Take a weird fantasy aquatic trip into the world of Žaburina

Instagram-trending techno can’t find its way out of the corner of a warehouse with some manic depressive crows. (Oh no – Derelicte turned real!) So let’s go to an alien undersea imaginarium with Jonáš Gruska instead.
Slovakia’s Jonáš has become a hero of this site over the years, because he manages to do it all. He makes his own musical experiments. He plays live. He runs a label (LOM) that’s also a … sort of brand for sound nerds. And he engineers some really clever sound equipment, for catching delicate sounds and electromagnetic waves.

But it’s not just multitasking or lack of focus – these things fit together. The devices are part of Jonáš’ sound practice, and the label and workshops and even the act of selling those instruments helps create the scene around him. The music and images are about imagined ecology, but the larger label project is, as well. That’s in a nice context to the viral pandemic model of social media.
Maybe Jonáš is also demonstrating what’s possible in smaller hubs. Bratislava is now home to a LOM laboratory, in a city of just about a half million people – roughly the same as just Berlin’s Neukölln and Kreuzberg neighborhoods.
But anyway, that’s all our present reality, which is boring. Let’s go instead to the world of the video for Žaburina.

The visuals are the work of h5io6i54k – no, that’s not Facebook leaking my login password, it’s Brno-based audiovisual artist Lukáš Prokop. Together, they create a kind of fluid, aquatic organic-futuristic world, as eastern Europe meets Java.
Jonáš explains:
the music is something I did algorithmically in supercollider with some spectral processing – many polyrhythms, polymetric melodies inspired by gamelan and south-asian music in general. the video was done by my friend h5io6i54k after we discussed the underwater worlds I was inspired by in the music… it is all his renders