Cover Photo Credit: Lina Gaisser
Zach Condon is back with A Study of Losses, the second Beirut album of the decade. Conceived as a thematic soundtrack to the acrobatic stage of Swedish circus collective Kompani Giraff, the album is a bold and endearing collection of tracks that take inspiration from forgotten aspects of world history. We talked to Condon on Zoom for a second time. You can find our chat below.
Nice to see you again, Zach.
Zach Condon: Yeah, good to see you. Nice background.
Thank you. Nice album. And you have the same background as before. You’re in your studio again.
Yeah, I haven’t moved. (laughs)
I moved to Berlin since our previous interview. Back then, you were wondering whether you should move back to Norway or not. Any updates on that?
Yeah, it’s kind of halfway, the place up there. I’m going to try and build it up a little bit. And we’re not sure if we want to be mostly up there, or half and half, or whatever. We can figure it out, but it’s going to take a while. We still go often and we spend a lot of time there. But as you can see, my studio is still set up here.
I moved to a different country for the first time in my life. It’s not like moving to a different city in the same country. It’s a totally different and more difficult experience. And you have done that multiple times. Huge respect for that.
Yeah. It gets stressful, though. It’s. That’s another thing, it’s very difficult. It’s a long process. There’s the bureaucracy and stuff as well. So this is a process that could take some years.
How are you adapting to living in Berlin so far?
I’m adapting, but I overall think it’s a good city. Sometimes it’s too overstimulating, but it’s a nice place if you’re an art lover.
Yeah, you know, Berlin is changing, too. It’s not quite what it was 10 or 15 years ago. It didn’t always feel this hectic. I feel like nowadays it’s more crowded, a little more stressful. You have to wait for everything and fight for everything. Which might literally be just because the population is growing so rapidly, but the energy is also changing a lot, potentially because of things like the tech industry moving in and all this stuff. It feels in some ways more like New York or something. Whereas when I first came out here, compared to New York, it felt like a small town, and it was very relaxed. Everything was kind of like, ‘do it at your own speed!’. There was no rush. But that is changing, unfortunately.
Lots of people compare New York to Frankfurt as well, because of all the skyscrapers. But I think that’s a relatively simplified view. I think you would know better how to accurately compare them.
I think Frankfurt, from what I’ve felt there, feels more impersonal, less like New York which has a character to it. I thought that with Frankfurt, the skyscrapers felt kind of anywhere and nowhere simultaneously. I think Frankfurt is more of a business place, and New York has a little more flavor to it in some ways. I don’t know Frankfurt very well, though.
Let’s talk about your beautiful new album, A Study of Losses. Your previous record Hadsel was a point of starting things all over again for you. In this second chapter of your new era, you explore a very specific concept. You work with the Swedish circus Kompani Giraff to soundtrack an acrobatic stage show based loosely on Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, the novel by German author Judith Schalansky. Hadsel was a project with no boundaries, whereas the whole description of this project sounds wildly different. How do you prepare for such a concept? Is it that much different for you? Is it a totally new thing? How did you handle the process overall?
Well, that was an interesting thing that you mentioned with Hadsel, feeling like starting over. For me, yeah, Hadsel felt a lot like doing the first record where I was kind of isolated and something just needed to come out. And this record actually reminds me a lot of my second record, The Flying Club Cup, because for some reason, it feels like I’m starting a cycle again. For The Flying Club Cup, I had this very intense thematic idea the whole way through. It was very specific. I had an image in my mind, and stories in my head. I had a literal picture that I was using as a reference for inspiration and so on. I was listening to a specific type of music at the time and trying to kind of imitate it. So for this one, that helped a lot actually. It helped to have a North Star or a guiding light throughout. It took some of the pressure off of inventing everything.
It was also a process that was open ended enough. The people at Kompani Giraff were very much saying, “No, just write an album. You don’t have to make it a certain way. It doesn’t have to be specifically good for acrobatics, or dancing or anything. However these book chapters speak to you, that’s how it works.” So I noticed for me, as the album went on, as I got further into it, the more the theme developed, the more I saw the image in my head of what it should sound like, and what the ideas should be. And I got more and more into what I was researching on the side. I say research and that sounds maybe a bit pretentious, but it wasn’t like that. I was reading this book and following this theme really put me in a state of constantly looking at, for example, classic arts and classical music and stuff like that. I don’t know why specifically. It’s not like the book is specifically about that. But that is what I took from it, and that is what I got interested in simultaneously.
So you had complete freedom in what you’re trying to express. Because when you think of collaborations, you need to usually communicate to find some common ground. But from what I gather, that was not the case for you.
No. And I was grateful for that, because in the past, for example, I tried to do a soundtrack for a movie, and I remember the director was actually sending me scenes and saying, “Can you write something that fits the scene?” I would look at the scene and try to fit that emotion or whatever that he was trying to convey. And it was just blocking anything I was doing. That’s not how I work. I’ll read something or see something, and a month later, a week later, a day later, who knows, something will come out of it. But I can’t control it and I can’t force it in any way, shape or form. So it was great that it was just like, “Here’s how much time you have and here is the theme. Have fun with it.” They adapted to my work in the end. They created the piece that they ended up performing after listening to my record, not the other way around.
Let’s talk about the research you did for the album. In the songs you tackle lost aspects of culture, history, life that surround us. These concepts are mostly evident in the titles of the songs. I want to nerd out with you on them. I don’t think we will have the opportunity to go through all of them, but maybe at least some of them. Let’s start with the instrumentals which take their names from seas on the moon. What kind of relationship do you have with the moon? Because it’s a topic of obsession in literature, astrology, mysticism, and more.
Yeah. I mean, that’s partially where it came from. The classical literature and stuff is just obsessed with the moon. I related to it a lot just because of my history of insomnia and things like that when I was younger. In the book the project is based on, there’s a story about the moonwalker. I changed the title slightly. I forget what the English translation is, but it’s about a guy who goes to the moon to archive everything that is lost on Earth, which I found to be a very interesting thing. And in it, it describes him traveling over the moon seas at some point. It mentions them very briefly actually, it’s not a main part of the story at all. The whole theme of the story is that he spends so long trying to archive things on the moon that he basically leaves behind a family, and his whole life disappears while he tries to archive everything. But in it, it mentions these moon seas.
When I gave Kompani Giraff the album, it was I think 11 or 12 songs, because I think there’s that many chapters in the book, which is what we agreed on doing. I think it was a 45-minute long album or something. They asked if I could do more to fill in the spaces for the performance, which is normally like an hour long or something like that. I had all this instrumental material that I had been working on that I ended up not singing over. So I just developed those more fully. I remember thinking, “Well, these would be all the lost little scraps of the chapters of the book. This is the stuff that would have been archived on the moon. And in my head I imagined, where would that have landed? I imagined them being descriptions of these moon seas, which to me is like one of the most beautiful, potent images I could possibly think of, whoever looked up at the sky and saw the marks on the moon and thought, “Yeah, those are oceans.” (laughs)
What are those lunar seas composed of anyway?
All they are is craters. They’re marks from where the asteroids hit the moon over the years. An Italian astrologist from a few centuries ago just named them that. There’s a lot of interesting things I found out about it. The first side of the moon is named after really rough things. They’re oceans of storms and clouds and rain and stuff like that. Because apparently sailors had told them that in certain phases of the moon, the weather is worse. And on the other side of the moon are all these peaceful, nice things, like the Sea of Serenity and the Sea of Nectar and The Sea of Fecundity and all these nice things. Very interesting.
Let’s talk about “Caspian Tiger” too. I think the lyrics of the song resonate with the theme of everything eventually fading away-
Yeah.
What fascinates you about this extinct species? How much of it was your own fascination, and how much came from the source material?
It was very loose. Honestly, in some ways I wonder if it was almost the chapter names alone sometimes that inspired the bulk of some of the material. Because the more I would read and the more I would specifically try to give what the book said and then put it on the song, the less I was able to get out of it. So I just kind of let it go. Like, “Okay, I’ll read the chapter and then I will just whatever comes, comes, even if it’s not related to what the author said, but what I thought.” And yeah, what you said is exactly it, with the Caspian tiger thing. I was telling you about being an insomniac. Ever since I was a young kid, I would go, “What is the point of anything?” You can spend your whole life trying to make a masterpiece and then in a few generations it’ll be completely forgotten. If not, even those generations will disappear and so on, and the work will crumble into dust eventually. As far as we know, the earth will just disappear into the sun one day anyway. So what is the point of anything? I think a big part of the book is just like, “We lose so much, but simultaneously you can’t save anything.” This gets into religious territory in a sense.
The chorus of that song is a bit interesting, because I didn’t consciously write that. It was more like I started singing and what came out was, “You’re also dying, you’re also safe.” In the end, that’s the worst that happens. This animal goes extinct, but its suffering is over in a way. It’s something that you can never have an answer to, you can never have a final thought on. It’s always just going to be this circular thing. I found that so interesting, I have been looking into a lot of more spiritual texts of religion and philosophy. While I was doing this record, it all happened at the same time. It was very, very serendipitous.
The song “Tuanaki Atoll” is an interesting one. It tells the story of a group of islets that eventually disappeared.
Yeah. It might be a group, but I think it’s mostly just about an island that has disappeared. Historians are pretty sure it existed, because a handful of explorers talked about it. But then it just ceased to exist. They’ve traced an earthquake back to that era that might have erased the island in a tsunami, potentially. And there were people there. No one knows how true this is, but they claimed that these people lived in this perfect Garden of Eden, peaceful and loving, which, if I’m being honest, I don’t believe exists anywhere and ever in history. I know that some people believe in it, but I don’t believe that. I think human nature is very flawed. But supposedly they were so peaceful that they didn’t even have a word for murder or for war.
One concept in the album that I don’t really understand is the one you tell about on “Ghost Train”. Can you elaborate on that?
It’s based on a very abstract chapter, and that is a rough translation to what it’s called. Essentially, it was about this author discovering the idea of death. Right now, I’m forgetting how the train gets involved, but I think in her mind, she was imagining a train full of ghosts, quite literally. She remembers the first time she ever became aware of the concept of death when she was a little girl. She has this imagery of people dying and decaying and stuff. That’s too much for her young mind. How do you handle that? And then the train comes in. I don’t remember much on how it came in, because I was probably traveling at the time. If I’m being honest, the reason I took the train part is this repetitive rhythm thing. The music on that one is like this repeating motif. I just kind of went with that.
We see some items representing songs and motifs on the album cover. I can immediately see the Caspian tiger among those items. Can you walk me through what else is on there?
Yes and no. I read the book piece by piece, and then I asked for summaries of the chapters by Kompani Giraff to ask them what they thought of them.This cover, though, is designed by my partner. She’s done the last couple of record covers, and she read through the whole thing, and she brought out these completely different items. So, for example, she tells me that the watering can is a reference to the flowers in “Ghost Train”. The funny thing is, I can’t remember all her explanations anymore. I know that the little angel reading is supposed to be a reference to “Mani’s 7 Books”. But I can’t remember all the specifics, which I actually kind of like. Everything has its own meaning now.
I kind of feel like that’s what art is about. Not having an objective meaning, or meanings changing in our perception over time.
Yeah. When I was younger, that used to drive me nuts, because I’m like, “I’m looking for an ultimate truth! I’m not looking for everyone’s interpretation.” And I was very much obsessed with this idea of true beauty that is outside and not subjective. It’s objectively beautiful to everyone. And I still think that in some ways, that exists. That to all humans, there’s certain things that are beautiful and not. Which is very much against the ideology of the modern day, actually, because everyone says everything is subjective all the time, that we’re all just making up stories. I don’t believe that, but I’m starting to appreciate the nuance of everyone having their own take on things more.
Does someone come to your mind when you think of your favorite explorers, adventurers, explorers, or philosophers in human history?
Well, that’s the thing. These days it’s almost politically incorrect, but I really do appreciate the European explorers. What an insane, crazy thing they did. People don’t appreciate or understand that these men were sailing giant boats off the face of the Earth and, as far as everyone was concerned, into complete unknown. They might as well have been visiting new planets. Their understanding of everything was so amazingly advanced in some ways. We know how little they knew about what they were getting into, and they just fought through it anyway. I mean, talk about insane and inspirational. For me, that is kind of an obsession. Everyone from Magellan and so on. Growing up in Santa Fe, I was raised with so many stories of the conquistadors and how they came through and stuff like that.
The reason I say it’s politically incorrect these days is because everyone is obsessed with the colonization aspect of it. And yes, there was that. But simultaneously, I think people tend to forget a lot of the places these guys went. The cultures were still doing horrible, brutal things to each other, too. It’s not like these guys were worse than how the world was already. When the conquistadors came to Mexico, for example, and they met with the peoples there, they helped a bunch of tribes that were being destroyed and brutally, ritually sacrificed by the Aztecs to overthrow the Aztecs. The Aztecs were bloody, brutal, horrible people, and they cleared them out. I don’t see the world as black and white as people do these days, where they’re like, “These evil white men jumped on boats and took over.” No, they were human just like everyone else. Humans with faults. And they went to places where there were humans with faults.
In the album Microphones in 2020, Phil Elverum sings: “I remember my life as if it’s just some dreams that I don’t trust.” Sometimes I also have memories that I don’t trust. Mostly from childhood, but from later, too, that I’m not sure if it’s real or not. Do you ever have those kinds of things?
Yeah. That’s been extremely rough for me. When I was working on Hadsel, I had this goal to kind of dig through my past and see if I could settle certain things and learn more about it. What I found is that it depends on how you feel that day, unfortunately, that it colors your memory so much that you can’t trust it. I think the lyric you mentioned is a very good way of putting it. I have that problem very, very much. But it’s both a fortunate and unfortunate situation. It is extremely inventive about these things. I’m finding that I can’t trust my perception of reality at the moment, let alone my memories. I can trust my memories even less, and I can trust my perception about half the time. I’m finding that to be a very stressful realization. The older I get, the more I realize that I don’t process things as they are. I practically make it up.
You’re getting back to touring, like, and you have some dates coming up. I was wondering how you feel about that, and whether you have plans about expanding them or you just plan to see in time.
Yeah, I have to just see later. I did the shows in Berlin last year. That was a huge leap, and that was very scary, actually. Very stressful too. But the reaction was great. It was so nice to see my band again and play with them, and it was really nice to see an audience react to the music instead of just putting stuff into the void and then not really hearing much back, you know?
So I decided to try a little bit more. But these are all baby steps, and that’s as far as I would go right now, because there’s certain things I still can’t deal with. I’m a little better with stress, but not great. And I don’t deal well with travel, ironically, even though people probably think I travel all the time. I don’t. I go somewhere and I stay there for a long time. That’s what I do. I don’t really travel a lot because I can’t deal with the transit very well, and I still have a lot of trouble with flying. People are always asking why don’t I at least play a show in Mexico or something? I would love to. I absolutely would love to play a show there. I miss those audiences because they’re so excited and energetic and stuff, and I love the cultures there, but I can’t get on a plane anymore. I’ve tried for 17 years. I fought my horrible fear of flying by just getting really drunk and getting on a plane, and I can’t do that anymore. It’s not working.
For my closing question, I want to ask about the current political state of the world. We are witnessing the rise of a global right-wing populism as well as a tech oligarchy, and the political state of Turkey is very similar. As a person who has lived there for many years, do you have any message of solidarity for all the freedom fighters in Turkey?
I don’t know if I have much to add. One thing about my music is that I believe politics come and go more quickly, and they have little to do with the more transcendent beauty of things like art and music. Other people are the opposite. They’re like, “Music needs to serve every day life!” I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. But with Erdogan, it’s such a horrible situation and has been for so long now. Everything that made Turkey great is slipping. And you’re right, that’s the same problem that’s encroaching on half the world.
I know a little bit about what’s going on in Turkey right now, but only vaguely. Only headlines and stuff like that. I know that he arrested the mayor of Istanbul, which is just dirty, dirty tactics. But none of this surprises me with him either. We all knew what he was capable of and what he’s going to do. I’m proud of anyone who’s resisting this kind of stuff and fighting for it, because there is a lot worth saving there. But simultaneously, it’s like the problems going on are a symptom of bigger problems in the world right now, some of which we’re having trouble admitting to ourselves.
I hope the resistance can do some things, though I wonder how many people need to change to a bigger perspective for this to click. Something bigger has to change in order for Turkey to be saved.
