Péter Nemesházi
Péter Nemesházi

Home is where the heart is – Interview w/ Ajja Leu

“It’s just something useful my brain likes doing when I’m not making music or anything else. What interests me is that you can make anything you want; the possibilities are endless and the only limitation is figuring out how to tell the computer what you want it to do”

– The Ozorian Prophet subscribers have already read about your family’s history, that Felix Leu and his wife and fellow partner, Loretta Leu lead together a colorful rock ‘n roll gypsy lifestyle, traveled the world and brought up four extraordinarily creative children. As a constant member of the psychedelic community and gatherings you’re currently living the same life. How can you survive the endless and tiring check-ins and check-outs; where is the place you call your main headquarters?

– As the saying goes – home is where the heart is! Which for me is wherever my love Tanya is… At the moment it’s in a quiet field on a mountainside in the French Jura in Switzerland. It’s a lovely spot, and I’m always struck by the contrast of our quiet mountain life and the multitude of throbbing parties and festivals I travel to. The traveling does take a lot of energy, but it’s a fair trade for all the high quality dance floors I get to experience and play for… I’m very thankful for my job and hope I’ll be doing it for a long time! It’s important to have a good home base to come back to, where you can get your sense of perspective back and recharge your physical and emotional batteries.
I think music, psychedelic music in particular, is strongly influenced by the mood of the musician at the time of its creation. So a track written in bits and bobs while traveling might take years to come together and still sound a bit stiff, whereas I’ve written great fluid tracks in one night in my studio. Those are the tracks that sound fresh and make people really jump around on a dance floor. The ideas are much more cohesive and follow a logical progression. It’s very hard to write those tracks on headphones in airports and such – I do it when there’s no other option but it takes a lot more energy then when I’m in my home environment.

– You have been surrounded by arts since your childhood, tattooing for example was at hand from very early on, but you studied programming. An interesting pairing. Do you use this skill/knowledge for anything else except making and performing music?

– Actually all my programming skills are self-taught, with the notable exception of well timed bits of help from my good friends Neil (Dj Apex) and Chris (Simiantics). So far I’ve managed to get a working knowledge of a few major programming languages by stubborn perseverance, although sometimes it feels like standing in a cathedral in the dark and trying to redraw its blueprints by inching your way around the walls, ha ha!
I’ve written an eclectic array of software gadgets that are useful for me and my friends… From Max MSP effects and synthesizers to latency-free loopers, a few dj mapping templates, business-managing applications, sysex-based editors for various bits of older hardware, general zip utilities and all sorts of online and local database solutions.
These days I’ve been concentrating more on Python scripts that extend the functionality of Ableton Live in lots of interesting ways. The most recent script turns the program into eight smart latency free live loopers with virtually unlimited recording times… We use that one in The Peaking Goddess Collective sets a lot as it allows us to create our supporting loops on the spot, and then jam away on top of them.
I’ve never sold any of my software officially because it’s not something that I do as a career… It’s just something useful my brain likes doing when I’m not making music or anything else. What interests me is that you can make anything you want; the possibilities are endless and the only limitation is figuring out how to tell the computer what you want it to do. It’s a very trippy process that requires you to keep the whole complex structure in your head until you set it in code – at which time you instantly forget it all until you need it again. In a lot of ways it’s very similar to writing music.

– This year Orgones (as Yab Yum) was released on the V/A “Peakadelic”. Is Yab Yum still alive? What is the main difference between Yab Yum and your solo Ajja project?

– Gaspard decided to take some time off for a few years to concentrate on his family, during which time I kept the Yab Yum project going by myself – although I wasn’t releasing tracks under that name. Recently he has been feeling the urge to produce music again, so Yab Yum is happily very much alive and kicking with its original lineup restored! Gaspard is also working on his solo project and has almost finished his debut album, which will soon be released on Peak Records.
The main difference between my solo project and Yab Yum is that my own stuff tends to explore one idea or groove for each track and follow it through all its permutations, focusing heavily on the funky and groovy side of things – whereas Yab Yum, although just as groovy and funky, is a little bit pushier, edgier, slightly higher in bpms and with a more electronic flavor.

– Another project: the blasting Ajja & Cosmosis live psy guitar set. From the outside it would seem like you’re improvising. Is this the case?

Péter Nemesházi

Péter Nemesházi

– Hmmm, do you mean improvising or getting lost and forgetting what we are supposed to be playing? Ha ha!
It’s a bit of both really… the set is actually a very precisely timed piece of machinery. Our guitar effects are controlled by the computer and automatically change as the live set progresses, so we need to be playing the right thing at the right time. Sometimes it will turn on an effect just for a couple of seconds while we play a specific guitar riff, or turn our levels up or down as required for solo or rhythm parts. We have about sixty different effects and amplifiers each programmed in for the one-hour live set. There are also some “free” sections where we haven’t programmed any patch changes in and left ourselves room to improvise a bit and create a vibe on the spot.
Of course we’re both human beings, not computers… so we do forget where we are sometimes… but then there is always plan b… improvise our way back to familiar territory and pick up the storyline again! Luckily we have both been playing guitar onstage for decades, so we don’t get easily flustered and are generally comfortable whatever happens. Personally I like a bit of chaos in the mix – I think musicians play best when outside their comfort zone, and sometimes the only way to get yourself there is by making mistakes and catching them… Or trying to, at least, ha ha!

–Do you have any releases planned, or is this exclusively a live project?

– So far we have been concentrating exclusively on the live part of the show, making sure all those little rock’n’roll vignettes work properly and fine-tuning our sounds and levels with every gig. The plan is definitely to release an album at some point, but it’s hard to say when that will be… We both have our solo careers and are involved in other projects, so right now it’s not easy to carve out studio time for this one. We do have an upcoming release called “The Alien Jams”, a live chill performance we recorded in the HR Giger Museum that will soon be out on Peak Records.
As far as our dance-floor guitar set goes, we have been recording most of our gigs, some of them multi-tracked and some straight from the desk, so we have lots of raw material to go through already. There are some great ideas that could be developed further in the studio. I’m sure that it won’t be long before we feel the urge to mix some of this down for general release and enjoyment. Stay tuned!

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