Fragments from an Ocean Comprised of Thoughts.
We are happy to present you this triple collaboration with music by Valance Drakes and Ivan Shopov and analog photography by Zlatina Tochkova. Out on tape and digital.
Valance Drakes: I’m just an individual that puts sounds together and waits for the outcome.
Ivan Shopov: I am a music composer, producer and a fine artist from Bulgaria, working in the fields of electronic music, scoring for picture and sound design. Creating stories through sound and drawing pictures for sound is my main occupation.
Zlatina Tochkova: My main activities include photography, music and film directing.I started playing the piano when I was 6 years-old – later, I moved on to playing the guitar and singing. My interest in photography started growing 11 years ago and till this very day I constantly take photographs – analog, digital and mobile, it doesn’t matter as long as I do it.Last year I graduated from my BA course in Film & TV Directing.To me, all three things are intertwined and I hope I will keep up with them till my very last day.
Which emotion is key in your art and which one drives your creativity the most?
Valance Drakes: Imperfection. The beauty of it is to let go of what you can’t control, that’s freedom in its purest form to embrace your own faults and limitations by giving meaning to it. Perfect is the enemy of the good, rather be a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.
Zlatina Tochkova: I would mention the two poles of a spectrum. The first ones that came to mind were sorrow and joy – both of them really help me “see” things in a certain way, as if my “vision” turns on. I embrace both of the emotions because each of them is important and unique every time.
Ivan Shopov: Love. Love for detail, love for myself, love for the process. I am being driven by many emotions when being creative, so its really hard to point at only one. It’s really a journey through my inner cosmos, rediscovering new connections and possibilities for creating my art every day.
How would you characterise the story of this release?
Ivan Shopov: Our music is always done in a glimpse of time, capturing a tiny moment of our everyday lives. This story is not much different from our previous and next albums. Its an exploration of our inner worlds done in the absolute moment through sound.
Valance Drakes: That Ivan and myself form new connections within sounds for creativity on what’s meaningful to us, to be raw and create within our truths. The picture perfect feed is as thin as the paper it’s printed on, or the screen it broadcasts from. Most folks are afraid of rawness as nature hardly ever makes straight lines, it’s all ever changing and curved.
How did you approach conceptualising and creating the images for the release?
Zlatina Tochkova: One of the things that has helped me “see” is music. I started taking photographs by going outside, walking around, listening to music. In the photo series, I put the focus in my daily life to scenes of nature and man-made, artificial objects. I took my analog camera everywhere with me, listening to the music. I wanted to make the images as intuitively as possible. For almost all images I’ve applied the double exposure method. I didn’t seek realism but tried to create a collage made of fragments of reality and details. The music was also abstract, yet very similar to me and how I perceived things. I wanted to present visual elements which I saw and associated with the music itself – a combination of mellow sounding with a lot of texture and grains of emotion you cannot put in words.
