Chain D.L.K.: Autopsia presently exists in Prague, in the town where Kafka, Rilke, Mucha and other icons of Monarchy and modernism lived. One might say that Prague is one of the thresholds of modernism. How does Autopsia experience the Prague of modernism?
Autopsia: Autopsia experiences modernism as historicism. Autopsia started as a postmodern project based on starting points which were radical deflections from modernism. Everything that is modernism Autopsia is not. But Autopsia makes use of modernism in order to show that it belongs to history and that it gathers meanings from history which cannot be labeled in terms of historical periods. At the time when Autopsia emerged, the phenomena that marked the distance between modernism and postmodernism could hardly be anticipated. The connection to postmodernism by Autopsia is found in the turn towards oneself, towards one’s own experiences, opposite to lessons learned. One’s own values and one’s own criteria certainly were in conflict with the paradigm of modernity on which leading authorities relied. Autopsia started with doubt in authorities and came across an entirely open realm, which was perceived as a time “after modernity”. That is why Prague became such an important site for situating Autopsia – a place that revealed its forgotten faces alongside with the projects of Autopsia. At that time projects by Autopsia were a hundred percent reality which enabled hybrid conjunctions of different epochs, and thus modernism as well.

Chain D.L.K.: “… Mein Bruder suchet Kronen, ich den Stein der Weisen” – this sentence was ascribed to Rudolph II. During his time in Prague, more precisely in Rudolph’s palace, mystics and alchemists of the Renaissance period were gathering. In the work of Autopsia one can often find allusions to and quotations from alchemical tradition. The atmosphere of mystery is also present. Did Autopsia have Prague mysticism in mind when you chose Prague as a “center” for your activity?
Autopsia: Autopsia proclaimed Prague to be the spiritual capital of the world. Certainly the spirit of Rudolph II, as well as the history he created, belongs to this spirit and centrality. Not only Rudolph II, Charles V is perhaps even more important and interesting to Autopsia, also the Czech baroque – especially baroque music. Rudolph II didn’t create the history of states and peoples, but rather the new European spirit of cosmopolitanism. His spirit gathered knowledge, from antiquity to contemporary times, thus making Prague a place of new epoch, a new center of knowledge. The Prague of that time was a huge research laboratory, which radiated the synergies of many arts. Similarity between the pre-scientific systems of Rudolph’s age with the principles of Autopsia is obvious. However, possibilities for all other similarities end here. Despite allusions and quotations Autopsia is neither concerned with alchemy or mysticism. It simply uses their iconographies in a rather special way. In hybrid conjunctions it connects them with other components which have nothing in common with the practices of the Rudolphine age. “Geistzentrale der Welt” is supposed to be understood as a code for a place in which the identity of the work is built.

Chain D.L.K.: Does Autopsia have a fatherland?
Autopsia: Autopsia does not have a fatherland. It does not have any place or system outside of itself. All social relations in which Autopsia operates might be anywhere in the world. Home for Autopsia is the world. Fatherland is a fictional concept. Autopsia operates in reality, outside “fatherlands”. It can produce a fatherland but cannot belong to it. Fatherland, motherland – these are projections, abstract notions which have nothing to do with homeland-ness. It is only a homeland for the world of individuality, it is not an abstract product. Individual experience of the world cannot be shared with others. Homeland guarantees the certainty of the world prior to awareness of one’s own person. Homeland has the meaning for individuality, and fatherland, or motherland, for collectivity. Autopsia has neither homeland nor place. It is a pure thought about the mortality of the being. What a person can do within the understanding of it’s own mortality is detachment, separateness from the ruling ideas of the world; meaning – it has to be detached from the collective. Only with collectivity does death becomes an idea which turns into the weapon of self-destruction. Only individuality is mortal. The experience of one’s own mortality cannot be shared with others.

Chain D.L.K.: Autopsia originated in one country, Yugoslavia, which – like the Monarchy and the utopia of modernism – fell apart, and today does not exist. What did the ex-Yugoslavian cultural space mean to Autopsia? How does Autopsia look at this part of Europe?
Autopsia: If Katalin Ladik, Balint Szombati, Boris Kovac, art groups K‘D, OHO, NSK, etc., meant something to Autopsia, not in terms of direct influence, but for the sake of presenting one cultural space, these artists could be mentioned.It would be wrong to think that Autopsia “originated in one country”, or state. One might say that the beginning of Autopsia had a cartography that included several countries. It would rather be better to say, several cities. From the very beginning Autopsia belonged to no state system. Its history is a nomadic one. The artists that you mention, with the exception of NSK, might be considered as the last remnants of the avant-garde. Autopsia begins where the avant-garde ends. The “Avant-garde” is today an historical relic which Autopsia deals with as a source of research, but never “belonged” to it. It cannot be said that Autopsia operated within the framework of any kind of cultural space as an historical category. Autopsia passed through different cultural spaces as one passes through images of unexplored regions. If Autopsia came across some hidden “preciousness” during this journey, then those things have become the impulses for the creation of new projects. Autopsia is constantly moving through cultural spaces; thus places of residence are irrelevant. Autopsia has no viewpoints on the political boundaries in Europe. There are no prejudices concerning where and when it will come across the impulses which will start the interests in new projects.

Chain D.L.K.: “Scars of Europa”, a track from one of earlier Autopsia CDs (Death is the Mother of Beauty, ‘88-89) can be interpreted as a premonition about the death of Europe. Does this mean that today we live in a post-Europe?
Autopsia: Autopsia does not deal with predictions. It deals with reality, which means – Death. “Scars of Europa” narrates a new spirit of Europe, which is filled with the scars of history. Such an historical component also belongs to the new spirit of Europe. Death is the Mother of Beauty and the presage of the world to come. After the domination of an all-encompassing simplified modernism, the world that could have been different was presaged, the world which, throughout the channels of its networks, will not reproduce the same. It could have been only the world aware of its history, the world of an individual, which was known to such a history. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. The entire project of the new spirit slipped into a globalized network of technological modernism. The only things that remained after particular histories were images, appearances and illusions that were poured into us by means of the media in order to cover the real condition – the flow of money. It turned out almost immediately that there was no project of the new spirit at all. Such a thing is not possible anymore. Man finally stopped thinking of himself/herself as of one individual, as a unique, unrepeatable selfhood. His/her mind became a container of messages.But death again has something to say on the subject, because death is not a mere event in the epoch – terror or genocide, conflict and destruction. At stake here is the epoch itself, death as time, the age of its reign, death from the perspective of a faith grounded in metaphysics, which encompasses the totality of being. Project Death is the Mother of Beauty can be translated into the domain of the political or the cultural, but it is not directed towards the presentation of something real, but towards an understanding of the homelandlessness (‘not-being-at-home; not-being-in-homeland’), which occurs in the catastrophic age of groundless faith. Since the messages cannot be checked anymore, one can only believe in them. Truth has lost its meaning, only belief remains and pure faith without religions and ideologies.

Chain D.L.K.: It is obvious that one of the cultural metaphors of Autopsia is the concept of death. Is it possible that a discourse concerning death can replace its individual experience? Is it not that the discourse, that is, any artistic act or ritual about death, becomes an unsatisfied wish, or even desire, to overcome death, to gain power over death?
Autopsia: It is not a matter of death being dealt with as an object of consciousness. To speak about death in the manner of Autopsia means to speak from the closeness, the proximity of death as mortality, from the closeness of the Being itself. Among all other beings, only humans have consciousness about mortality, because they have the ability to comprehend the concept of time. Time is what tells us that we are mortal. We can do our best trying to gain power over death, we can even work on its eradication – and that’s what we most often do – but we cannot go out of time, beyond time. We cannot be outside of changes, permanent and timeless, as an image of God. And yet, within this dualism of changes and continuity it is as if something is hidden which keeps them together so that thinking can endure such a fate. What puts them together is certainly something that lasts and which is eternal. Although hidden, we somehow participate in the image of God, as its inseparable part. After all, we consider ourselves godly creatures.Autopsia does not speak about death from the standpoint of individual experiences of death, nor are its motives directed towards some substitute. There are substitute concepts only if you think about death as an object. Death is not something that is represented, nor it is representable. We are mortal beings. Mortality cannot be put in front of us and be observed. Our own mortality cannot be shared with anyone else. This feeling cannot be “communicated”. It can only be poetically expressed – it can be spoken of indirectly, by means of a specific language. And this is what Autopsia, in fact. does.

Chain D.L.K.: What kind of means does music represent for Autopsia? Is it an instrument of the manifesto about the mortality of beings?
Autopsia: Music is not a means for Autopsia. Music is neither an instrument nor a programmatic platform. Music is art; Autopsia does not stand for anything outside art. To be in art means to dwell in poetic discourse. There are no manifestos; iconographic messages of Autopsia should not be read directly. Autopsia operates with images as with a vocabulary of recycled cultural products. These images refer to the means of musical composing, but they are not a one to one illustration. The sound and the image are linked only on the level of methodologies but not of meanings.

Chain D.L.K.: In your works one can find various quotations: textual, musical, quotations from fine arts, from film, etc., ranging from high culture to popular culture. Within this collage of quotations, by way of frequent repetitions, quotations become self-quotations. There occurs a processing of cultural waste into a hybridism of signs, which leads to an “original” palimpsest. Does Autopsia accept postmodern ideology of quotationalism, that is, the blasphemy of the authority of the original work? There is no hierarchy in Autopsia, is there?
Autopsia: Correct, there is no hierarchy, no authority. In “Mirrors of Destruction” it is said that our world is founded on the idea of the center, which has the attributes of the source, the beginning, the truth, the ideal form, the essence, the god – the presence which guarantees meaning. Everything that is different from these notions is excluded. What interests Autopsia is exactly that which is “excluded”.Autopsia uses language and its forms just as it uses musical phrases. To operate with representations means to use the metaphorical features of language – like in poetry. Autopsia uses the image in so far as it is the meeting point of those characteristics that can easily turn out to be the forms of mass media. In its visual products it carries out the procedure of a montage of the trivial and the marginal. Autopsia creates images by means of which it nourishes what it destroys. Thus the double-headed process is carried out – on one hand, through thematic and subject matter a relation towards the work is shown, and on the other, through manipulation of the image’s essence, a testimony of death is displayed, which is nothing else but the image itself. Autopsia uses mediatic contents as containers of entire cultural realms, reduced to media patterns.

Chain D.L.K.: It seems that Autopsia’s musical experiment consists of baroque, minimalist, electronic, avant-garde, ambient, pop and other music. In one of your answers you’ve mentioned that baroque is particularly important for you. Baroque is founded on the ideology of harmony. What attracts Autopsia in the art of baroque?
Autopsia: The list of forms of musical expression you have just made is inexhaustible, limited by nothing else than the creative impulse. For Autopsia there is no focusing on just one sector of music, or on choosing one set of musical idioms. Autopsia is not interested in musical forms, but in their spiritual foundations. In baroque music for the first time there appears the work as a “project”. One is supposed to conceive the complex structure of the work which is based on the idea of the spectacle, and which will acquire its standard form in opera. Thus the baroque work is a total authorial project which originates in the symbiosis of music and other visual forms – a project of total spectacularization. In different styles and different cultures harmony is a matter of convention. Harmony in one style and culture is a disharmony in another style and culture. The superficial opinion that the avant-garde is disharmonious is just an opinion and nothing else.

Chain D.L.K.: Autopsia’s work is not only music, but textual and visual art as well. Could we consider the works of Autopsia a verbo-voco-visual meditative objects?
Autopsia: No, works of Autopsia are not verbo-voco-visual projects. Verbo-voco-visual is a notion derived from the arsenal of the late avant-garde. It designates the hybrid of conceptual amalgams within the invention of art practices which at one time had the significance of the “new”. The use of verbal statements, musical compositions, and visual representations is quite conventional for Autopsia. There is no intention to create any kind of synthesis that would be directed towards one particular hybrid product. These three ways of expression are autonomous. What links them is a common spiritual ground. Autopsia deals with music and is concerned with complete control over its own production.

Chain D.L.K.: The latest album of Autopsia, “The Berlin Requiem,” is rather interesting. This project evokes Berthold Brecht’s “Berliner Requiem,” and the inside cover refers perhaps to the Himalayas, that is, the endeavor of human being to overcome his/her limits, to reach the peak of his/her existence, which in the context of Autopsia means – death. Is Autopsia attracted by Brecht’s poetics of quotationalism, the so-called Verfremdungseffekt?
Autopsia: In the context of “The Berlin Requiem”, Brecht’s “Berliner Requiem” might be seen as a quotation in its entirety. In the initial ground of Brecht’s poetics there is a concord with the poetics of Autopsia, otherwise “The Berlin Requiem” wouldn’t have happened at all. However, every similarity ends with this initial connection. Everything that can be heard in the requiem is not a quotation. The use of verbal statements and the creation of compositions do not match. One does not illustrate the other. They are in the relationship of foreboding, of potentiality, of some kind of inclination of one toward the other, on which the possibilities of “expanded” meaning rests. Sound images, photography and the text come from different areas, but in some special way they support each other and make the entire product more complicated.Climbing up the mountain peak is not the striving to reach one’s own peak of existence in the concept of death. Although Autopsia was using the slogan “Our Goal Is Death”, it is not about the representation of death. It is a declaration of the object which is substituted. Climbing to the top points to the effort which man makes in order to explore the unknown. However, this strenuous walk does not lead to some determined goal, and so not to death. Rather, it speaks to the courage needed to endure the solitude present in the world.

Chain D.L.K.: Recently Autopsia issued a small project in which Pasolini and Freud were put together, entitled “Silently The Wolves Are Watching / Porcile”. Is this work an introduction into the conception of new works, which are, at the moment, in the phase of becoming? What are we to expect in these new projects?
Autopsia: The first title comes from psychoanalysis, and the second is the title of Pasolini’s film. The speech at the beginning of the track is from that movie. At www.autopsia.net both titles have direct links to the sources of the inspiration. But it is no accident that they are separated on two sides of vinyl. There is a connection between “Lacanian gaze” and parallel narratives about cannibalism and capitalism. It is a matter of a paradoxical conjunction of completely individual experience, an irreplaceable one – outside of communication, and social order, which is replaceable. It’s permissivity can be displayed by any other form of social construction. When we speak about capitalism, we speak about one of the known forms of totalitarianism. However, at stake here is not the fate of the individual in society, nor is it the criticism of society, which is the usual opinion, but at stake is the unrealizable desire of one to appropriate the other, that is, to eat oneself. Selfhood is substituted with the mere representation of the other. This desire is projected into social relations and becomes a driving force of permissivity. How much such a scenario corresponds to reality, and how much to the interpretation, still remains the open question. Referring to “Lacanian gaze” perhaps helps to explain the connection of the numerous fields available and the equally important issue of “how” we gaze at something. The gazing itself becomes the enigma of the visible. This record is a complete whole. It is not an introduction to some other product, nor is it a preview of what shall happen in the future. In fact, Autopsia goes through a period of interest that is expressed in an exploration of the legacy of the last century. All projects from that period are connected in a certain way, but at the same time are completed entities. One work has never opened the other. A method of repetition and extension of material was used, but always within a framework of a single thematic whole. Projects by Autopsia were not conceived as a series.

[interviewed by Roland Orcsik] [proofreading by John Gore]

Chain D.L.K.: Your previous full length album before “The Berlin requiem” has been released into 1996 by Hyperium. What made you wait so long to do something new?
Autopsia: Autopsia does not fit into the category of ‘album-production’. It is not necessary for albums to appear in some annual rhythm, or in any other kind of rhythm. There is no foreseeable schedule of producing a forseeable number of compositions. Since Autopsia have complete control over their own production, there are no obligations which might come outside of authorial interest, which might require any foreseeable terms of issuing new materials. Autopsia is not the part of music business. The status of Autopsia is not supposed to be understood in terms of music production, but in terms of art, meaning that the relation of the work and the time of its appearance is measured according to completely different principles. An artist stands ready for the emergence of the work of art, he is the one who listens, who has the ability to hear the call out of which the work appears. The artist is the one who follows this call. It is not a foreseeable or a predictable process, and a year or a decade do not mean a lot when it comes to the inception of the idea which leads towards the work of art itself. I do not want at all to get into the situation in which terminal requirements will be posed to Autopsia outside of its own motives.

Chain D.L.K.: Over these eleven years you released two compilations: “Colonia” and “Le chant de la nuit”. We already talked about “Colonia” on our previous interview so let’s focus on the latter one. “Le chant de la nuit” is a CD with a rich Cd-rom multimedia section where people can find visuals, writings, interviews, etc. What was your intent with that release?
Autopsia: “Le chant de la nuit” was a rather demanding project. It was not just the matter of collecting different materials from previous productions by Autopsia. I didn’t want any kind of „backward gaze”. I wanted to explore a new form of production, in which sound and image could appear together, but in a very special way. The project itself was not retrospective but exploratory. Digital technology enabled such a direction of exploration. New relations between different materials were introduced, and a possibility of not moving linearly through the material, as in printed media, was established. An ambience of different „chambers” was created, which have their own particular keynote, and which are connected in the manner of wandering, that is – of exploring. This „architecture” of the project is essential for the understanding of it. Like in a panopticon – there are new images opening, new ways of looking at things which appear familiar, but now they are in unfamiliar places. It is not a question of collecting old things, but of designing a network which becomes the new event. There have emerged new generations that read already issued materials in a different way. Thus “Le chant de la nuit” was for a part of the audience some kind of ending, and for the other part – it was the beginning.

Chain D.L.K.: Music is only a little part of your project, can you talk about your other activities?
Autopsia: Autopsia is not a multi-media project, but its involvement in music, poetry and art are linked in a special way. Text and image have their relevance for an extended reading of music production. In a certain way they provide the historicity for the sound which is bodyless and placeless. Text and image embody music production, they are not external supplements, but they arise along with musical ideas. Thus, the application of text and image is not some “other activity” of Autopsia, but an integral element of the project itself. There is a certain network of crossings, passages, between sound, text and image, which is based in their essential framework, their underlying structure. I make use of three media to the extent that this framework is sustainable and comprehensible, that the meaning of their intertwining is preserved, or maintained.

Chain D.L.K.: Each of your releases has a concept behind them, so they aren’t a simple collection of tracks. Your latest one “The Berlin requiem” has been inspired by Bertold Brecht. What made you choose that author and that poem?
Autopsia: Different aspects of 20th century avant-garde became, after 2000, a main interest of Autopsia. Avant-garde today is not only an experience of the past and from the past but also the subject, that is, the object, of history. Thus avant-garde is classified into the same containers of culture in which other historical phenomena dwell. The general notion of the progressiveness and innovativeness of the avant-garde is not sustainable today. It may be said for many Central-European avant-garde authors that they have been supporting some “regressive” ideas which were manifested in relation to the world as totality. That was in opposition with modernistic rationalism, subjectivism and particularism of the West. This is why reaching for the heritage of the avant-garde can be understood as a “new reading”. Historical patterns are one of the elements in the methodology of operative processes of Autopsia. In this sense no difference is made regarding historical sources. The genuine processes of avant-garde are completed operations. A renewal of their patterns and the exploration of inspiring samples are part of a new creative cycle which is not in direct connivance with the messages and aims of the avant-garde. With the matrix of history in mind the avant-garde is just one of the possible resources in which the beginning of a new creative process is placed. Bertold Brecht is an unavoidable figure of the 20th century avant-garde. The choice is not accidental and it is not only because of the theme of the title song. Rather, the choice was made because of the spirit of Brecht’s avant-garde orchestrations, in which a particular junction of sound, text and image occurred, and the result was the project of the new spectacle. Essentially it is the matter of a baroque idea with changed poles of perception. Scenes were not shown to a single person but to the populace, which assigned a political connotation to the entire production. The project of Autopsia reverts perception to the original state because it addresses the individual and not the collective. The same direction is visible in Brecht’s poem which was chosen. You cannot sing to the collective without it being agitation, propaganda. Poetizing is no longer addressed to a particular individual, but to the person who is capable of receiving the message.

Chain D.L.K.: “The Berlin Requiem” deals with what can scarcely be discerned by the senses, be heard, in the realm of ice-cold nothingness. Listening to the tracks I felt a sort of isolationist atmosphere as the tracks were tending to avoid rhythm and melody. Can you tell something about what you wanted to achieve musically?
Autopsia: “Just as the electricity was always there, before it was discovered, and just as everything undiscovered exists from the beginning, therefore, even now, the universe itself is entirely filled with forms, motifs and combinations of past and future music. The composer seems to me as a gardener who was given to cultivate a smaller or larger part of land; his task is to harvest, to order, and to bind, in short, to transform that which grows on that part of land and the land itself into the garden”. This was written by Ferruccio Busoni in the text “On the essence of music”, which was published in 1924. At the beginning of 20th century, music experienced a fundamental change of its language, and from tonal it turned into atonal music, and it found its strong point in the ideas of the avant-gardes. This is the area in which Autopsia “cultivates the garden” and draws ideas for current production. This interest is already indicated in several limited editions, and in “Berlin Requiem” it was realized completely. Impulses were looked for within the legacies of Schoenberg, Stockhausen and other avant-garde artists. I’ve experimented with dodecaphonic technique and particular, specific rhythmic structures. There has been no change in Autopsia’s method of composing, but a new sample, a new pattern was chosen.

Chain D.L.K.: Who is the Dammerung Orchestra?
Autopsia: Sometimes projects of Autopsia involve collaborators from various domains. Dammerung Orchestra is a common title for different forms of their activities. They are “beings-performers”. The title Dammerung Orchestra is added to the notion of “the performers”. Their role is sometimes entirely concrete and defined, and sometimes it is virtual, in some cases both. The title itself is what brings them together in one form of unstable community which constantly appears and disappears, as beings whom you cannot get acquainted with entirely nor give them a certain, defined place. You must “imagine” them.

Chain D.L.K.: Can you talk about Illuminating Technologies and about its projects/releases?
Autopsia: Illuminating Technologies is the label already used for projects which were supposed to extend the operative domain of Autopsia. Now it has become a label which will publish Autopsia in the future. Due to new digital media and Internet it is possible, in a very simple way, to start a new authorial label which shall support only its own projects. Some authors are already within such practice and it gives excellent results. Several limited editions, such as CD “Le Chant de la Nuit” and the single record “Radical Machine” were issued on the label Illuminating Tecnologies. The single “Silently the Wolves are Watching” is the first unlimited edition on my own label.

Chain D.L.K.: You sent me a 10 minute video which is part of Autopsia’s “Non-spectacular videos”. What kind of series is that?
Autopsia: It is an experimental film. It is not a video project, I was never interested in music-video projects. “The Winter” originated as an experiment with the medium of film. Although there appear in it sound, text and image together, the basic, supporting structure of the project is film and that is why I speak of film experiment. Source material is film, and the ordering of the new structure is digital. I think that this experiment has potential, and that it is possible to think of “a series”.

Chain D.L.K.: On that video the shots were showing natural events (rivers, snowy trees, etc). That “Non-spectacular video” made me think that nowadays people are used to being surprised by things they see on TV and nature is no more spectacular for them…but, what is your interpretation?
Autopsia: “The Winter” explores the possibilities of cutting “within the frame”. The perception of a trivial sample is being changed – of the winter landscape, as we all know it. But, is this quite so? Do we know what is really happening here? “Reframing” has as its effect a new gaze at the same thing. Text and music take us additionally into an adventure whose initial point is a trivial realistic representation. Present-day people can look at the same thing, which they have seen a thousand times, but in an absolutely transformed relation to the object of viewing. The perception of “nature” changes, despite the object remains the same.

Chain D.L.K.: Are you preparing new releases (audio or video)?
Autopsia: Two 12″ vinyl records for Illuminating Technologies.

Chain D.L.K.: What do you think you have achieved with Autopsia during these 20 years? There was something you had to achieve or you just followed the creative flow?
Autopsia: There is no “achievement”, nothing that could be singled out in itself, and that one can say: “this is the object of my achievement”. Certainly, there is a creative flow, I have said something about it in response to your first question. But the true achievement is peacefulness, stillness, , it is mine only, and one cannot dispossess nor trade it away. Peace and presence of mind are the real results of creative work which is controlled by the author.

Chain D.L.K.: Anything more you want to add?
Autopsia: This is a time when Autopsia renovates, re-establishes itself. When you work for a long time then the creative motivation restores itself in cycles, like seasons of the year. When you say “I”, it seems it is something stable and permanent, but nonetheless you change along with what you do. It seems the same, but it changes.

[interviewed by Maurizio Pustianaz] [proofreading by Marco Pustianaz]