How It Started
I played trumpet as a teenager, had my first band at the age of 16, both was terrific. Maybe it still is, but I got used to it by now. Tigrics started when I worked as a full time cartoon-animator, and a bit later as a children`s book illustrator and the children in me got more prominent. I just wanted to make cartoon music, and my very first songs as tigrics – the first pieces I wrote alone – are pure sunday morning cartoon music. My current band was not into it that much then, they made a lot of rackets they called industrial music, and I wasn`t too comfortable doing that. …just wanted to make people laugh, so I had to carry it out alone, bought my first analogue synthesizer, a farfisa which had – and still has – very funny cartoonic monophonic sounds, and had a go. Then the money I got from my first book I did spent on my rent and my first sampler.
The name Tigrics comes from that time also, I had a reluxa on my window then and thanks to that I had stripes on every photograpy made that time. One of my friends just noticed it, and called me tigrics. Which is a dumb wordplay on tiger in hungarian, but it suited me.
Music
I just got to know the morr label a year ago, – I`ve had my style which could link me to them by then – but my friends also keep telling me what I do is a lot like their stuff. I can live with the comparsion happily (maybe its time to send them some cd now…). Warp was a big influence, as all this little underground of smaller labels, that even warp belonged to some time ago. But the events of my life are the biggest influence, all my mistakes, up and downs are mirrored in my music, sometimes the ability to make some music is a life-saving feature.
It’s a sort of a lifestyle for years, I just get home after I`ve finished my job, (I’m living from flash-designing/programming now ) switch on the gear, – or sometimes I don`t even switch it off not to lose the stuff on the analogues until it gets recorded (the power bill used to be quite worrying) – have a track going, I work on something most of the time. It gets dancier as friday comes, and gets very abstract as weekend passes. Then if I like what I hear, I push record, it’s this simple.
Friends
I just played alone a few gigs, then I met Adela, a girl from Prague, she liked to sing over my tracks, she has a key to my flat and used to record some vocals over the tracks I leave for her while I’m not at home. She has a very nice voice. And then I asked Marci, my good friend, a sound engineer, if he would fancy mixing it live… he liked the idea, and got round his ever growing range of delays and started processing everything, and it sounded great, it was very live, he even had some ideas on improving the music and the instrumentation – my favourite is the microphoned up spoons. He`s a huge help. Then the two of them met recently, and fell in love, so I guess we became a band.
One of the nicest thing to have in music is interaction between the players, you can learn so much from it. All the three of us are into different music, Adel is into more dancey stuff, Marci is mixing reggae as a profession and is into this experimental kind of music like Rooji Ikeda. All of us love Lali Puna from the morr label.
Hungarian Scene
I guess no scene is dominant, you have all sorts of, drum`n`bass is sitting in the place where hardrock used to be in the eighties, most people are into that, but you have everything: only in very little amounts. Now dj`s are well payed and respected, a lot better than the people who actually do some music. Is it such a big art to take someone else`s music, match it to tempo, than claim you`re doing something else other than that, while most of the times you’re not? They try to keep people dancing, but music should never be restricted to that, though I love good dance music. Nothing is in your face as nowhere, you have to dig a bit for good stuff, but it exists.
What we do is still very underground, but – I guess – that`s what makes it so enjoyable, I can go round to my friends any time, I’ll probably find them working on some stuff, we don`t just make a tea, we make a track while we are at each others place. Instead of playing a card game or watching tv, we record some music. I don’t even have a tv, I`m into my ageing Akai sampler instead. So I guess you can call it a community, only I never felt like that. The spread of computers, freeware or cracked music software made it possible to finish the whole music at home, it did set free most of us, I guess it’s worldwide. Just grab my hard disk with unfinished tunes, go round to friends, or upload some to our server, I always get something back what I can use. It’s a bit like folk music now, and it starts to get interesting.
We don`t have too much pressure from labels, some of us get some music released sometimes, but nothing serious. Same with clubs and live gigs, not too much opportunity, but some, most clubs are ruled by the dj culture. Ultrahang foundation (www.uh.hu) have made a limited cd-r series gathering a cd worth of music from most of us in this scene, it contains some mad-mad music, which couldn`t see the light on a more commercial label. yet I have a very bad experience with hungarian labels, sadly. Quick money is a prime issue here to their survival if they do this professionally. I made an album, »compact disco«, for a well known label here for instance, they heard all the demos I made for it, they said they`d like to release it, and by the time I’ve finished the album they told me next month they don`t need it as it is. I wasn`t dancey enough for them. There is nothing you can do about it. You have to be the sort of person to prove them wrong, it keeps you going. They need money from it instantly, I guess that`s what makes most music go the wrong way, trying to hide away the missing parts with stolen grooves and sounds everyone heard a million times. Its not a hungarian speciality,but we are very very good at it.
Life
I sleep four hours a day, – a little bit more on these cold winter days – to do all the designing and all my music. Music fills you up the same way as dreaming and sleeping. Live fast and die old, finish the work you are here for.
aktueller Termin: 23.01.2002, Tigrics live im rhiz
Check out: Tigrics Homepage
