone fully original, not an Italian version of anyone. He’s also been a peer to pioneers like Throbbing Gristle and SPK.
L: I suppose that’s because he’s been inspired by avantgarde composers from 60s and 70s more than popular records from England.
Jadwiga, how about a Polish angle to your music?
J: It’s quite natural that the culture you grow up in influences your perception of things you do later. However, I’m not sure if I can pinpoint anything in particular that had a huge impact on what I do. Sure, I used to listen to Pidżama Porno as a teenager, but I wouldn’t say it’s reflected in the music I make now.
L: What about your lyrics?
J: Oh, that’s for sure. My fondness for surrealism in writing lyrics has to have some influence from Polish culture.
Now when I think about it, there is something very pre-war XX century about you. All the magic realism and analogue sounds, not to mention how you live an outdated fantasy about bohemians, with those paintings hanging on the walls of an apartment in Kraków’s Kazimierz.
J: I think Luca should start smoking a pipe.
L: Yeah, I was also considering getting a classic-style hat.
Jadwiga, do you think your background as a painter impacts you as a musician?
J: Definitely. It often helps me to organize ideas that are very abstract and difficult to even think about in everyday terms.
Are you responsible for creating all your album covers?
J: Yes. The one for Blue Afternoon is actually a photograph of a mirror with some pearls and drops of water on it.
Apart from that, do you have a strict division of responsibilities between you two?
J: It changed many times over the years, but currently I’m responsible for lyrics and the melodic part, the harmonies, while Luca…
L:…I help with developing those melodies into actual compositions. I sometimes suggest changing some sounds in the harmonies so they loop better or something like that, but it always starts with her ideas. I mostly work on the details.
So you’re not a singer/producer duo?
J: Not really, even though production is more on Luca’s side.
L: We work closely together during recording anyway. Jadwiga also plays electronics, both live as well as in the studio. I just put the final cut together.
Do you often have disagreements during this process?
L: Not anymore, but in the past…
J: Yeah, back when you were composing some melodic parts.
L: I was playing guitar a lot until around 2022, which caused me to have much stronger ideas about what could be an instrumental contribution from my end. We tended to have some conflicts about those parts. It’s much smoother now, since I gave up live instrumentation and focused on electronics, giving Jadwiga more space to work on her melodies.
J: Over the years you also learn not to get too attached to things you make. At this point, when something doesn’t seem to work, I’m prolific enough to just make another one and try again.
L: Nowadays, for every album we prepare 25 to 30 songs and just throw away most of them.
As a writer, I also often find myself deleting a lot of what I’ve written and leaving only the best stuff.
L: I think it was Abel Ferrara who has said that “cinema is extinction”. When you’re making a movie, you record hours upon hours of stuff, most of which ends up in trash.
It’s also really easy to see when someone isn’t good at this. There are so many 2 CD albums that should have been just 1 CD, but someone couldn’t help themselves.
J: For this reason I write lots of melodies, but lyrics are done only after we agree that something actually works. I’ve noticed that if I have lyrics written for a given melody, it’s much easier for me to get attached to it and have this regret if it doesn’t make it to the album when I’ve said something personal to it. If it’s just a melody, it’s much easier to just put it away.
How do you navigate doing a music project while sharing a life as a couple?
J: It works fine for us, because it gives us an opportunity to share ideas and experiment with them whenever we need to.
L: It’s perfect for me. Every year or two we quit our jobs to focus on music exclusively for some time. You cannot do something like this when you’re in a band where everyone has got their own, independent lives. When I was younger, I used to be in bands and I know how hard it can be for four people to show up for a rehearsal at the same time and place.
I recall a lot of music projects that fell apart because couples making them have split. What advice would you give to musicians who are currently working like that?
J: I think the important thing is honesty about your expectations for doing this and the influence it has over your life. I suppose a lot of times it doesn’t work out because one person is committed more than the other. If you both decide to dedicate yourself to this passion to the same degree, it’s going to be much easier. It’s generally important for every couple to have common goals. In this way, even when you release something and it doesn’t work out to your expectations, you still share this experience together. I don’t want to sound pretentious, but there’s a choice of the path your life will go through. Of course, I don’t know how serious someone’s relationship is – I wouldn’t like to scare anybody by saying that it has to be a lifelong commitment!
L: If your expectations about what you do and the lifestyle it could bring you are too high, it’s easy for frustration to appear and those expectations to be projected onto your partner. This could become a real emotional mess. Maybe it’s better to be a bit cold about music stuff.
J: It might sound a bit cheesy, but it’s also worth remembering that you’re doing something you love with someone you love.
L: Well, even if you’re not a couple, there usually is some sort of human connection between people making music together.
That’s not always the case. I’ve read somewhere that the guys from Darkthrone live on the opposite ends of Norway and just meet when they decide to make an album, record it, and then they just fuck off and not stay in touch until the next session.
L: I’ve heard about bands whose members hate each other, but it’s really weird for me. Whenever I was in a band, I was always good friends with everyone and we were spending time together even outside of making music. I don’t know how you can be in a band with someone you hate!
J: I can actually imagine that. Just because somebody has a character you don’t like, doesn’t mean that they cannot have some valid contributions.
My favorite romantic couple in music is Coil. An interesting thing about them is that they broke up as a couple around 2002, but decided to keep making music anyway.
L: I guess something like this is much easier when you have great results from what you are doing, not to mention similar lifestyles, like in the case of Coil.
They were well in their forties at the time this decision was made, which also may have been a factor. This leads me to my next question: you’ve been doing this for around 15 years now. Does aging affect your approach to art?
J: I definitely feel more confident about what I do and it’s easier for me to get the results I’m expecting from it. I also think my ideas got more abstract over the years.
L: I’m a bit more conflicted about it. A lot of people, myself included, tend to think that the real innovation in music will always come from young people, who, being in their own era, are naturally better in reacting to reality than myself. But you know, after a while it becomes a lifestyle. If I stopped doing this, I would immediately feel that something is missing. And I guess we’re still putting some good creativity into what we’re doing.
J: What I’ve meant about the confidence I’ve got is that maybe we don’t have this sense of innovation that younger people have, but we also don’t put that much pressure on ourselves, which gives us more space to focus on what we really care about.
Do you think that your work has changed with the development and greater availability of technology over the years?
J: Well, electronics are what enabled me to create music in the first place, as I can’t play any traditional instrument.
L: So much has changed when it comes to recording and post production technology. When I was playing in bands in the early 00s, we had to pay a lot of money to get into a studio in order to record anything, and the results were never exactly what we wanted. Now our entire approach to making music, based on manipulating loops, is enabled by technology.
What is the one piece of equipment that you would take to a desert island?
J: Well, everything is connected with the rest in our setup, so we couldn’t do much with just one thing.
L: I think the most useful thing would be the Boss delay pedal, as it has a built-in looper as well.
What contemporary musicians do you feel kinship with?
L: First of all, and I guess you can ever hear it on our new album, it would be Leyland Kirby a.k.a. The Caretaker. He’s surely one of my main influences when it comes to production and themes in my music.
J: And he often hangs around Kazimierz! We also really love Beach House, Grouper and Midwife.
L: Midwife is definitely one of our favorite new acts, especially her second album. About some more experimental stuff…
J: Anatol!
L: Oh yes, Anatol for sure is also among the favorites.
Speaking of Anatol, I think you might be the oldest artists released on his label, enjoy life. I really wonder, what do you make of other music from this label?
L: Oh, we really like a lot of it. Polsoja is really great, just like every other thing Mimi was involved in. We’ve seen hage-o live a couple times and they are a really good act. They remind me of a younger version of a 90s band, which is an attitude I really appreciate. I’m not very much into the hip-hop stuff though. I suppose it’s a generational thing.
J: I think enjoy life is a great resource for everything going on in Polish underground music.
L: We were also really into Order of the Rainbow Girls’ album from a couple years ago. It had this 90s, indie rock vibe, but it was very fresh at the same time. I think the best band to ever do this sort of stuff was Złota Jesień. I think it’s my favorite Polish act ever.
And as of now, it’s also one of the best meme pages on Instagram.
J: Of course, I follow it!
Alright, I have one last question for you. Imagine Anatol forked out some pocket money for a TV commercial of your new album. What would you say in it for your potential new listeners? You have 30 seconds.
J: Kids, don’t buy drugs – wait until someone offers them for free!
L: This is very 80s television of you.
J: I know, I was trying to be hauntological. I guess it should be somewhat disturbing, with a bit of hauntology, but with some new media as well. A constant, irritating sound with flashing lights and images.
L: William Burroughs had this acceptance speech when he got some sort of academic award. He said: “20 years ago those people wanted me in prison, now they give me an award. I didn’t give a fuck then, and I don’t give a fuck now.”
J: Save this one for when we get a Grammy!