OLEC MÜN
Olec Mün has played the piano since the age of six. He then studied jazz, folklore music, harmony and composition with teachers such as Nicolás Guerschberg, Francisco Sicilia, Guillermo Romero and Paula Suarez. Always in the search of new sounds and introspections, Olec Mün has nourished his musicality through travels and studies around the world. His visits to northern India and west Africa have each marked a point of no return in his music and his way of living it.
Music since then has been a prayer and a path of transcendence for him. After participating in numerous groups and projects, in 2018 Olec Mün released his first solo work called Septenio. September 2020 will see the release of his new solo piano album Reconciliation on Lady Blunt Records.
The grandson of four Jewish refugees who escaped the Nazi Regime during World War II, Olec discusses with INTERLOCUTOR the ways in which Reconciliation is a musically creative attempt at recounting the story of his ancestors and their experience of exile.
Interview by Tyler Nesler
Your new album Reconciliation is a unique creative attempt to reconcile with your traumatic family history. You are the grandson of four Jewish refugees who escaped the Nazi Regime during World War II. What were some challenges in conceptually trying to tell the tale of your ancestors and their experience of exile through the language of music?
I moved to Europe with a clear intention of reconciliation but I had no plans of composing music around this theme. Once the music started emerging during my practice sessions, I was able to inhabit this magical place we sometimes reach when composing, this unfolding into being the spectator of your own creation.
My practice was to sit in silence in front of the piano for about twenty minutes. I would ask my grandparents: “How does it feel? What do you feel?” and I waited. I let myself feel everything, feel the pain, the guilt, the sorrow, and the gratitude. This happened almost every day for about three months. I must say that some days were painful, and there were other days of pure bliss.
I believe that if I had approached the project from an intellectual or conceptual drive, I would have probably failed. I think it was a key point to address the subject directly from the world of music, which is the world of feelings and emotions. Music can reach those unvisited corners of our souls, and it can translate them and illuminate them. Whereas the language of words and logic is dualistic, music allows you to elevate that dualism into a much more complex palette of feelings which are unspeakable. In fact, I am a writer as well and I had wanted to write about the story of my grandparents before, but I couldn’t. Now I understand that I had to inhabit those intense and complex feelings in order to tell the story, and the language of music allowed me to navigate them. When you tell a story through words, you deliver one kind of information, and when you tell a story through music, you deliver another kind.
The trauma provoked by war and persecution were inherited by your brothers and your parents and also yourself. How do you feel that making this album has helped you to both confront that pain and to find peace within it?
When music has an intention behind it, a driving healing force, it becomes true medicine. This quality of music is pretty much overlooked in our modern times but in initiatic cultures music was used as a bridge to connect with the invisible world. When I realized that in my case music was serving as a catalyst and as a trustworthy field of energy where I could confront this past, I decided to go all the way.
The thing with pain is that we usually reject it because it is unpleasant, of course. But as long as we reject it, and try to distract ourselves from it, it will keep coming back. I believe pain is there for a reason, it is us trying to communicate with ourselves, and the moment we decide to observe it, listen to it and integrate it, it dissolves.
So every day in front of the piano, I did that (and I still do it every time I play these pieces). I could have confronted this story in other ways, but I chose music (or music chose me) because it depicts unquestionably how the search for beauty is not only an aesthetic search, but a healing process of integration of one's own truth and existence.
When I was composing this music I realized that this project transcended my own story. I was giving space to my grandparents and to all my relatives whom I never met an opportunity to express. I received so much gratitude from my family tree and I feel so grateful at the same time. The mere fact that today I am able to write and talk about it is evidence that it has helped me find peace. One year ago, it would have been impossible for me.
Reconciliation, 2020, Lady Blunt Records
Through your travels and encounters with international styles of music, you came to consider "music as a functional tool to connect with the invisible world." How do you believe music can function as a connection to the unseen? Does music communicate realities in ways which are less limited than words or visuals?
Music has this uniqueness of being invisible. It is something we often take for granted but there is something really powerful behind it. The fact that it allows you to feel, travel, explore, heal, etc., but you can not grab it or see it, immediately turns it into something so magical and mysterious. This is why I feel music is a bridge to connect with that part of ourselves we can’t see, that is, what we truly are behind our physical body.
If you pay attention to initiatic cultures, music has always been part of their rituals. If you observe how many Gods are depicted with musical instruments, and how in many myths of creation, sound is presented as a previous state of the material plane.
Words and music are not so far from each other. Words which are spoken within a particular context become poetry, and poetry is very close to music because they both share boundaries of sound as a vehicle. I love writing poetry because it allows me to explore these areas where barriers diffuse.
Considering the current unsettling international trends towards nationalism, authoritarianism, and the persecution of "otherness," do you view Reconciliation as having an immediate relevance which necessarily transcends your own personal family history?
This project transcends my own personal story. That is why I firmly decided to make it happen. It is my story, but it is also the story of so many people throughout the world. If you look back at your own personal family tree you will probably find that a relative of yours from a near generation had to escape from war, famine, poverty or disease. Exile seems to be part of our DNA as a human family. The mythic story of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden is present in all of us. As long as we keep on placing all the evils of the world outside of ourselves, we will continue blaming the others for our problems. What happened with the Jews in World War II is today happening all around the globe. African refugees in Europe, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Palestine and Israel, wherever you focus your attention, there is someone blaming another.
I have a dear friend who leads a project called INANA. She works with art as a way of integrating refugees into their new communities. I was so touched when she told me she was sharing the story and the music of Reconciliation in her own workshops as a way of showing how art can heal our own personal story. I sincerely hope Reconciliation serves the global community as much as it has served me in confronting and integrating my own story.
You are versatile in many styles. In "The Calling" there are elements of minimalism. In "Dora" and "Reconciliation" there appear to be references to Chopin and Erik Satie. Is there a composition style you prefer when you create your works? Additionally, have you incorporated any folk songs or rhythms from Argentina, Spain or Europe/Poland in your works?
I try not to define my style because I wouldn't want to restrict myself. [I want to] continue growing and changing forever.
I guess I am a melting pot of every music I’ve ever heard and played in my life, and the styles appear in service of the story I want to tell. It is not a conscious decision, and I like it that way. I try to use the space of my heart while I compose and let the logical mind — which categorizes and structures — come in late in the process. I am learning along the way that when I try to sound like something I am not, or when I let musical theory take too much [emphasis] at first, the essence of what I want to convey might easily get diluted and lost. So my everyday practice is to trust that all these influences, technique and theory, will filter the intention and help me communicate what I want, serving as a structure guiding from behind.
I was surprised to receive many comments about Reconciliation saying that they could listen to the Jewishness behind it, a kind of Klezmer influence. I had never played this kind of music before, but there’s the magic again playing a wonderful role. If I ask my Polish/German grandmother, whom I never met, how does she feel? It is quite understandable that she will respond with a minor harmonic scale, and that if I ask my Viennese grandmother she will respond with a waltz. I insist that these decisions were not taken consciously. For example, if you listen carefully, in the second part of “Exile” there is a perfume of tango, which is a genre created by immigrants in the ports of Buenos Aires. Tango expresses the melancholy of longing for something lost. So tango and Klezmer have much in common. When I imagined my grandparents arriving at the port of Buenos Aires, sharing a room with other immigrants, the soundtrack of tango style slipped through my fingers. My grandparents arrived in Buenos Aires when tango was living its golden decade.
Reconciliation is structured into two parts: "Songs for my Ancestors" and "The Refugee's Journey." The first section revisits each story behind your grandparents, and the second section is set by four movements: Exile, New Beginning, The Calling, Reconciliation. With the strong narrative aspects to this album, have you considered expanding this work at some point onto the stage as a musical or opera?
Yes! And I am very happy you are asking this question. I still have no answer for it but I hope that as time passes the idea will precipitate and materialize. For the time being I can say I imagine visuals and choreography, maintaining the minimalist resources, and not much more. But I am glad you have also perceived that the story could be enhanced by other disciplines. I would love to collaborate with other artists, and I am open to ideas and suggestions.
In your first solo work, Septenio, you conceptually visited the first seven years of your life (the first seven years of life being considered by many ancient traditions as the period when the soul adapts to its new human body). Do you view Reconciliation as a direct continuation of this very personal exploration? Do you foresee your future works continuing these personal explorations through other phases of your life?
I believe music in particular and art in general needs to have a purpose and an intention behind it, and that intention in me has been a healing one. To heal is to integrate those excluded aspects of yourself you are not willing to encounter because of diverse reasons. This is called our shadow. Music can help us illuminate those dark spots. Revisiting my first seven years of life was so powerful for me, because I could get in contact with that young, sensitive boy I was, and with numerous feelings from those times that I had kept in a box in order to keep on going. I was able to tell my young self: “It is safe for you to express yourself now.” And that is what I did while composing Septenio.
Then I thought I was over talking about me, but the Reconciliation project appeared to tell me that I carry my family tree in me. And that is a living system, transcending time and space. If the first project was a personal one, Reconciliation added a transpersonal ingredient. I don’t know how my future projects will shape, but I do hope that as years go by I have less aspects of my personal story to heal, and that music allows me to contact that mystery of what I really am, behind these stories of my personality.
Your press release says that in November 2020 you will be presenting your album in the small German and Austrian villages of your grandparents. Does this mean performing the album live? Are these plans still tentatively in place with the current pandemic?
The original plan was to perform the complete album in the villages and towns of my grandparents. I visited these towns during 2019 after recording the album, and we were already organizing the concerts together. We were also starting to produce a concert in Auschwitz during September, but all these plans were put on hold. They will probably have to be postponed and will occur in 2021. I don’t lose my hopes, because I really want to play there and I feel it is necessary to do it. Once the last chord of Reconciliation is played, I will stand up and ask the audience to welcome my grandparents back. I believe that when that is done, the circle will be closed and I will be able to continue my own path in a lighter and more whole manner.
Reconciliation will be released September 25, 2020
For more information, visit Olec’s official site
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Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based freelance writer and the Founder and Managing Editor of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.
Special thanks to Lasandra Fairchild for assistance with this interview.
