As a music and sound artist, Nic Krog’s signature is a distinct and volatile blend of bass-heavy club music juxtaposed with subversive sound art and spoken word. Their artistic trajectory is characterised by a diaristic approach that recounts mental processes and psychological baggage from growing up as a queer outlier in a small town in Denmark. The work traces the metamorphosis of a colloquial introvert as they negotiate their place in the hedonistic capital of Berlin, Germany.
Your music is personal—it channels your feelings, moods, and memories from both past and present through a diaristic process of storytelling and composition. Could you talk about where and how you grew up, and how that background influences your artistic persona?
I grew up on an island called Falster in the south of Denmark. I was born in the countryside, but when my parents divorced, I started splitting my time between my father’s farm and my mother’s place, which was first in a small town, then a small city. By nature, I was this quite flamboyant queer kid who wanted to express myself, but in the small places where I was living, there just wasn’t space for that. And this was reflected in my two homes as well—in one place I felt encouraged just to be myself and in the other, I was being taught to conform to expectations, and to be someone who didn’t draw attention to themself. This experience had a lasting effect on me. For many years, I struggled to fit in—wanting, on some days, to fit in with a certain crowd and, on others, with a different group of people. But there was always a reluctance and hesitation because I felt I needed to reduce myself in order to fit in. Ultimately, having two upbringings, so to speak, based on two very different sets of values, taught me, both personally and as an artist, to question everything and to find my own way instead of adopting other people’s values. In the end, it taught me to embrace fragmentation.
When it came to my music, I always wanted it to express my identity—I don’t think I ever considered being impersonal as an option. I never had an interest in using different monikers for different things; I always wanted music to seek out some form of truth about who I am, but it took a certain maturity to understand that this meant that embracing fragmentation was necessary. That only happened shortly before my debut EP in 2016. Years earlier, in my early teens, I had gone through the process of trying to merge different identities through sound, but my interests were much narrower in scope at the time. Then, a few years later, my interests broadened like crazy, which meant that my ambitions did too. Aa a result, making music became too hard, there were too many obstacles to overcome, and I also felt that too much was at stake on a personal level. I had realised that I wanted to use my voice in my work, but I simply didn’t have the confidence to do so. Feeling overwhelmed, I stopped making music for several years and gravitated towards other interests, including DJing. I felt conflicted about it, though. I had signed up for an A-level music class in high school because I knew I’d be forced to sing, but then I ended up dropping out of high school because I just couldn’t deal with it emotionally. It took me many years and a lot of effort and help to get to a point where I felt comfortable using my voice in my music. People often describe my voice as deadpan, and ultimately, I think that’s the consequence of having grown up in a place where I was taught—explicitly or implicitly—to tone it down.
Anyway, my teenage music-making, for the most part, saved me from depressive tendencies that had been present since childhood—tendencies that resurfaced in full force in my late teens and dominated my life throughout my twenties. Then, at some point, when I still hadn’t properly returned to music, I realised that I was stuck emotionally—that therapy had gotten me so far, but only to a certain point, and seemingly no further. That’s when I realised how therapeutic making music had been years earlier. So I decided to stop therapy and go back to music—properly this time—to try to stop getting sidetracked. For me, my work is therapeutic, which is why my personal experiences and the workings of my mind take up so much space in my work, in my lyrics. It’s my way of reclaiming dark times, turning them into something positive. Retroactively, I have turned my depression into field work.
From relationships to mental states and deadlines, what themes do you incorporate into your work? Do they stem from writing that you do anyway (such as a diary), or are they inspired by your music work?
My diary writing is very on and off. Mostly off, although I’ve had periods where I spent more time writing about my life than living it. But my lyrics certainly do come from my personal life, though not always in real time. My latest release, “Perfect Pattern,” actually addresses a time that occurred before the subject of my 2021 album, although from a perspective that has developed over time, particularly due to the pandemic.
Lyrically, I think my work is largely driven by wanting to resolve challenges or examine questions I have, often of a psychological nature. I guess the same goes for my instrumentals; they typically emerge from experiments I was conducting during the same period as my writing. Coherence between music and text is discovered and shaped as they develop together. Even my instrumental tracks originate from a narrative place. I’m just not much of a jam-session kind of person …I’d like to be, but being in the moment isn’t my strong suit.
Do you find it difficult to be personal and sometimes confessional in your lyrics?
Hmm. Well, first of all, I don’t feel like I have a choice. But yeah, it does feel difficult, there is some fear there. But I find that whatever scares me, or anything that gives me a strong reaction, is usually worth paying some attention to, to understand why. There’s usually a lot of re-writing involved in my writing process, though, which is somewhat focused on getting to a place of comfort… or some degree of comfort. But in that regard, “Perfect Pattern” was different from my other work because the relationship between text and music was inverted. “Perfect Pattern” is more about the text, and the music is largely a soundtrack to the text. So certain structures needed to be kept in. And because of that, this piece feels much rawer to me than anything else I’ve created. That’s also why it’s harder for me to listen to than my other work. But soon I’ll be performing it in full, so that’ll be an interesting, and surely intense, experience.
What is the interplay between the spoken word/vocal part and the musical element? Do you write the lyrics/ideas first, and then the music, or the other way around?
I don’t have a particularly fixed process because I don’t like feeling as though I’m repeating myself. But often, it begins either with text first or with a combination of text and a musical draft, and then both are shaped as I progress. I refine the text right up until the final recording session. “Perfect Pattern” was different, though; it was written in its entirety before I composed any music. The script for it also included descriptions of the music I would create. But then again, I don’t really consider ”Perfect Pattern” to be music as such—to me, it’s a piece of writing first and foremost.
How do you find the performance aspect of your work—the personal spoken-word part that is performed in front of an audience, who might, of course, empathise with and relate to the situations you describe in your lyrics?
Mostly, the fear and shame I associate with my lyrics dissipate after performing them for an audience a few times. It’s like when you open up a new subject with a therapist and it’s the scariest thing in the world, but then you gradually strip it of its power, and you can begin to talk freely.
This year, you released a new album on Nick Klein’s Psychic Liberation label, which was originally conceived for your Master’s degree in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at Berlin’s Universität der Künste. How would you say it differs from your Opal Tapes debut, Reproaching the Absurd? It seems there is a bigger emphasis on the vocal part / spoken-word element in the new record…
I wouldn’t actually refer to “Perfect Pattern” as an album—it’s an audio play, which, to me, is something different from an album. In “Perfect Pattern,” the text was finished by the time I began working on the music, the text really carries the whole thing, and the music is a soundtrack to it. “Reproaching the Absurd” was narrative-driven, too, but my voice and lyrics were more integrated into the larger musical whole.
Musically, in “Perfect Pattern,” I wanted to keep things very simple, very skeletal, constantly referring back to the same elements. “Reproaching the Absurd” came out in 2021, but I had already started working on it in 2016 when my debut EP came out. On “Reproaching the Absurd”, I wanted to try my hand at everything—make it my own—everything except the genres that had dominated my EP.
What are your inspirations? Is literature something that inspires you?
Inspiration can come from anywhere for me. My emotional life. Memories or ideas of places, real or imagined. Everyday life is a big source of inspiration. Also, TV shows, mainly sitcoms and soap operas—I love how they dramatise mundane life. Movies, too. Musical tropes inspire me to some degree—maybe that’s the musicologist in me. I like the idea of taking musical conventions and putting them into a completely different context. As I said, I also get a lot of creative energy from challenges. I’m very driven by the need to try things out, to grow, and keep moving forward.
I often find inspiration in music, but it’s never because I want my music to sound like someone else’s—in fact, I often get inspired by music I don’t like, just because parts of it interest me. When I do draw inspiration from artists I look up to, it’s usually because the tools they use add something performance-wise that I wish I could apply to my own work. If their tools add an immediacy to their performances, then the trick is to reinterpret that within the framework of my practice, which consists mostly of highly personalised tools.
When I wrote “Perfect Pattern,” I was really into films—that’s how I ended up “covering” a scene from “Contempt”. It was only after that that I got into reading; before then, I hadn’t read much. But I see some similarities between that work and certain authors I’ve discovered since—like Hervé Guibert, for instance, whose books I love now. Admittedly, I only very recently read the book that “Contempt” is based on, by Alberto Moravia. But it’s interesting just how deeply that book resonated with me and the experience that “Perfect Pattern” conveys. I was surprised by that in a way, because—to be honest—I didn’t include the Godard scene because the film itself aligned with what I wanted to say. When I wrote “Perfect Pattern”, I had actually forgotten about the movie, but a friend of mine was talking about the specific scene, out of context, and it struck me that it pretty accurately portrayed an experience that I wanted to evoke in the audio play. Having rewatched the movie recently, I do see a parallel to the audio play, but not as much as there is between the audio play and Moravia’s novel.
One book that has influenced my thinking in recent years is Jack Halbertstam’s “The Queer Art of Failure”, especially in regard to my next release.
What awaits you next?
I’ve got a new EP coming out very soon, which I see as the true follow-up to “Reproaching the Absurd”. I think it narrows the scope of “Reproaching…”, even though the mood and attitude are different—more outgoing. I’ll be releasing that myself.
Over the last year, I’ve been very focused on playing live, and I plan to keep that up. Among my upcoming live shows are a few special projects, including the first-ever live performance of “Perfect Pattern”. I also have a show coming up with Jeremy Coubrough, who plays saxophone on some of my tracks. Jeremy and I did an improv set once, but this will be the first time we perform my songs together live. It’s a one-off show for now, but I’m hoping to do more, for sure. Another thing I’ve been focused on is programming tools that allow me to work in a more freeform, improvised way. That will be my focus during a collaborative project I’ve got coming up in Latvia for Skaņu Mežs, MABOCA, and SHAPE+, where I’ll be collaborating on two performances with Latvian artists Andrejs Zālītis and Kristians Brekte.
Both my next EP and “Perfect Pattern” have been in the making for a very long time, so I’m craving some time to immerse myself in making new work. But of course, time is a luxury.
Interview Lucia Udvardyova
Photo Oda Egjar Starheim