Jan Nemeček is a synthesist and sound designer hailing from Belgrade, Serbia. He has been releasing electronic music since 2005, with a particular focus on ambient and bass-heavy electronic compositions. Nemeček’s music is characterised by his use of a wide range of sound generating tools, including neural networks, analogue synthesisers, and granular synthesis.
You have a new release out, can you say something about it?
“Fog World” is a follow-up to my last EP, which I released last summer on norbu, a fictional spa centre meets netlabel crossover that I’ve co-run with a producer friend of mine, lbdl, since 2007. It’s heavily inspired by both the fictional, foggy towns in Japanese indie horror movies and games, and walking every night through dense smog here in Belgrade. You could say the release is a bit like Vangelis goes to Silent Hill. I found it interesting to follow up this heavily melodic release from last year with something that’s more introspective and kind of folk horror-like.
We started norbu a long time ago, and one of its core concepts was to always have an outlet to execute and release music quickly without depending on PR, press or other contributors. We were mashing up this Bandcamp, self-released ethos with netlabels and Creative Commons, just trying to keep the “weird web” alive in a way. It has always existed as the polar opposite of how I had to approach albums or releases on other labels, where I try to make things as collaborative as possible, either through the visual aspects or the contributions of other performers.
You’ve been around for many years—active on the scene since 2005, which makes it twenty years. How do you look back on the development of your own work and the scene in general?
Funnily enough, it never feels like that many years have passed. As I’ve developed my craft, it really has changed who I end up being surrounded by and what I consider to be my “scene”. It also keeps you on your toes in terms of approaches to making music. I’ve always tried to keep my albums consistent within this ambient or electronica worldscape so that it feels like a progression, but in between, there can sometimes be years of performing or collaborating on more mainstream club genres, going down a rabbit hole of improv, or just taking a break from making music altogether.
While it might be the most obvious take, I do think that every scene undergoes a cycle, and my local one is no exception, for whatever reason. In the last ten years, we’ve gone from having larger events like the (now sadly infamous) Resonate Festival, or Dis-patch before it, to there being less public interest and institutional funding for music events that don’t fit whatever hard techno or house du jour template is currently popular. I’d expect there to be more than one Polja in Serbia.
How has your work evolved in terms of both technical approach and aesthetics?
One of my mainstays has been granular synthesis—I’ve found it to be an indispensable tool for recontextualising sounds. You can take a very traditional acoustic song and make a soundscape out of it. Musically, I found it to be a great way to discover new harmonies within the source material, or restructure it to produce new ones. It’s such a post-copyright approach to sampling music.
Somewhere along the way, I also became super interested in modular synthesis—as my press photo still testifies—but I found that it took me down roads that are less interesting to me now. I ended up making music that was only interesting to other producers or gear enthusiasts! These days, I find more joy in making music more deliberately—taking the time to record whatever I’m exploring at that moment and building an arrangement around it. I now like to use studio time to print sounds through external gear or valve amps, and, in general. to edit myself rather than trying to wrangle long takes of modular noodling into a cohesive piece. I do admire people who are able to tap into that world fully and take advantage of its possibilities, like the inherent microtonality of the signal path.
In the early 2000s, I was obsessed with the digital/virtual analogue synths of that time—that’s what I learned synthesis on. I’ve been lucky enough to own a Hartmann Neuron, which is a very strange, unabashedly digital synth that was trying to do neural network resynthesis (think primitive “AI”) on a very constrained processor. I probably wasn’t using it very well at the time—I was just a kid interested in playing spacey new age music, using it to play basic pads until it eventually broke a few years later. I kept it in storage for more than a decade, and once it was up and running again, it inspired almost all of the electronic sounds on “Dissolved,” my last LP. It made me revisit almost everything I was doing 20 years ago and listen to it with fresh ears—all the new age motifs, the obsession with sustain and droning, the melodramatic pianos. It started to make sense to me that all these elements could coexist within a distorted, power-ambient aesthetic.
Can you talk about the Serbian electronic scene? How is it at the moment? Which labels, clubs producers should we watch out for?
The crew around club Drugstore and their semi-related offshoot Karmakoma are always of interest. The 20/44 shuttered boat also reopened just last month. I appreciate Zhe Pechorin’s and Overdriven Dreams’ post-rock takes on ambient, while TAPAN has carved out a unique niche within Belgrade’s nightlife, and A//O brings a distinct post-acid take on club music. Label-wise, I have the utmost respect for Pop Depression for their sheer endurance and their enthusiasm for releasing indie music.
At the moment, there are huge anti-government protests happening in Serbia, with students being the driving force. Is the culture scene in any way involved or affected?
I find the whole student movement right now absolutely fascinating. They’ve managed to whip up a force that’s far more resilient than anything in recent history and also immune to the government’s spin tactics. I’m happy to see that local clubs and DJs have joined together to donate resources to support these gatherings, and have participated in boycotts as well. I was also glad to contribute a track to the fundraiser compilation that was released just last week.
What are your plans for 2025?
I’m working on a kind of spiritual sequel to the “Organ Dissolution” video from last year, there’s always another norbu release on the horizon (we try to stick to at least bi-monthly releases), and I’m looking forward to attending Rewire in April for the twelfth time.
Interview by Lucia Udvardyova