The Israeli Haifa based band Mazeppa creates a musical language that moves between the worlds of Psychedelia, Art Rock, Shoegaze, Krautrock and Pop. Their debut album will be released in September 2019.
In this interview spotlight, I chat with the band about their latest project, challenges, technology and more.
Full Q&A along with links and music below.
Where are you from and what style of music do you create? (In your own words, not necessarily in marketing terms or by popular genre classifications.)
Currently we are all living at Haifa – the biggest city the north part of Israel however we all grew in other cities and each one of us used to live in Tel Aviv or abroad for some time in his life.
To simplify things you can say we are doing psychedelic rock but we know we are not falling into any specific category and we hard to classify as we have diverse influences such as movies music, 60s psych, 70 krautrock, Avant-garde, some eastern sounds (Turkish), 80s Gothic and more.
Eventually each one of us brings his own musical origins and when putting it all together something new is created.
What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to keep going?
The rehearsing room is our lab, this is the place where things are happening.
Sometimes we are starting something and don’t know where it will ends, mostly our musical chemistry drives that.
Chemistry and passion to music including the process as a whole from the seed all the way to a musical piece.
How is this new release different than previous ones? Were you trying to accomplish anything specific?
Michal saying: Usually I brings the songs at its basic form. This release – “Storm” can stand by itself but it’s a part of a complete album coming out at the end of 2019 so than it will be understood in a context.
This is the first time I’m writing music to poets lyrics, about half of the album song were written by Rainer Maria Rilke.
I wanted to bring something that was not necessarily delicate and refined but something that would come from within me and from the experience in the song – this single is poetry in motion…
Also this is the first time we work with a producer.
Name one or two challenges you face as an indie musician in this oversaturated, digital music age? How has technology helped you (since we know it does help)?
We think that in some way it’s a bit easier to technically record, come out with a professional looking “product” create posters, ads, promos, cool things that everybody does however, its harder to be original as it feels everybody is doing the same and getting similar technics to promote themselves in the DIY arena. It feels that to get to a larger audience you need a fat pocket and lots of patience. Still its very cool you can find amazing artist you can easily reach and hook with to work on design and graphic art other bands from all over to team up and so on…
What was the last song you listened to?
Michal: Days of Future Passed / Moody Blues
Amir: Galactic Supermarket by Cosmic Jokers
Elad: Serge Gainsbourg & Michel Colombier Le Pacha OST
Which do you prefer? Vinyl? CDs? MP3s?
Michal: CDs, YouTube
Amir: Spotify, Vinyl
Elad: Spotify
Asaf: YouTube, Cassettes
How about this one…. Do you prefer Spotify? Apple Music? Bandcamp? Or something else? Why?
Each one of us has different prefs so hard to say, I think that Spotify and bandcamp rules.
Where is the best place to connect with you online and discover more music?
We are running our band page on Facebook and our gigs are updated there.
We post from time to time live recordings on our YouTube channel.
We also have our single in all big streaming places, and probably next single and album, will be released in Spotify
Anything else before we sign off?
Yes, Music is a universal language that will forever reach and connect people. We want to reach all people touch them and make them moved by our music
