When the skies fall: outcasts, community, and the sound of survival with Vina Konda

On the occasion of the ninth anniversary of Untitled 909, journalist and mana co-founder Adelaide de Cerjat invites the multifaceted and polymorphous entity Vina Konda to speak on the subjects of shadow, resistance, and survival. Whether in terms of speech itself, affiliation with certain musical genres, or even the choice of instruments and production methods, this resistance to homogenization is everywhere. In his work, Vina Konda notably references adolescence and fictional worlds, which are explored in this interview as fleeting moments that shape our identity and our capacity for resistance. These references feel especially important at a time when everything seems to be collapsing in society, along with all our gods; whether religious, moral, or political. This need for resistance is no longer felt only in so-called marginal communities, but also in more mainstream societies. How can the modes of expression used in certain sonic worlds inform this potential societal awakening?

Photo credit: Amalia Jaulin

French version:

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Maybe we can start with the definition of “the other.” It refers to social constructions established by people in power, but in music, it can also refer to certain processes within the music industry. Could you tell us why fiction, as opposed to reality, is so important to you?

In my project, fiction is something that exists a lot through this idea of adolescence and also, let’s say, a fantasized and residual version of what I lived through during that period. There’s something really important and constitutive in the figure of adolescence: it’s that moment of transition into adulthood, which is a way of locking in a becoming. The becoming of one person rather than another. At least for me, there was this passage through adolescence via multiple styles, multiple things, and actually I could even say it never really stopped.

That’s why I still struggle today to really consider myself an adult. This possibility of being plural: that interested me. To be in conflict with this capitalist or liberal figure, to use the big words, of being one person and representing one identity. Though that’s debatable today because, especially in artistic circles, we’re all confronted with the fact that we have to wear multiple hats at the same time.

You’re also talking about recreating a reality that maybe wasn’t lived—or at least not in the way you would have wanted it to be. Last year, you released an album called Tales of a Necromancer’s Assistant. In the description, you speak of chaotic adventures. Fiction reworks reality, but then there’s also the reality we’re living through. At a certain point, the overlap between the two becomes so intense that we begin to wonder: which version is the dream?

For me, fiction and reality aren’t two separate places; they’re one ongoing continuum. Fiction influences reality just as much as reality influences fiction. It never stops. To give an image that matters a lot to me, we can talk about cinema and the question of representation. Mark Fisher talks about this through the idea of soft power: the ways we represent ourselves inevitably are influenced by external factors.

I think cinema is a great example because, deep down, when we go through a breakup, when we go through drama, or when we experience happiness, all those images and memories we have from cinema influence our reactions a little. There’s this thing of being sad the way you’re sad in a movie. There’s this kind of infinite feedback loop where we also go looking in images for a way to validate our actions. That notion of continuum is extremely important to me. The idea, then, was to invent a dark tale that would depict some of my fears and anxieties about what it means today to be a white cis boy making music.

Coming back to the title, I wanted it to be called Tales of a Necromancer’s Assistant because I told myself: I didn’t want to be the central figure in the title. And I liked the idea that it was the assistant telling the story. There was this notion of reporting or relaying.

Has storytelling always been central to your work? A few years ago, I remember you were more focused on the technological object as a tool of social transformation. Now it feels more like fairy tales, stories, and characters, where your persona takes on a more central role. Do you think fictional characters, especially those that embody forms of social otherness, can transform, not necessarily society, that would be ambitious, but at least listening habits, or the norms of how we receive music?

There’s one thing I’m pretty convinced of: nobody thinks entirely for themselves. And using stories, myths, and those kinds of forms—which can even extend to cinema—is a way of transposing and feeding catharsis. Theatre, and all these spaces, were still places where you could experiment with states that were normally forbidden, like in ancient theatre. That’s why it’s so important for me to tell stories and not just drop tracks one after another. It’s true that I have a bad habit of structuring my EPs and albums around concepts, stories, and narratives.

Regarding technology, I think it has always been present in my work. It’s just that there may have been a moment when a belief collapsed. The internet is fascinating too because it’s a technology with military origins. And I think it carries within itself, as both fiction and reality, that violence inherited from the military. There’s something really strange about the internet, in the way you hide yourself while also exposing yourself. I was reading a book not long ago called A Violent Desire, which just came out, and it talked exactly about this policing element: people being harassed online.

In that case, it was a BIPOC woman. And there was this moment in the book where you saw people of all ages participating in this kind of vile public humiliation, and when they were confronted about it, they said, “No, but actually, I would never have done that in real life. But yes, online, I said I wanted to kill her.” These really strange gaps appear with the internet. I’m not against it though; I’m more anti-Big Tech. In the end, there’s been a very weird transformation because the internet wasn’t that at all in the beginning.

That brings us back to this possible illusion of having a voice online, and to the question of community. During the pandemic, so many people focused on how they could represent themselves online, and on how to build communities there. But now there’s a kind of fatigue, and maybe a desire to return to offline communities—to forms of closeness, care, and mutual support. I’m not talking about insularity, but about creating bonds that allow people to sustain one another. In those relatively small circles, where people still know each other, something seems to be happening that’s feeding political and social movements—especially in the United States.

I was reading an article this morning about “neighborism” in the context of ICE: people befriending their neighbors to create support networks, to share food, to respond when alerts happen, and so on. Through the different genres and scenes you’ve moved through, what does community mean to you? What have you found in those communities?

That’s not an easy question. The article you’re referring to is great, but in that case, that’s really activism. And there’s something incredibly beautiful about it. I think one thing I could say is this: depressive states linked to social media use, for example. I use Instagram, so I can talk about Instagram and I’m not going to talk about tools I don’t use. But today, it’s well established that Instagram is a pretty violent source of depression for a lot of young adults and children. I’ve experienced that too: I was in my twenties when I started using it, and I really feel its harmful effects. And I think this desire to disconnect also comes from wanting to reclaim some power facing Big Tech. Namely because they are taking from our attention span, our concentration, or really just our time.

As for my own community, it’s very much rooted in everyday life and the physical realm. The internet is a way to stay in touch, but it’s not that much of a major tool of socialization.

We were also talking the other day about social violence. There may be certain illusions around how some networks are used by communities that can exist online, and around access to certain tools—PR systems, press agents, things like that. There are a lot of people active in the music industry who are creating tools linked to the algorithm, etc., but which are still grounded in reality. There’s notably a studio in Berlin called Studio 1201, where there’s a CCTV camera installed in the studio. They film everything, they record the conversations—typically production sessions—to give access to people who aren’t necessarily in major cities, for example. It lets them see how production works, how collaboration happens, even how jam sessions unfold. I feel like more and more initiatives are recognizing that we need to move beyond the illusion of accessibility. Does that bring anything to mind for you?

I don’t know if I have examples, but maybe I can talk about the home studio. With the development of technology and international markets, there was this really great thing where we could say: today, anyone with a computer can buy a pair of monitors and build a home studio, with a quality that ranges from very basic to quite complex. Let’s say it’s accessible to quite a lot of people, even if, obviously, not everyone. I’m not naïve about that. Personally, I know that this home-studio dynamic—I admit I sometimes see its limits. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that with rising prices, little by little, in some places, we might return, as you were saying, to more collaborative studio dynamics.

I was lucky enough to be able to do it with two people. Because I think there are people who need to be more than two, and I was also lucky enough to have an apartment that allowed for that kind of thing, which isn’t the case for everyone. So there are external factors too. But yes, I do think that the home studio is both great and, at the same time, its own pitfall, in that it divides people’s forces a lot.

To come back to PR logics and the music industry: I come from a very working-class background. I’m from northern France, from a family that used to be railway workers and postal workers. It took me a long time to get past this thing of telling myself: actually, I’m in a musical situation, I’ve been doing this for eight years, I’m not going to start something else now—it’s too late. I’m a little older than the average producers I hang out with. I’m going to turn 35, which isn’t exactly ideal either. Just to give a sense of how blocked I’ve felt over the last two years: I felt like there was this gigantic glass ceiling, and my initial social, cultural, and monetary capital wasn’t going to let me smash through it. So I was going to have to seriously structure things in order to keep reproducing the conditions that let me grow and gain recognition.

And again, honestly, it’s luck. I have a job that allows me to carry some of the financial burden. By the way, if you’re aiming for intermittent worker status [in France], given how hard it is to work right now, I really recommend looking into payroll-portage companies because they genuinely help keep things afloat. Structuring myself that way made for a really hard year last year, but now it means I qualify for intermittent status. It allows me to let go a little of those questions and tell myself, “Okay, it’s not a race anymore. I have unemployment benefits, so if I’m working at home making sound, I don’t need to be paid otherwise right now.” But that requires other kinds of organization on the side.

Regarding this whole star system, snatching up artists; there’s a lot of that. So it’s normal that there’s a lot of turnover too. But that model of picking up an artist, building them up for two years, and then boom, it’s someone else, and everything gets forgotten very quickly and I try to avoid that. I think I wanted it a lot at one point, and now I don’t anymore. But it’s a lengthy process. You have to remember that it’s something incredibly long to build and you need patience.

I remember we were already talking about that 6 or 7 years ago. In any case, I’m really happy that your work now allows you to travel all over Europe and provide you more joy than fear. I think we can come back to the question of infiltrating certain spheres in order to get the message across. Obviously there’s the notion of community, and we can be strong as a community, but are we at a stage today where maybe we need to enter certain other spheres in order to change norms? I’m saying this with producers who’ve made huge albums in mind. We were talking about Danny L Harle, but also Arca, who have produced incredible albums in recent years. What’s your relationship to that; the notion of infiltration?

I’m not very familiar with those people’s trajectories, but I do have the impression that these social pyramid dynamics also exist in music. A friend of mine has an expression I love: “the violence of cool.” And I think there’s often this thing of over-representation and over-performance of oneself. Maybe that’s changing, but for me, I really felt like I got caught by music at a moment when it was this weird thing where you had to be cool, you had to catch the vibe of the moment. You also had to post on Instagram.

Well, in any job there are unpleasant aspects, we shouldn’t kid ourselves! In music, I believe Instagram is a monstrous headache. Beyond that, I think the structures, and again the way Big Tech has structured the gateways into the internet, really bother me, because it could exist differently. I think back, for example, to the Vaporwave era. SoundCloud was amazing; it was so easy to discover great sounds. Now SoundCloud is just being rotted from the inside, namely because of ads. But I still dare to hope. I think I’m not necessarily super aware of what platforms people one or two generations younger than me are using. I’m just saying that the platforms I use are done: they’ve been through enshittification. They’re becoming garbage and it’s obvious to everyone. At one point, you could be visually satisfied by what you saw. Now advertising is hell. I get the worst thirty-something ads to loosen my back, drink things that aren’t coffee. It’s awful! And on top of that, it creates this daily mental pressure where you tell yourself, “Oh wow, if I’m not doing well, it’s my fault.” That’s pure Foucault: biopolitics and all that. Anyway, I hate them [Big Tech]. Sorry, I went off on a tangent and I’ll stop right there.

And what about production companies, labels, agencies—those that confront you with listening norms or sounds that maybe weren’t heard in those spheres before.

You mean how the transition happens between more marginal music and the mainstream?

Yeah.

Same thing! Again, I’m not really inside those worlds, but from where I stand, if I had to give an opinion, I think that even though there are a lot of people in big structures, big majors, and big labels, a lot of them are still passionate people too. I think there are curious people. But of course, once you enter economic systems, once you enter the music market, there are risks you can’t afford to take. So there are economic questions that are complicated. In France, I think it’s harder. Maybe it exists more in rap in France, but in the UK there was really this thing where stuff changed quickly. When garage arrived, it became a national phenomenon immediately. It didn’t take a thousand years before you heard garage on the radio.

Then again, the UK has a real history of radio and activism. Simon Reynolds talks about this in Hardcore: he investigates the history of pirate radio. And there’s one story that really struck me because it’s truly violent. Basically, a pirate station had set up in a building under scaffolding, and they had sealed parts of the scaffolding to pipe gas through it. So when the cops started trying to smash through the scaffolding to get in, the scaffolding exploded. People died. So we’re not dealing with the same level of political commitment. In France, I think there are squats and things like that, but it’s less permissive too. And I also think the times have tightened up a lot. We don’t have the same activist history, at least in music, that the UK can have.

I’m going to move to something a bit more sonic, because I think we can also talk about politics through production. I’d like to bring up the term “goblin mode,” which was Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2022. “Goblin mode” referred to not being perfect, not being polished, allowing small flaws in one’s lifestyle. It was something that became somewhat permissible during the pandemic, when all those codes of social self-presentation were deconstructed. In music, I feel like that was also a moment when there was a return to distortion—especially vocal distortion, but also the infiltration of texture, of sounds that unsettle the audience. And that’s something you use in your work. What’s your relationship to all of that?

I remember during Covid there was this whole vibe of: “we’re making ambient music, getting back into yoga, romanticizing our day, doing stylish things because everything’s going to be shit.” And it pissed me off. I think the use of distortion and the return to violent music was very much a reaction to that. And to that kind of slightly imposed movement. Deep down, it goes hand in hand with the mushroom drinks Instagram keeps trying to sell me. Basically, you always have to be healthy, more than yourself, always available, so that you can always remain a labor force.

Additionally, I think my use of distortion also comes from that adolescent fantasy, because I was already playing rock, I grew up in the early 2000s, and so nu metal was really the thing I was immersed in.

I also grew up with the visuals of my stepfather’s album covers—he came into my life pretty early. He did a lot for my musical education. There was this desire to go back and retrieve that. And on top of that, they were things I had kind of forgotten: I rediscovered Slipknot around that time. And I also started getting interested in the foundations of distortion: broken amplifiers with torn speaker cones. That produced this badly reproduced guitar sound. And little by little, it generated experiments where people would literally slash their amp speakers with knives.

I find that gesture incredibly beautiful: waiting until an object is perfectly manufactured in order to alter it, in order to produce added value. Or rather, to draw out another power beyond what it’s supposed to be in its most perfect state. I am moved by that question of alteration. I started with this fascination, and then I put distortion everywhere. Sometimes too much, sometimes not enough. Then it infiltrated the voice because I didn’t know how to sing. There was this feeling of camouflaging the voice, which went hand in hand with wanting to hide my face. It was also a way of escaping recording, escaping all those forms of control, and leaving open the possibility of always being something different from the person I am on stage. In that sense, it’s a form of identity distortion.

Photo Credit: Amalia Jaulin

You also build your own instruments. We could talk about your guitar, if you’d like.

I wanted to build the guitar I dreamed of when I was little. It was a B.C. Rich Warlock: two spikes pointing downward, two spikes pointing upward. I thought the shape was demonic. I remember walking past the guitar shop as a child and thinking, “One day I’ll have it, one day I’ll have it, one day I’ll have it.” So eventually, I decided to build it with a friend who’s a carpenter.

I also have a Fine Arts student background, and I have a particular interest in forms. So I told myself it was an opportunity to make more than just a guitar—maybe an art piece, or something with a statement behind it.

And for a long time I’d had this kind of hatred in me, thinking: “I’ve been force-fed Ferrero Rocher every Christmas for decades.” And through marketing, my whole family had been made to believe it was this amazing thing, when it’s barely chocolate, barely hazelnuts. It’s wrapped in golden foil, and I thought: it would be a nice middle finger to gild my guitar with Ferrero Rocher wrappers. So I hired my neighbors to eat them for me, and I covered the guitar with the wrappers.

There’s also a kind of simulacrum there.

It was a way of turning the provocation that had been made to my family inside out. Of taking that weakness and turning it into a strength. In the end, it’s not gold at all—it’s tacky. But I’m going to make it powerful. I’m going to make it the central instrument of my live set.

I think that notion of simulacrum also applies to the voice. I know we keep returning to vocal distortion, but on your upcoming album there’s a track you made with Amalia called “Insomnia.” Toward the end, there’s this slightly rubbery sound. I have to admit: the first time I heard it, even though I listen to a lot of experimental music, it really pushed me out of my comfort zone. Could you talk about how that sound was made?

Amalia is a set and stage designer, and she works a lot with metal and plastic. Her idea was to bring piezos and try to capture sounds by striking the materials and shapes she brought. That squeaking sound is actually just a kind of plexiglass receptacle with water in it, and then just a finger rubbing against it. To go back to cinema, it also reminds me of horror codes—the slipping hand, which is a bit of a stereotype and sometimes overused to the point of becoming almost laughable. That’s what’s funny. I think that sound has a cinematic dimension thanks to everything Amalia brought to it.

That desire to slightly disturb the listener isn’t always easy to achieve in music. It can also feel political—wanting to work with something that isn’t smooth, or immediately legible. Of course, “smoothness” is always relative.

In the end, it depends on who you’re addressing. If I play that for my mother, she’ll say, “you’re crazy, stop that.” But if I play it for my roommate, he won’t be shocked. We all have thresholds. Then yes, there are sounds that, subjectively, will resonate in us in relation to memories, to our past, and all sorts of things. It’s funny because this whole “dark” thing has also, I think, become something of a label, because we’re already heavily conditioned to dark music. So the real question is: how do you still make something genuinely disturbing because it’s dark?

That’s a real question, and I don’t necessarily know how to explain it intellectually. It comes from sensation. And also from the state of the world—everything happening right now is so horrific that our thresholds for horror have been blown out.

Last year, I was talking with an Italian friend, and he said: “Actually, I think I must be doing relatively okay, because to make this kind of super dark music, or to go looking for super dark things within yourself, you need space and availability to do that.” I think I saw that a bit later, when I started feeling worse after that album, and I no longer really had space to make dark things or to go looking for those things in myself, because I was actually trying to pull myself out of the problems I had.

And then there’s someone like Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys. I’ve been listening to him a lot lately, and there’s something incredibly beautiful in his voice. To give some context: his father, who was also a music producer, beat him. At one point he hit him so hard he lost hearing in one ear.

Brian Wilson, with the Beach Boys, which he formed with his cousins and brothers, spent so much of his time in the studio trying to make an album his father would love. There are so many references to childhood, to a lot of deeply intense things, but it’s always done under this hyper-joyful surface. And that really triggers me and it’s more violent than what I do, actually.

Because there’s this kind of violence that doesn’t express itself immediately, but is really hidden, underlying, and kind of insidious. That hits me hard.

That makes me think of genres like suicidal black metal (or depressive black metal) a metal subgenre that often abandons conventional riff structures, or uses distant voices and screams in the background. In the works of Sadness, for example, here’s a kind of nostalgia in the soft chords, but also these faraway, muffled screams. It feels like an acceptance of the end of things. Does that resonate with you?

There are two things there. On the one hand, that idea of contrast between a kind of softness and, at the same time, a kind of distant, lingering violence. And on the other hand, that nostalgic element. Personally, I’ve been fascinated by questions of nostalgia for about eight years. Namely by recording, and how this can produce nostalgia. How nostalgia creates repeating cycles of trends, how we ourselves are a little like recording machines. The thing is, I’ve reached a point now where nostalgia has started to feel strange to me; and sometimes even problematic. Because I think there’s more and more confusion inside nostalgia, where instead of going back to search for things, we’re actually starting to alter memories themselves.

I’m thinking, for example, of far-right campaigns that make political profit by offering a group of people the chance to relive a golden age that no longer exists. And the thing is, instead of trying to fix things or find solutions in the future, we plunge back into the past in order to try to find solutions for the present. It creates a loop that never gets surpassed, and I’m starting to see that vicious circle very clearly.

The other problem is that nostalgia is a spectrum. There are so many kinds of it and so many ways of using it. But I think today it can be touchy too, and I feel like I’m starting to come to the end of my relationship with it.

This may be a broad question, but earlier you said your work draws heavily on the codes of your adolescence, so there’s a form of nostalgia there. How do you work with those memories while still transforming them, while taking a step toward the future?

At the beginning, I said that going back into adolescence was a way of saying that adulthood, in some sense, is an invention. I feel like “adult me” would be the version of me that gives in to all those Instagram things where, in the end, I drink those mushroom drinks and become some kind of labor force; this kind of perfect body, always available for capital, always in shape, never sick. So adolescence was really a counter-position to that. It was a way of saying: no, I want to keep open the possibility of plurality.

To put it a bit bluntly, it’s a form of resistance to a kind of Judeo-Christian monotheism of identity, where everything has to be singular, binary, stable. I didn’t want that. I wanted the possibility of being multiple: multiple people, multiple potentials, multiple becomings in different places.

For a long time, nostalgia was a way for me of going back into the past and drawing from the possible people I could have been. So not being trapped in a past moment that I want to bring back, but rather working on the past the way you might work with a psychologist. Reappropriating my past in order to transform it and turn it into something more positive than the things I experienced in middle school or those kinds of situations.

I feel like that’s something happening more broadly in music right now too: there’s a lot of retro, a lot of return, but always with the desire to shift the norms a little, to alter how listening happens.

I also wanted to ask about how you described your last mix—I think it was for Groovy Radio. You said: “I wanted my mix to feel like chaos, where weird sounds, distortions, and twisted rhythms could take the stage. I wanted a sense of disorder and instability, to push bodies into zones we don’t usually explore, with melting BPMs, strange and distorted melodies.” I think that notion of discomfort is also what can transform an audience—what might give them the capacity to do things differently. Maybe that’s a good place to end.

Yes. Yes. Basically, I have a bad habit when I make mixes: I force things together in order to make the mix work.

I don’t tell myself, “Okay, I’m picking one genre, I’m going to dig all the way down to its roots and pull out the best tracks.” No, I’m going to take the 25 tracks I love the most and then I’m going to shape them so I can make the transitions work. But the goal is still that there has to be a story being told. There are tracks I play at 30 BPM instead of 170, to make it work.

There’s something in that act of forcing and of pushing the limits. And yes, sometimes it makes the tracks physically uncomfortable to move to. Even I sometimes think it becomes too violent in certain moments. But I also like to remind people that discomfort, violence, things we don’t understand, they’re also aesthetics. I think it’s important to confront them. And not forget that if something isn’t comfortable, or isn’t danceable, it can still be cool to take the time to confront it. Maybe not in the moment, but eventually, to ask yourself: why? What does it do to me? What is it that makes it uncomfortable?

That feels like the perfect place to end: with sound production as a way of unsettling the status quo. In the end, this conversation turned out to be deeply social and political—and it touches on questions many people are asking right now. It was a pleasure to speak with you about all of this. We can’t wait to hear how these codes reappear in your upcoming album.