Music is Medicine: An Interview with Composer and Pianist Olec Mün
There was a time in human history when music wasn’t a spectator sport but was a form of deep communication that connected people with each other and with the Divine. As Western music moved away from these roots, thankfully, many Eastern and African cultures have maintained and cultivated the life-giving source of music’s ancient place in society. In these cultures, music is, essentially, communion, which is what composer and pianist Olec Mün discovered in his travels and now transmits through his music. Whether sharing the wordless stories of his grandparents’ experience as refugees of the WWII Nazi regime on his album Reconciliation, or celebrating his connection to people and nature in his most recent release, Vögel, Olec reminds us that music is medicine and community. It is an honor to feature him on No Dead Guys.
You started music lessons at the age of six. What drew you to the piano?
I started taking lessons at six, but the piano had been one of my “toys” since the very first day. My mother plays the piano and she is also a music therapist, so our house was full of instruments with the piano as the gravitational centre of attention. It is difficult for me to imagine a childhood without music. I remember the first time I went to play at a friend's house and realized that not every kid had music all around. I remember my disappointment.
So sitting at the piano was part of an everyday game with my mother and brothers. I also remember being about 5 or 6 and sitting by myself playing clusters, focusing with my eyes and ears wide open, listening to the harmonics, taking sound baths. I am glad that today, as a grown up, I am able to enjoy those magical moments of awe just as I used to as a little child.
At what age did you begin composing, and what sort of pieces did you create?
I was lucky that my first piano teacher realized I was much more enthusiastic about creating and improvising than playing other composers' music. So, again, at the age of six, sitting at the piano did not mean playing a waltz from the 1800, but singing about whatever came into my mind. So the piano has always been there to express myself.
I used to compose songs with lyrics, mainly with the guitar, when I was a teenager, crying about my unrequited loves. When I finished high-school, I got into loving jazz, which allowed me to just play and play, improvise, channel, whatever you want to call it. I used to listen to Keith Jarrett´s improvised concerts and then sit on the piano and “imitate” him. These improvised sessions became my refuge, my meditation practice. The melodies and harmonies that emerged during these sessions, some repeated once and again in the form of motives, licks, becoming kind of my own language, but I had no intention of crystallizing them into compositions and sharing them with the world.
However, very recently, about four or five years ago, melodies became to appear and repeat insistently during these sessions, as if they wanted to say something to me. I just gave them the space they were asking for, and slowly by slowly they started expanding, having shape and form, and most importantly, a clear message and intention. That was how Reconciliation was composed. It was as if a need stronger than my own wanted those melodies to come across. This was a work that had to be shared with the world. Ever since, my improvising sessions have reduced and much of my time with the piano is spent composing.
You write that your music travels to India and Africa prompted you to “approach music from a premodern perspective.” What does this mean, and how has this directed your compositions?
What I experienced in India was that music had a key role in rituals, as a way of connecting with the world of Gods or Devas in Hinduism. Chanting, both in Buddhism and Hinduism, is also a way of meditating. In Africa, music is in the streets and in the houses. Not only do they listen to music, but they are making music all the time, playing the drums, singing and dancing, while they cook, and while they harvest. In Ghana, I attended funerals where music had a key role of holding and supporting the energy to help the Soul of the deceased to travel to the World of the Ancestors.
So it was in these travels, together with my experience with plant medicine, that I awoke to a role of music that had not been clearly revealed to me before. Up to that moment, I thought that music belonged mainly to a stage, but that is where the Western world has placed it. (Hopefully we are returning to its origins!)
Music is much broader and malleable. It is a conduit of conscience we all can utilize as a tool. It is a medicine, a bridge that can take us to insights and revelations. When I came back from these travels I got off stage for many years. I started playing other instruments apart from the piano, making music in yoga classes, improvising concerts with ancient instruments and assisting plant medicine ceremonies. I believe I went through a self-induced deprogramming of my relationship with music. After this, I was then able to come back to the piano and start composing my own pieces from this new space that I was finding and inhabiting within.
Your work has been described as Neo-classical. How do you feel this style of music best allows you to “approach music from a premodern perspective”?
I’ve always had trouble with genres. I understand they are necessary for the industry, but I think that listening too much to those labels can be counterproductive, because once you are labeled into a genre, there is already a part of you that believes you should stay close to a particular sound, volume, bpm, or esthetic. The most interesting composers I know, the ones I admire the most and inspire me, are those who push these boundaries, so I try to stay closer to what I want to say with music and cultivate the freedom to choose how I want to express myself, and not pay much attention to the labels they give me.
If you listen to Reconciliation or Vögel you might think my music is Neo-classical, but Septenio and Makara are experimental, ambient, minimal electronic. What I’ve found about my music is the space I create through it—the possibility of experimenting with silence as a part of music.
In a recent interview in Interlocutor Magazine, you state, "When music has an intention behind it, a driving healing force, it becomes true medicine. This quality of music is pretty much overlooked in our modern times but in initiatic cultures music was used as a bridge to connect with the invisible world.” What, for you, is the “invisible world” and how do you feel that music allows us to connect with it?
The invisible world is that world that we cannot perceive with our everyday senses. All spiritual traditions and today's quantum physics state that matter is only 1% of reality. So we live in this world of matter, thinking it is all there is, but we are only perceiving one percent of all that is. For a fish, the world is the ocean. A fish doesn't even suspect that out of the water there is air, plants, birds, houses and human beings!
Music has been utilized by these iniciatic cultures as a fundamental part of the rituals that connect with the invisible world. Some call it “the world of the Spirit”, some “the world of the Ancestors”. So music can become this bridge into other realms.
We often listen to the phrase that “music speaks to the Soul”. I think this has to do with the idea that music itself is invisible, we cannot grasp it nor touch it. And our Soul is made of the same content, we cannot touch nor see our Soul, but we know it is there. So I honestly believe music and Soul speak the same language, and that is the language of pure vibration. The Soul, just as the invisible world, is still there although we do not clearly perceive it. It is just vibrating at a frequency much subtler than matter. When music vibrates highly (energetically, not in terms of sound), it can allow us to perceive these realms.
In your recent release, Reconciliation, you told the story of your grandparents’ experience as Jewish refugees from the Nazi regime during WWII, and you did so using the language of notes. How did music allow you to access those stories in a way that perhaps words could not?
I had wanted to visit my family story for some time, but it was always too painful to do it. I am also a writer, so before Reconciliation I thought that this would come in the form of a book, as a novel. It was only when I moved to Europe, making that symbolic and physical movement of returning to this land, that something opened in me. I was not planning on doing this album. It caught me by surprise. I became an open channel to express all that pain, guilt, mixed with gratitude and humbleness. The emotions that were processed and released with this music were too complex to describe in words. This is why I needed to express it in music. Music is able to be a vessel of energy much more potent than words, because words, used in everyday language, inevitably will condition the message in some way or another.
In this particular case, music allowed me to connect with my two grandparents, whom I have never met. I was able to connect with the “World of Ancestors” that the ancients talk about.
Tell me about your upcoming release, Vögel. What prompted you to compose a project around birds?
So, as you can tell, to make Reconciliation I really had to dig deep. It was beautiful to do it, and I am really grateful that I was able to do it, but it was also very painful. When I finished it, I felt I needed to look into the future and not into the past, and I wanted this future to be encouraging and uplifting. I had already composed “Gavina”, which means “seagull” in Catalán. I had composed it while living on the beach, watching every afternoon the seagulls fly above me. I was also composing a love song to “Paloma”, dedicated to my partner who is called “Paloma”, but “Paloma” also means “Dove” in Spanish. So I realized I had two songs named after birds.
Then March of 2020 came, and with the severe lockdown the project took another dimension. I was locked in my own apartment in Barcelona, playing the piano and watching the birds fly and sing freely. I started composing to them. It was my way of feeling free. I couldn’t fly, I couldn’t even go out of my house, but I could play the piano. So that is what I did.
I then started thinking about my own path as a musician, as an artist, and how special people around me have helped me trust in myself and spread my own wings. So I called them and told them about the project, and asked them to help me find a name for the compositions. Together we gave each song the name of a bird chosen by each of them. So each song is dedicated to a specific person who has been supportive in one way or another of me taking flight in this new stage of my life!
You write that your music “is a constant search for the Unknown.” How is Vögel part of that journey?
When I compose, I feel I am revealing something which was in the Uknown and is now in the Known. That happens to me with music, but it must happen with everyone in their own art and life. We are all here to reveal something unknown. We are here to shed light where there was darkness before. There is no person in this planet that can deliver an exact album as Vögel. There can be similar music, but never the same. Think about the potency of this. There are around 8 billion people in the world, but I’m the only one who can deliver this particular music. Of course, this is true for all of us. Imagine if we were all aware of this truth. I am sure the world would be a much more wonderful place to live in.
Vögel helped me reveal information that was unknown to me before I composed it. It helped me realize how supportive towards me these people were being. How important it is to feel supported by others. Maybe you are having a bad day, maybe you are thinking about quitting your dreams, and something your friend says might bring you back on track.
Vögel also opened the door to connect with these beautiful creatures, the birds. After lockdown, my partner and I moved to the countryside. Everyday I would walk into the woods and just listen to the birds sing. The same songs birds have always sung, now I could understand them better, I could sync with them because I was now listening with my heart.
Now, the visit to the Unknown, the experience, remains in me and is beyond words. That is why I make music. If this motivation of searching the Unknown disappeared I would stop making music.
You composed Vögel in Barcelona during lockdown. Did your experience with the pandemic change your composing? If so, how?
It did not necessarily change my way of composing, but it gave me much more time to do it. 2020 was going to be a year of traveling and presenting Reconciliation, but none of that happened. So I was suddenly locked in my own house and the only way I could go through this difficult year was by creating.
Apart from Vögel, due to the pandemic, I started making music with other musicians across the globe. I think this happened to many of us who started collaborating with one another. We all suddenly realized we didn't have to be in the same room to make music together.
When will Vogël be released and where can we listen to it?
“Vögel” will be released by Lady Blunt Records on Thursday June 24th and it will be available on all digital platforms. Before the album release we will be releasing singles, so stay tuned!
What future music projects are you most excited about right now?
I am composing a whole new album, probably piano solo as well, that I hope to record by the end of 2021. I am also collaborating with other musicians, such as Michael Sarian, Sergi Boal, Chiara Dubey and Ben Moore. Hopefully I will be releasing those collaborations soon.
If you had one bit of advice for an aspiring composer, what would it be?
The advice I give myself every time I need it is to compare myself with no one. The beauty and generosity of true art is that it gives a place to all of us. It is not a competition in which there is a first, a second and a last position. In the industry, as part of this competitive world, we have lists and ratings—the song with most streamings, the song with less streamings, the posts with more likes, etc. But those ratings have nothing to do with my own search as a composer. If the numbers are generous towards me, that´s great, if they are not, that´s great as well, it won't move the needle of my compositions, or at least it shouldn't.
When we want to sound like others, look like others who are “successful” we are missing the whole point. We shouldn´t copy them but let ourselves be inspired to shine our own light. They are not successful because they copied from others but because they are able to connect with what they truly are. So be brave and allow yourself to shine your own light!
OLEC MÜN. Born in Argentina in 1985, Marcelo Schnock aka Olec Mün has played the piano since he was six and has studied jazz, folklore music, harmony and composition with teachers such as Nicolás Guerschberg, Francisco Sicilia, Guillermo Romero and Paula Suarez.
Always in the search of new sounds and introspections, Olec Mün has nourished his musicality through travels and studies around the world. His visits to northern India and west Africa have each marked a point of no return in his music and his way of living it. Music, since then, has been a prayer and a path of transcendence.
After participating in numerous groups and projects, in 2018 Olec Mün released his first solo work called Septenio. This project was composed with the use of minimal electronics and audios of Olec’s childhood family videos. In Septenio, the composer revisits his first seven years of life. This first cycle of seven years was studied by Essenes, Greeks, Anthroposophy and numerous traditions, since it is in these first seven years that the Soul adapts to its new human body in the third dimension. September 2020 saw the release of his solo piano album Reconciliation on Lady Blunt Records.
His third album, Makara (Piano and Coffee Records) was composed with Michael Sarian, a jazz trumpet player residing in New York. An experimental work crossing the frontiers between jazz and ambient, Makara is a musical journey exploring new avant-garde sounds and textures that transport you to the deep mysteries of the ocean.
His new piano album Vögel will be released in June 2021 on Lady Blunt Records. To learn more about him and his music, visit his website.