Improvised concert at Hevhetia festival in Budapest music center September 2019.

David Kollar - guitar
Zbigniew Chojnacki - accordion

www.hevhetia.com

Illusion of a Separate World is the meeting between innovative Slovakian guitarist, film music composer and sound designer David Kollar (Steven Wilson, Pat Mastelotto, Fennesz, Marco Minnemann, Eivind Aarset) and Norwegian trumpet maestro Arve Henriksen. Shimmering soundscapes and haunting melodies mixed with soundtrack music, ethnic influences, electronic explorations, jazz hybrids, and post-rock riffs are at the core of this meeting.

David Kollar and Arve Henriksen started their collaboration after they met in 2017 and played just twice before the recording. “I played last year at the Spectaculare festival in Prague,” said David “I had a solo performance and after me there was Arve playing with Christian Fennesz. At the end of the festival, we shared our contact details. In few months, we met again on the stage at Hevhetia festival in Slovakia.” The performance was such a bonding experience that the two chose to record an album together.

In December 2017, David spent a week in the city of Faenza, Italy as the guest of his fellow trumpeter and friend Paolo Ranieri. This was the perfect setting to start sketching out improvisations that would become part of Illusion of a Separate World. David drew inspiration from life’s trials and tribulations or from the environment around him. “I played them as musical diaries,” said David. Soundscapes, moody riffs and rhythmic works emerged. He recorded 17 tracks and then gave them to Arve, who layered trumpet, voice and electronics over them.

Through this joining of two unique worlds, in both geographical and cultural senses, the duo has created an anthemic album which reveals an intimate connection. It spans from the moments of quietness that slowly turn into walls of orchestral sounds like in Night Navigator, to the tribal drumming rhythms that Henriksen enriches with his voice-like trumpet in Chimera. When the guitarist transforms a simple clacking on string into a weird rhythm like in Silk spinning, Henriksen then turns it into a pastoral melody. When the trumpeter switches to his trademark soft-speaking voice, like in Mirror Transformations, Kollar places himself in a more subtle context, camouflaging his guitar in synth-like drapings. The Slovakian guitarist then takes the stage and hints at his Americana influences with a delicate guitar and trumpet solo in Solarization, that eventually morphs in an ethnic-flavored electronic experience. Suspended over Kollar’s cloudy drone, Castles in the Air is Arve Henriksen at his best, playing one of his most iconic solos. But he can also turn in some of the most intricate and haunting melodies like in the unsettling Roving Observer, which Kollar initially took inspiration from movie director Tarkovsky.

Intimate, intense, passionate and subtle, Illusion of a Separate World is two artists showing how easy is for them to create music that is immediate and tremendously complex, haunting and gorgeous at same time.

2017 Hevhetia records
"I began work on this album in Autumn 2016. It started with experimentation of sounds from a modular synthetsizer, then I added the guitars and Paolo Ranieri added the trumpets. Some of his riffs I also processed through the synthesizer and each day a song was formed. I used a minimum guitars.

Work on this album was influenced by the diagnosis of my good friend Lukas Halicky, just 34 years old, father of 3 kids with a brain tumour.
Things spiralled downward, as I trusted in a positive result of treatment for my friend and I wanted to help. All this influenced the atmosphere of the songs. This album is a story, like Dostoevsky's notes from the underground. That book fell off its shelf when I thought about the title of this album and its conception. In these circumstances, the painting
from Dušan Očkovič summarised my thoughts (see the album cover). A smoking man deep in thought wearing a striped jumper. I see there Jesus who doesn't want to look me in the eye.
But, as long as the cigarette burns, there is always hope.

2015 Hevhetia Records
Pat Mastelotto - David Kollar - Paolo Raineri
"A beautiful, impenetrable Cthulhu. KoMaRa pushes forward into the unknown" ECHOES AND DUST

"it's living proof that the music it's not as dead as we might think" BRUSHVOX

"Throw your superlatives at this one lads, they've created a monster." PHIL WELLER - MANCHESTER ROCKS

It will challenge you - but it will do so in all the right ways." THE MUSICAL MELTING POT

"Their sound is daring, heavy and frequently brutal" PROG

"Candidate to the Top 3 of the year." BABYBLAUE

".immerse yourself and you will be rewarded." TOTAL MUSIC MAGAZINE

"There is no doubt that KoMaRa attempts to build a new aesthetic in contemporary music." ADAM BARUCH - SOUNDTRACK OF MY LIFE

"Sounds fantastic!! I love it! This is really good and inspiring stuff" EIVIND AARSET

"Very strong candidate to album of the year". FAJNE RECENZJE

"Its great! Amazing playing and production" CHRISTIAN FENNESZ






Boundary-Breaking, Cinematic Industrial Ethno-Rock From
King Crimson’s Pat Mastelotto and Renowned Avant-Experimentalists David Kollar and Paolo Raineri.

It fucks with your head and has the ability to fluctuate your levels of sobriety even if your system is clean of drink and mind-altering drugs. But as far as mindfucks go, this is damnably compelling.With album art coming from the bewilderingly ingenious mind of Tool guitarist Adam Jones, Komara is a foray into obscure territories.
Dirty Smelly sounds like sin and seduction. . ., reverb lavished trumpets and twinkling sound effects spreads about the song’s atmosphere like a vile of blood dropped into a glass of crystal clear water. It blots the palette in mesmeric fashion, the red of the blood moving about the water like tree roots venturing through soil for nutrients. Deeper in those waters a venomous, barking bass line dwells and gives the whole a definitively nastier guise.

Mastelotto has been a member of every King Crimson lineup from 1994 to the present. In addition to King Crimson, he was with Mr Mister, XTC, David Sylvian, the Rembtandts, Steven Wilson, Terry Bozzio, Trey Gunn, Allan Holdsworth, John Paul Jones, and Kimmo Pohjonen, Tony Levin and dozens more.

Slovakian guitarist and composer David Kollar has released nine expansive albums, scored 18 films and worked on many multimedia projects. He’s also worked with Eivind Aarset, Gergo Borlai, Bjorn Charles Dreyer, Lenka Dusilová.

Trumpeter Paolo Raineri takes his instrument and processes it in real-time to create ethereal, otherworldly sounds. The Italian musician combines Scandinavian nu-jazz influences with psychedelic rock, In addition, he’s performed with Stefano Battaglia, Berserk!, The Blessed Beat, Baustelle, Calibro 35, Nada, and Enrico Gabrielli.


credits

released 30 June 2015

David Kollar - guitar, bass, electronic textures
Pat Mastelotto - acoustic and electric drums and percussion
Paolo Raineri - trumpet, vocals and audio mangling

Adrian Benavides & Bill MUnyon- mix engineers

Produced by KOMARA and Adrian Benavides

Label: Hevhetia


Recorded 18-19 November at Faust Studio Prague

Track Listing:

1.Dirty Smelly
2.37 Forms
3.A Collision of Fingerprints
4.She Sat in Black Silt
5.2CFAC
6.Pasquinade
7.Abraso
8.Got Has Left This Place
9.Afterbirth
10.Inciting Incidents

2015 Hevhetia Records
Borderless Color Blast - Cinematic Visionary Avant Rock

Personnel:

Simone Cavina Drums, Electronic Textures
Bruno Germano Recording and Mix Engineer
David Kollar Electric guitar
Paolo Raineri Trumpet

Sophisticated, extraordinary trialogue of experienced improvisers creating
their trans-genre & tranversal musical collage inspired by Charles Bukowski ́s text “The Copulating Mermaid Of Venice”.

They do not play to illustrate this novel, but to make real the various (im)possi-
ble, rhizomatic connections between surprising sounds and tones – only this way they can remind us tense atmosphere of this writer. However, first of all, The Blessed Beat tries to go beyond... – not only beyond of this literary text, but beyond the space of binarities to find something “in between them”.

The music here is either massive, uncompromising aggressive (in kind of poly-
rhythmical and brutal sonic tsunami) or flowing sonoristically introverted, but you can feel and have a hunch that there is something more, which moves us to the otherness of unknown, adventurous, sometimes quite disquieting world where nothing is stable and expectable.

The specific immediate, instant, intuitive musical communication of David,
Simone and Paolo can overlaps your expectations because they are able to ex-press ineffable meanings of something “beyond and between”.

Slovakian guitarist and composer David Kollar has released nine expansive albums, scored 18 films and worked on many multimedia projects. His last recording, 2013’s The Son, an atmospheric, emotionally-charged effort, received accolades from Guitar Moderne, France’s A Decovrir Absolument and the Czech and Slovak Radio Head awards. He’s also worked with Eivind Aarset, Gergo Borlai, Bjorn Charles Dreyer and Lenka Dusilová.

Due to his versatility, Italian drummer Simone Cavina plays with many different musical projects, ranging from radical improvisation to avant rock, through jazz, funk and songwriting. His musical research is leading him through electroacustic and electronic music, allowing him to enlarge his musical inspiration and his drumming style in brand new territories. He played and collaborated, among others, with Junkfood 4et, Berserk!, Yuppie Flu,Iosonouncane, Incident on South Street, Stefano Battaglia, Luisa Cottifogli,Mauro Patricelli.

Trumpeter Paolo Raineri takes his instrument and processes it in real-time to create ethereal, otherworldly sounds. The Italian musician combines
Scandinavian nu-jazz influences with psychedelic rock, experimental and free improvisation in his award-winning Junkfood 4et. In addition, he performed with Stefano Battaglia, Berserk!, KoMaRA, Baustelle, Calibro 35, Nada, Enrico Gabrielli and Tommaso Colliva.

TRACKS

1. I Feel it in my blood

2. Doesn’t looks dead to me

3. Like garbage left in the sink

4. The First thing to come and the last thing to go

5. Best fuck I ever had

6. Just like a mermaid

7. You’ve been fucking dead women all your life

8. Only a damn fools falls in love

2014 Mystery Stable

"Shock, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance or resignation. Those are five stages human beings undergo in the face of a trauma. “Trauma” is Greek for injury or wound. And one of the most painful wounds in our life is birth – in a way an expulsion from unity. The idea of our death or the death of our loved ones is close to this traumatic interpretation. It is at such moments that we fall apart in multiple selves which are then attacked by shock, experience anger, bargain with themselves, imprint into depressive traces and reunite in reconciliation. No rational thinking at the beginning and the end of our journey, just an instinct turning us into ANIMAL EXITUS.



All music composed and recorded by David KOLLAR in his studio Mystery Stable in Easten Slovakia.

Mixed and mastered in Klakson studio Košice - Slovakia.

Paolo Raineri - trumpet
Lenka Dusilova - vocals

Listen it with good headphones or speakers!

I decided to record the album Son in the beginning of this year, when my son David
was waiting for a second surgery. It was very difficult and painful period, which I also took as a challenge to move somewhere else.
I recorded the feelings that were inside me and around me. I wanted to conceive the album differently than I did before.
I used only electric guitar on which I made all the noises and sounds; mandoline,
which I play with bow, Gamelan, a voice of Lenka Dusilová and India Czajkowska.
The compositions are based on improvisations, which I recorded in Warsaw in a studio of Tadeusz Sudnik and later in my studio in Slovakia.
The final material was longer than three hours. From that I chose what is on the album.
David Kollar - guitars, bowed mandoline, effects, gamelan, vocal
Lenka Dusilova - vocals
India CZajkowska - vocals