Tomas Pristiak - Dog-rose (2021)

dog-rose is an exploration of musical articulation and vocalization. Its themes can be felt gnawing at the surface of the world: people’s clumsy everyday intimacies, the neverending pursuit of self-knowledge, God. Of foremost interest was the unreliability of memory as a tool through which we experience life, yielding an attempt to dismantle it into its minute elements.

"I arrived at a combination of diary entries in the form of field recordings, various, mostly acoustic, instruments through which I invoke different modes of memory // its associative functions, and my own voice, more an agent of introspection than any conventional vocal. The lyrics were originally written as pop-songs, but committed to the form of contemporary music they appear as field recordings made to be sung. They are field-songs."

"To me, musicmaking is a dialogue with sounds where I seek to understand their character and how to handle them. This is a performative process and admittedly also a projection – what I am actually discussing is myself. The recording took place at a remote cabin in the forests of Tribeč. Most of my work is created in isolation, regardless of the social distancing and lockdowns of the outside world."

Tomas Pristiak is a member of Tante Elze, Pain Palace (FKA Weltschmerzen), and dog-rose is his first solo album and the 11th release by contemplative label Weltschmerzen.