“I think it’s such a privilege to be able to make music, and have creative discussions, with people you consider some of your closest friends. Being stimulated by spending six hours in a room together, thinking about sound.”
Violetta Suvini, Komuna Collective
Launched in 2022 in an underground nightclub in Oxford, Komuna Collective are a group of artists, DJs, and musicians committed to experimentation and bringing immersive, intense, intimate performances to new spaces. Consisting of composer, violist, and artistic director Adam Possener, performers Violetta Suvini, Gabriel Francis Dehqani, and Amalia Young, visual artist Gala Hills, and DJs Still Loading and Bek, Komuna have taken their performances to raves, fashion shows, nightclubs, and concert halls, with highlights including London Fashion Week and Riposte Queer Rave.
Komuna Collective’s debut album Views from the Real World was released in December 2024. Featuring 10 tracks composed by Adam Possener and performed by the collective, Views from the Real World offers a tongue-in-cheek approach to the digital age, weaving samples from news broadcasting, TikTok trends, Reddit threads, and more with string quartet and electronics.
Following the release of Views from the Real World, Komuna Collective are emarking on a tour in January-Feburary 2025, performing in London (23rd January), Oxford (28th January), and Norwich (5th Febuary). Ahead of Komuna’s album tour, we caught up with composer Adam Possener and violinist Violetta Suvini to discuss maximalist approaches to sound, performing at raves, online creative spaces, lived realities of genre, and more…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Adam, hi Violetta! Thank you both so much for joining me today. We’re chatting following the release of your ensemble Komuna Collective’s debut album, Views from the Real World — tell me a bit about how you, as a group, came up with the concept of the record?
Adam Possener: We formed as a group in February [20]22. An album is always a really big goal; [we] put in this Arts Council grant application, not really thinking it would be successful. And getting it was a bit crazy. We had a two-day exploration mini-residency in December ’22, trying out all these ideas, and as a group, thinking about what we want to say artistically. It didn’t come together until December of the year after — December 2023 — when we had a five-day residency in Norwich. I’d written most of the work by then. But there was lots of sending mp3’s to everyone, getting their thoughts and feedback — which was really constructive. It was really nice to have dialogue and feedback.
Violetta Suvini: I remember listening to the first draft of ‘1 L0V3 Y0U L1G3T1’ on a bench outside my flat, with my AirPods. -laughs- It was really exciting.
Adam: I think I wrote that in two hours, and then was like “oh, I don’t know if I like this, is this what we want it to be?” — and then sending it to you, and you being super excited and really affirming was really useful. As a composer, the model of writing something in your bedroom, or studio — if you have a studio — and not sharing it with anybody until the rehearsal, where everything is pretty much finalised, is quite lonely and quite difficult. It’s much more fun to be co-creating with other people.
So we had the five-day residency. We recorded it at Lightship 95, which is a really cool studio in Canary Wharf. And the mixing and mastering was a long process, as well; timing when we wanted to release it, when we’d be able to perform it, took us to December this [past] year. So the album was two years in the making. Which is kind of crazy, because we’ve changed quite a lot as a group, and done a lot of different things in that time.
Violetta: I think we’ve all developed both as friends, but also as musicians, in the meantime as well. It’s nice that you go away, and develop your own perspective, and then a few months later you’re back in the room with those people. It kind of grows naturally in that way.
Adam: Obviously, everybone’s got their own busy lives. It’s quite nice to come together to do stuff — but [there] can be a period of activity, then nothing for a couple months, then something comes up. Our normal rehearsal process looks like two full days of rehearsal before a project; it’s nice to have the intensive being-together, which is fun.
Zyggy: How did you first meet, and what initially drew you together as artists and as friends?
Violetta: Adam and I met doing an opera by Michael Gordon at the OSO Arts Centre, just kind of by chance. Jonny Danciger [ed. the director of OSO Arts Centre at the time] knew a conductor called Hannah von Wiehler, who was at Oxford — who I’d done a lot of projects for. Hannah and Jonny came up with the idea of putting on a synthesthesic production of Michael Gordon’s Van Gogh, which Adam and I played for; and we got on really, really well.
Adam: And you’d just started at Guildhall…
Violetta: We had some mutual friends. I thought you were really shy — but you had a really cool Marlboro jacket, that I really liked. -laughs- I think Komuna was basically your brainchild…
Adam: I’d been to Warsaw Autumn, and they had a scheme of events [called] “Warsaw Autumn Hits the Club” in the evenings. What I loved so much about it was that it wasn’t gimmicky; it was so well-curated. It was really eye-opening for me, being there: I was like “this is something I’d really love to do”.
Zyggy: Adam — tell me a bit more about how your time in Warsaw, and how that impacted the way you and Komuna Collective work?
Adam: I went to Radziejowice, to SYNTHETIS, which is a summer festival programme — and the teachers were Ondřej Adámek and Paweł Mykietyn. It was post-covid, so there were only 12 of us, and I was the only non-Polish person there. And they were like “oh, you have to come for Warsaw Autumn, it’s the most crazy cool festival.” So I came back for that. It was really enlivening, and really integrated into the culture of the city. It’s not a “bubble” in the same way sometimes that London feels like — where the musicians probably know the audience — there, it’s like the city opens its doors, which is really exciting.
So I felt really inspired and enthused by all of that, and wanted to integrate that into my own creative practice. I think that’s a big thing for our generation, as well; you have to make your own opportunities. So it was an experiment of “how can we do this?” I met Amalia [Young] at Oxford; Gabriel [Francis Dehqani] I knew from Aldeburgh Young Musicians, from when we were younger. I used to live with the artist Gala Hills — and we’d wanted to collaborate for a while, as well — and also some DJs in Oxford (Joel Kovoor and George Fitzmaurice). So it was this kind of web, or scene, of people that all had a lot in common and all got on really well, but doing relatively separate, distinct projects. So it was like “oh, this would be really cool, to try something out to bring it together” — and then it ended up being really, really fun.
Zyggy: And how did the name — Komuna Collective — come about?
Adam: Like, names feel really intimidating and hard. And then you realise that names become names when you repeat them enough…
Violetta: When they’re successful. -laughs-
Adam: Alarm Will Sound have this blog post of the process of how they came up with all their names. They had a list of 90 different options that they floated. But Komuna… there’s a theatre in Warsaw called Komuna, and [it] kind of translates to “to commune” — to have an intense conversation. It also has some other connotations in Soviet Polish… -laughs- Which I didn’t realise at the time.
Zyggy: You’ve got a string quartet, visual artists, and DJs as part of your artist roster, and you’ve performed in nightclubs, raves, and fashion shows — what draws you into these kinds of spaces, and interests you about these artistically?
Adam: For me, the music is so much more than the musical sound. It’s co-constructed between the audience, the venues, the lighting, the sound engineer… All of that coalesces together to make this musical space. Something we put a lot of energy and effort in[to] is curating the experience; the visual artist Gala [Hills] making all of the art that feeds into the posters. Having dress codes — Violetta’s amazing at making the dress codes…
Violetta: -laughs-
Adam: So I guess not trying to build a “scene”, but make a space, and a vibe.
Zyggy: Could you tell me about some of those first shows — was there anything about those shows that particularly surprised you?
Violetta: I think the thing we found the most surprising [was] the audience’s willingness to receive a new experience. Even if they’re not a specialist audience — they’re just people who happened to be at the venue. Like Riposte…
Adam: When we first played there, we had no idea what to expect. It’s this massive queer art rave; they do raves once a month. [There are] loads of performers, and then DJs, artists, exhibitions. We thought it would be so cool for us to play there, but we thought it was be [more of] a spectacle — having a string quartet at a rave. It’s almost like a tableau, an image, a performative thing, than a strictly musical experience. I think we were really comfortable with that. But when we got there, our expectations were completely wrong; people sat down on the floor to listen, people were so attentive.
I think going into the space, it’s almost a bit of a reversal of a traditional concert setting — where the musicians are elevated on the stage, and the audience sits quietly and watches. We were almost going with an offering, and had no expectations or desire to command the audience’s attention. It’s quite nerve-racking, going into these spaces and having no idea how people are gonna respond… But that makes it part of the excitement, and the thrill, I guess.
Violetta: For me, the standout performance [was] at our launch, where we played Different Trains by Steve Reich in a nightclub in Oxford. It’s that thing of bringing people together and trusting people’s ability to receive something, even if they’re not familiar with it. I think one of the ways in which our daily digital interaction is set up is to receive an echo chamber of affirmation towards your own inclinations, or predilections. I think one of the really nice things about an experience — if you exit your home and go to a different venue to watch a piece of art — is that you’re able to enter this space of curiosity, where you’re not sure whether you’re gonna like what happens. But you’re willing to be open-hearted about what the experience is gonna look like.
When people gather in a space, you’re not in a position to command someone’s experience of what’s going on. Everyone has their own tangential stories, that are happening at the same time. You [Adam] said something really nice — you know two people who met at the launch, who are now dating… -laughs-
Adam: A club night space is a social experience, right? Working with DJs, I’ve learned so much about how they approach their craft — how it’s all about flow, and reading their audience. Trying to figure out how that applies to us.
We spend loads of time thinking about transitions from DJ sets to quartet. DJ sets [are] all about flow, moderating changing the set to fit the vibe you’re receiving from the audience; so then not trying to have the quartet as an “interruption” of that space has been really exciting. Especially in our launch — [in] a small, tight space, an underground club — sensing or feeling the vibe shift, or how people tune into something, can be really exciting. How flow can be negotiated.
Zyggy: Let’s talk a bit about the themes of Views from the Real World — I love the way you’ve used samples throughout the record. Were there any particular themes that influenced your use of samples?
Adam: There’s kind of a few things. There’s a lot of Easter Eggs in there; references to conversations we’ve had, ideas we’ve had, things we’ve listened to, things we’ve read that sit in the DNA of the music. I’d read Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism manifesto — this idea of rejection of this digital-nondigital divide, and [what] identity persona means in the age we’re living in. Playing with that false binary that’s been constructed.
And celebrating the creativity that exists in these online spaces: reading Reddit threads, seeing artists on TikTok, as creatively valuable things. There’s genuine creativity — particularly on TikTok or Reddit. You’re seeing some of the most interesting forms of creativity and originality, that [it’s] good to avoid making fun of it, or delegitimising it. I think there’s a lot of technology-stuff that’s almost Black Mirror-esque, fueling the digital age’s doom and gloom. When actually, there’s a lot to be said about how that’s democratised creativity.
Zyggy: And how did you explore and develop these themes throughout the album?
Adam: There’s a lot of the same samples manipulated through different tracks. One thing that took me in a weird direction… I was at Darmstadt — which was a really fulfilling experience, but quite overwhelming — [and] to relax from that, I played Minecraft. -laughs- There was something really absorbing and calming about that. So I wrote the final track as, essentially, Minecraft muzak. There’s people doing art exhibitions on Minecraft, stuff like that that’s really exciting [and] interesting.
There’s a lot of text-to-speech, synthesised voice. Which is really interesting, theoretically; when we hear a voice, who do we assume is the speaker? Can we relate to a voice, or person, that we know isn’t real? The ‘r/confessions’ track is a composite narrative of Reddit threads from r/confessions — there’s people spilling their hearts out, it’s really emotional. How do you capture that rawness, but juxtapose it with a synthesised voice. There’s lots of discourse about the red pill movement on Reddit; so there’s a cynicism in there, as well.
Violetta: I remember you explaining what the “voice” part of that track was to us. You said you were reading this confession, and you were overwhelmed with empathy for someone being so vulnerable. And then it got to the end, and they were talking about [taking the] red pill… And you were shocked at how you were able to relate to what was a very human confession prior, but then how jarring it was that it was feeding into an ideology that you totally didn’t agree with. The split between what we share as human beings, and what we don’t share.
Adam: There’s this Donald Trump speech that starts ‘A Little-Known Belgian Choreographer’; it’s about the similarities between Beyoncé’s choreography and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, which is a really funny [and] interesting story about ownership, intellectual property — which feeds into sampling culture. What originality means. I guess sampling culture is about repetition with a difference; the whole concept of signifying in hip-hop, as a really interesting creative avenue that’s often quite at odds with how we consider “originality” in classical music. There’s a line from a TV show — I don’t remember where I got it from — about plagiarism as an art form. Which I found really interesting, because there’s so much anxiety and disdain for plagiarism — rightly so — but what does it actually mean to copy something, or to steal something? And then this CNN quote about Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker being “a little-known Belgian choreographer” — who define[d] modern dance… -laughs-
Zyggy: How would you see your approach to genre on this album — blurring genres boundaires, blending different aethetic styles — and as a group?
Violetta: Adam’s got strong opinions about this… -laughs-
Adam: Genre theory is a big can of worms. Georgina Born, my supervisor at UCL, has written quite a lot about genre. Again, it’s so much more than musical sound. Genre is built through networks, and multiple-mediated phenomena — constructed through artists, audiences, insitutions, wider trends in social identity formation, gender, race, class — that all plays into it. Sometimes, discussions about genre often are relegated to purely aesthetic senses — if you write spectral music, or post-serialism, post-minimalism, and it’s confined to conversations in spaces within musical form, and musical style. When actually, so much of what makes genre genre is its lived realities. I think for us, it was about taking the conversations further than just the musical sound, or “music itself”. We all have different musical experiences, tastes, and preferences — so that’s been fun [to explore].
Violetta: It’s interesting, uniting our different perspectives to make musical decisions.
Adam: And what we’re comfortable with as performers. We’ve done some wacky things. Like, the video piece we did — we were wearing these animal masks that Gala had made. It was very conceptual and performative, which was new for us. We wore hazmat suits for a piece we did at one of the raves at Riposte. So I guess experimentation’s a big thing with that — playing with genre.
Violetta: And also, all of us as musicians wanting to be in service of the experience. I think we’re willing to be a bit experimental, if we’re creating a cohesive experience for an audience.
Adam: Jennifer Walshe’s New Discipline manifesto is interesting for that. The thing that defines that is not its formal, or aesthetic, direction — but the commitment to performance. How it’s materialised on stage, on the record. I think that’s something we’re all work[ing] towards: what does it mean to be a convincing performer?
Violetta: And all of that still feeds back into when any of us might go and play a Mozart string quartet. It’s all part of a spectrum.
Adam: We started the first Riposte gig we did with a Bach chorale. It could have been ironic, but it wasn’t.
Violetta: It was just a nice way to start the set.
Zyggy: I’d love to hear more about some of the audiovisual, or new discipline-adjacent, work you’ve been doing as an ensemble — is that an area you’re looking to explore in the future?
Adam: We’d love to do more of that. Nowadays, as composers, working with video and electronics is becoming the new “standard” thing — but is really difficult to execute well, I think. That [piece] was a collaboration with a video artist, Julian Day; as part of that project, we also played for some other video works with the Faculty of Music at Oxford. [It] was really fun to work as artists with other people; lots of the work we have done is put[ting] on our events ourselves, but playing in other things has been really fun too.
Violetta: One of the things I think is so fun and rewarding about collaborating with other people… There’s a really nice quote in Maggie Nelson’s latest book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint — I think she’s slightly paraphrasing the poet Eileen Myles — but she says that what’s nice about art is that you’re treating it as a place to get “real and irregular news about how others around [us] think and feel”. So it’s nice to open up the dialogue to include another person — and another person’s entire background [and] cultural context.
Adam: In our launch gig, Gala had done some video animations which were really beautiful. But there was no video screen. So we had someone holding a projector, and going around the club projecting onto the walls, onto people — as a bit of happening. Knowing all these roaming things were happening too, facilitating that, was really nice.
So following the release of Views from the Real World, you’re emarking on a tour starting later this week — hitting up London, Oxford, and Norwich…
Adam: We’re launching in London on the 23rd, [at] Theatreship, which is a really cool venue — [a] cinema-theatre on a boat in Canary Wharf. They’re a really nice grassroots, really friendly. We got some funding from PRS for the tour. We had to choose carefully where we were going; we thought it would be nice to go to the cities where we’ve made the work, and where we’ve done performances. So going back to Oxford, and Norwich as well, at venues we’ve played at before — not as a group, but as individuals — and been to, and seen cool stuff [at].
Finding new listeners, and seeing people’s responses, has been really interesting. We have people that come to our gigs regularly; but when you have an album out, people are listening all over the world. Getting random DMs or messages from people sharing their thoughts and responses has been really moving. Looking at the demographics: we’ve had quite a few listens in Japan, Santiago in Chile… Places you would never expect it to end up. That’s exciting.
Zyggy: I also understand you’ll be appearing at Classical:NEXT in Berlin a bit later this year?
Adam: We’re not really sure yet what to expect from it! It’ll be our first time playing interntionally; it’s [a] really cool festival, and quite professionally minded. It’ll be a really good experience to meet [and] talk to different people, hear people’s responses and feedback.
Violetta: And also look at the industry — take stock of where the industry is at, what things are on the horizon for change. And receive lots of new opinions and perspectives. A lot of what we do is influenced by the way the UK classical music scene works, which [might] be different for people coming from other countries.
Adam: Yeah. Different creative economies, as well.
Violetta: Buzzword! -laughs-
Zyggy: Finally — what’s exciting you most about being part of Komuna Collective and working in this way? What are you particularly interested in taking forward in the future?
Violetta: I think it’s such a privilege to be able to make music, and have creative discussions, with people you consider some of your closest friends. Being stimulated by spending six hours in a room together, thinking about sound… You know, the residency days where we [would] stay in accommodation together. It’s both professional, but relies on a lot of trust and friendship, as well.
Adam: I guess in really busy lives, when you’re always hustling, to then have time and space together — however limited that might sometimes be, or feel.
Violetta: The musical bond is also helped by the fact that we’re all quite similar; we’re going for the same young professional musical experience[s].
Adam: I think we’re very grateful. We’ve been lucky to receive really good advice, generous help from people. That’s been really rewarding. People that come to [our] gigs, it’s really lovely to be a part of it; especially [with] the club stuff we’ve done, we’ll be playing and then we’ll be dancing afterwards.
Violetta: I think one of the nice things about the way that UK classical music functions, in terms of networks, is that you can go and see your friends’ gigs, and then they come to yours. It is an economy, in the best sense of the word — in that you can visit each others’ projects and creative ideas. See how people are feeling.
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Komuna Collective are performing their album Views from the Real World in London, Oxford, and Norwich – come and see them at:
- 23 January 2025 – Theatreship, London
- 28 January 2025 – Jericho Tavern, Oxford
- 5 February 2025 – Voodoo Daddy’s, Norwich
Stream and download Komuna Collective’s debut album, Views from the Real World, at:
- https://komunacollective.bandcamp.com/album/views-from-the-real-world
- https://open.spotify.com/album/4KmhThHeQ3I6a5gC1G3qjy?autoplay=true
- https://music.apple.com/gb/album/views-from-the-real-world/1773933129
Learn more about Komuna Collective and their practice:
