Can you tell us about this track?

This track is part three of my upcoming EP New Days Dawn, which will be released on Kasev Tapes in mid 2025. The EP is strongly influenced by the experience of an old friend’s death last year. Through this experience, I found myself negotiating my relationship to death, memory as a living tissue, and the rites offered to deal with death both collectively and individually. The latter, I feel, failed to provide what I was looking for, so I began working on this EP as a kind of place of mourning. This place felt like a vast, unknown forest where it is always dim—neither night nor day. And I was walking in it. I became fascinated by the idea of rotting and becoming part of this greater body, being reiterated into a more chaotic assemblage of matter. This idea is spiritual at its core, in the longing for connection to a vaster body that transcends the individual as a concept. At the same time, it is simply a reconfiguration of existing propositions about what happens after death. “False Ascension” is a part of this train of thought. It represents a disenchantment with a lifelong promise that doesn’t hold up.

What’s your process?

I primarily use material recorded by me or people around me. This gives me a way to weave moments and memories into something that, at least in my feeling, is connected. “False Ascension” started with me playing my viola zither. I’m not trained on this instrument, but when I find the right intention for a stroke with the bow that feels like it is speaking to me, I trust this feeling and start to let the recording react by playing along with it—like waving a net of relationships between sonic entities. When I have gathered some material, I usually start composing. Some recordings (field or instrumental) can simply be left as they are because they already offer an interesting proposition for a song structure. So then I start composing around this recording until the track starts speaking and in the best case becoming more than the sum of its parts.

Tell us about being a musician in Switzerland.

I feel comfortable in Zurich. There are a lot of interesting musicians here, and the scene is small. I’m part of a group called Doxa Shroti, and we organize monthly guerrilla concerts in underpasses. This brings together a lot of people who are into experimental music. Much of what happens in Zurich, at least in the experimental music scene, is self-organized. You have access to funding from the city you live in, as well as from the canton and other foundations. This makes it possible to take your time in creating while being able to pay everyone more or less according to their work. Even yourself.

Who are your favorite Swiss artists?

Tebe Tebe Tebe, Otis Thomet, and Mirio.

You can follow Gotgha on Nina and Instagram

Now Playing

Playing Next