On today’s show, Àbáse revealed the story behind his new album Awakening and personal views on promoting your album.
I’ve made public a snippet of our recent live Q&A session within our Club with Berlin-based Hungarian musician and producer Szabolcs Bognar aka Àbáse.
Szabolcs has just released his second album Awakening in collaboration with Analogue Foundation which came out on July 5th, creating an inspiring blend of classic Lagos Afrobeat, traditional Hungarian folk, Yoruba rhythms, house and techno, hip-hop and Jazz.
I decided to invite him for a discussion on the behind-the-scenes work of the album and his personal views on promoting your album, providing you with new ideas for showcasing your music releases.
I must say it was a lively and deep session.
We delved into important topics such as having a well-defined social media content calendar as well as clear goals. Additionally, we explored the importance of cultivating a growth mindset on social media and heard about Àbáse challenges and lessons learned.
Not only does he share personal perspectives and insights into the topic of promoting your album, but he also deep dives into the different opportunities you can focus on online.
Below is an excerpt from the conversation.
In Conversation with Àbáse: Àbáse’s album ‘Awakening’
There’s a lot to consider when thinking about your album, including various influences, references, and sources of inspiration. What was the initial starting point for the album, and why did you decide to create it?
It kind of goes back to the very beginning of me wanting to do music at all. As a child and someone who started to study music at an early age, I very quickly started to dream about my own project.
You’re practising and you’re picturing yourself on stages, doing your stuff, or I would often, picture myself playing, the music that I was listening to, my favourite music on my headphones.
And so I was developing this dream for a very long time. And I’m a very, I don’t know what’s the right word…I’m a big over-thinker. I’m analyzing in my head, and building the project in my head.
I was thinking a lot inside of my head about what it’s gonna be instead of figuring it out on the instrument or composing a lot.
Back then, I had two major inspirations as an album, and they kind of defined my way of production too.
One of them was Bending New Corners by a trumpet player called Erik Truffaz.
He had two very inspirational albums in the late nineties combining club music and jazz.
It spoke to me a lot because it was the first record that I heard where live musicians were interpreting music that I heard as a young person going to the clubs, drum and bass and electronic genres and hip hop in a very organic way.
It felt like this was a unique perspective and very authentic too.
On the album, they do an amazing journey across genres, but it’s always the same for musicians with the same four instruments, and it was recorded in the same room live, like a classic jazz record.
So the sonics are always the same, and you can picture the four people playing in front of you if you listen, but the emotions and inspirations are very broad if that makes sense.
And that to me was an amazing thing, and that was one inspiration.
And the other one was a Prince album that is called The Rainbow Children – which is from the early 2000s.
It’s not a really famous album, but that was the first Prince album that I got.
And back then I had the Walkmans. So with the Walkmans, you were kind of forced to listen to things over and over again, and it was a pain to switch it. So you were sticking with one of them for a longer period.
I was listening to both of these albums like front to back, front to back, front to back, front to back. Rainbow Children was a huge influence, but that album on the contrary was using a lot of production. It felt more like a collage because one track would be jazz and have one type of instrumentation.
And even in between a track, they would go to different places and switch it up and, you know, you would hear a crazy guitar solo after an amazing funk section and Latin breakdowns and then a baroque interlude.
And it was just a creepy, like, a crazy dream.
So that was, I would say, the first record that got me into falling in love with production in that sense.
You know, creating an experience, and it felt like almost like a hip hop record in that sense, that it was organic sampling.
Like, you draw all these inspirations from everywhere and there are no rules and you can go anywhere.
And so in the beginning, the closer I got to producing my own project, I was always referencing these two. Like:
Am I doing a jazz record?
Am I ready to be able to show a lot of inspiration through a small sound and a small combo?
Or am I going rainbow and just layering the production, like inviting session musicians and, doing sampling and layering stuff like recording instruments on top of each other?
I grew up in the era where DAWs and accessible audio production just become available widespread, and we still had big PCs and everything.
But in high school, I remember someone telling me for the first time that there’s this program called Reason – a studio inside your computer – and I was going crazy.
And I couldn’t understand Reason.
It was too overwhelming for me, but then I got a very old MacBook, and it had GarageBand on it: that was my first access to a production station on my computer.
And me being an overthinker and probably a control freak as well, especially when it comes to your own music, you want to make the best possible, and it’s kind of a blessing and a curse to give everybody access to these computers because you have all the time in the world.
So very naturally, I went with the rainbow children way, which is just, less and less exporting, inviting musicians until I feel it’s ready, adding layers on top of layers and editing every single detail.
And so my first few projects were like that.
I was studying music at the same time, and I always play live as well, I did invite musicians, but it was still live musical takes being edited and selected and chopped up and manipulated and all that.
Invocation has more live recordings and live takes, and it does have a couple of fully live gems. But even though I was selecting them carefully, I did edits, and it still went through my Ableton thing.
So I was cleaning up. And Laroyê was the most, in the box, so to say, because I really only had my laptop and the Zoom recorder. That one took years of fine-tuning.
I’m very self-conscious when I’m playing the instrument. I started piano pretty late. I was learning drums before drums were my first instrument.
And so to me, to do an album that is fully live and that has improvisations and solos took a lot of courage. And honestly, I was just never able to make that step. I always pictured myself doing that music.
I always looked up to jazz musicians the most. In my head, there’s no bigger achievement or even just nobody’s cooler than a proficient jazz musician. You know?
So to commit to an album that has live takes like that, was just too much, and I always wanted to do it.
And I guess after all the years of editing Laroyê, I was at the place where I’m like: wow! I just wanna play.
And I also felt like by coming to Berlin and finding these people who collaborated on the album, I felt confident saying: “I think we have a sound that is worth tracking live.”
That’s how the idea of Awakening came. It was always there. I always wanted to do an album like this, but I never made the step because I just never had the guts to do it.
You said that working on awakening took a lot of courage. Could you break that down and explain it in more detail?
When you record the way you record it, which is being in the same room and recording all the layers at the same time, it means that you have very little room for correction.
We grew up knowing that.
Everybody who is my age or younger is growing up with having access to unlimited editing and perfecting everything.
You can loop anything.
Back in the day, it wasn’t even an option. If you had an ensemble, you had to come in and perform it all together. And if you mess up and you have to do another thing, it’s expensive.
The studio is expensive. Everything is expensive. Tape is expensive. You would lose your job very quickly.
I think it’s just a whole different culture of recording.
I mean, it’s a blessing and a curse. We lose something, we gain something.
It’s incredible to do music this time and age, and creativity doesn’t have barriers. You can do whatever you want, but there is a culture of live music playing that is just by default because of technologies getting lost.
So, I see performing live like that, this type of music as a statement in itself. And it just took a lot because it was a big commitment for me to say: okay, I’m gonna contribute to this culture of live musical performances or call it jazz.
I respect the recordings I love a lot and the musicians who do them.
I just have this built-in filter on me.
How important was it for you to be surrounded by the right people who provided you with the direction you needed? What was your experience collaborating with them?
I more and more feel like I would love to work with an outside producer on a project in the future to have a strong outside voice that is critical, and who’s happy we make decisions.
But I’m a bit wary because I also know that it will be very hard for me to give away the lead.
I did consult a lot with my dear friend, Wayne Snow, who I deliberately met and talked to about the project and showed him the demos not being a participant directly to give me just feedback.
Because I respect him a lot. He always has very strong artistic visions.
I have very much this insider music musician perspective, understanding the structures and the chords and arranging from inside of the music, but he sees everything.
So, I was consulting him mostly on the concept, but then also on the sound. I ask his opinion a lot.
But then, the people I played with, it was more about musical trust.
These people, I would trust them blindly, doing music anytime, anywhere.
But we didn’t discuss production that much. It was pretty much left to me to make decisions.
So having the right team is definitely important, but everybody needs to figure out on their own what’s the right setup for them.
In Conversation with Àbáse: Promoting Your Album
What was it like for you to promote Awakening? And what do you think about the topic of promoting your album nowadays?
It’s a tough and confusing job. I think everybody who’s doing music here can relate. I think we are all involved.
It’s a confusing industry.
My strategy was to find help because I knew that I was not gonna be able to push through alone.
Since I moved to Berlin, I always, booked the PR agency, for my releases to help.
I learned about the industry when I moved here. Back in Budapest, you only had an idea of how things work, and we looked at the blogs. Back then, it was blogs and SoundCloud.
And when I moved here, I started to hear about TikTok, and Instagram became bigger.
It seems like there’s a new trend and a new wave every six months, or they change the algorithm and the trend every three months.
And it’s really hard and confusing to follow up, to be honest.
So one thing we knew was that, on a certain level, we wanted to make sure that, the the right people at the professional level and the industry heard it.
What agencies are doing is that they are targeting or pitching it to people who are working at blogs and printed media and or radio, to make sure that the people get it.
One thing I realized is that everything is so saturated, and you can access everything with the streaming platforms, but people are also getting overwhelmed by it.
So there’s a reason community radio and tastemakers are still a thing.
People are overwhelmed by too many options.
And if they just wanna hear cool music that has not, their iPods in the same place for fifteen years, then the easiest is to turn on a cool show on Worldwide FM or on BBC or wherever that you like.
And there will be plenty of mixes nowadays, and it’s necessary. People appreciate these types of filters, and people who do the job for them. I think radio stations are still very relevant either online or real, radios. And media, as you know, some of the blogs, some of the music magazines, there’s there’s still a market even though it’s niche.
And, actually, the more niche it is, the better for me in my view. Because one thing that we can thank the Internet is no matter how small your genre is, on a global scale, it has the potential to keep your project afloat.
Through Bandcamp and socials, there is a chance to reach the people who will support it, and if you find enough of those people, you’re good.
And that’s the inspiring thought that keeps me afloat, to be honest, in this whole landscape of social media.
One thing is that we have an agency that is pitching the big guns, the media outlets, and I know that that’s being taken care of.
And even with that, I often tell or ask for as many interview possibilities as possible because I like to talk about the project in-depth, and it feels much more genuine and authentic if I can reply to questions and exchange rather than writing a long essay or a pitch because these PR pitches could be very dry as well.
On that note, thanks for this opportunity because this is exactly the type of format that I love. And it’s personal.
I got to express the things I need to express by myself.
Absolutely. I 100% agree with you.
In addition, listen to this Podcast Episode: Afro Brazilian Music w/ Àbáse
Interested in hearing the full conversation and discussing it with a community of artists and musicians?
Our Club Membership is our online space for connecting, learning, and exchanging ideas with independent artists based worldwide.
The full live session is now available on-demand within our dedicated online space.
To watch it, sign up for our Club 👉🏻 HERE.
I can’t wait to welcome you! 🙂
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