Plazmatick

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Plazmatick (b. 1979, Zagreb, Croatia) is a music producer based in Zaprešić, Croatia. Active since 1996. Was a leader of Nuclear Age Nomadz, a progressive youth organisation focused on new media and web activism. Its members became acclaimed designers, architects, photographers, artists, directors and university professors. In a new millennium low-bandwidth era, he was active on EGOBOO.bits, a digital publishing project & production collective dealing with the free software development, sound production and media theory. The music is fully controlled by the participating members and music CDs are usually designed, burned and distributed by artists themselves.

Plazmatick at Media Mediterranea, 2002, Pula, Croatia

Discography

Albums:

1. Fast Tracker Deviations (1996–1997)
2. Demo (1997)
3. Suburbanaut (1999)
4. Frequent Flier (2000)
5. Blue Devils (2001)
6. Demons, Be Gone! (2002)
7. Homecooking For Friends (2002)
8. Eskapist (2003)
9. Toycars vs Puppets (2004)
10. Hrđava vremena / Rusty Times (2013)

Live:

1. Plazmatick & Suburban Orchestra - live in Pauk (2000)
2. Plazmatick & Suburban Orchestra - live in Kset (2003)
3. Plazmatick & Josip Tocilj - Instinct & Intuition - live in Library (2002)

Campaigns:

1. Love is love (2002)
2. Say no to prejudice (2003)
3. Nasilje ostavlja tragove (2009)

Theatre composition:

1. "Utjecaj Mjeseca na život homo sapiensa", d: Sanja Tropp (2003)
2. "Oblak vila", Tigar Teatar, d: Vlatka Vorkapić (2003)

Film and TV composition:

1. Short documentary films for Fade In production (2002–2009)
2. OST for teen-series "Kad zvoni", HRT, d: Vlatka Vorkapić (2005)
3. "Bolesno", d: Hrvoje Mabić (2015)

Trivia

1. A new media pioneer
2. Organizer of the first Zaprešić rave party at Mikey's garage in winter of 1992. Soundsystem was provided by DJ Suziq (Suzana Kovac, one of the first Croatian female DJs).
3. His 8-bit designs were featured on Kaliber10000 (k10k) and Pixelsurgeon
4. Organizer of the first Croatian Battles of Robots in Zaprešić, 2002.
5. Composer of a score for a campaign "Love is love" (2002), banned from National TV as too controversial due to progressive topics portrayed in a campaign.,
6. Composer of a soundtrack for "Bolesno", critically acclaimed featured documentary, shown at more than 20 international film festivals.
7. Avid collector of Asian films (Kim-ki Duk, Wong-kar Wai, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Takeshi Kitano,...)
8. Cover photo for Rusty Times album used with permission by Japanese photographer Seiji Kurata. Album was used as a soundtrack for Kurata's travelling photo exhibition through 2014.

Reviews

A Dystopian Traveler on an Electronic Highway by Velimir Grgić (review of Rusty Times).

When Western civilization was pushing through the seventeenth year of its Gregorian calendar, the world was still very far from inventing electricity, gramophone, and mp3s. But this doesn't mean it didn't know how to dance, even though it was absorbed in turmoil within Germanic tribes, guerilla uprisings against Roman armies in Africa, and sending Publius Ovidius Naso to eternal hunting grounds. One always has time to dance. Seventeen is a wonderful number for lovers in Grenada, who by putting out candles on the cake are finally able to engage in legal sexual intercourse. “Sweet seventeen” is a constant in the profit-oriented world of Hollywood producers’ thematic obsessions; on this side of the Atlantic, in this age you are still child enough to be allowed to make mistakes more freely, but also grown-up enough to thumb through Playboy, drive a station-wagon, give blood, or join the army, and without parental permission end up in a trench somewhere in Afghanistan. In a word, seventeen sounds like a wonderful number for doing many things: chlorine disinfection, voyages by tram from one end of Zagreb to another, and writing haiku poetry – but by no means, absolutely by no means it can be a good number to celebrate an anniversary. This is precisely why we celebrate it. This number is not round enough to bake a cake and present a Rolex, but it is still round enough for vinyl, and it is a perfect gift for Winamp – Marko Mihalinec became Plazmatick exactly seventeen years ago; then, tinkering with his PC in a small room of his parents’ house in Zaprešić, he weaved his first music experiments, and in this way, in the course of time, he pioneered a strain of Croatian electronic music whose answer to rave parties in storehouses, pavilions, and suburban clubs was a cannabinol-like fusion of analog and digital, a rumble of organic rhythms, only lightly simmered in the oil of acid house heritage. Plazmatick, a pseudonym derived from a graffiti tag, an accidental souvenir of the days spent in experimenting with aerosol marks on suburban walls, was put into use when his love for music in 1998, with the “Suburbanaut” album, officially became the base for an exciting journey, seven long-playing studio records long. The kid, who learned to read music while stretching his accordion, emerged from his cocoon as a pioneer of Croatian “techno-jazz”, speeding on the electronic highway, equally impressed by trip hop, electro, jungle, and breakbeat, by all the sounds of the 90s that were engaging in Cronenbergian copulations, in collisions of role models gathered along two main coordinates: a local radio station that gave Plazmatick his background in classical and rock music, and the Zaprešić library, where, in its audio-visual department, he was acquainted with Ligeti, Pärto, ECM label... it perfectly complemented his love for Aphex Twin, Daft Punk, Lamb and Tricky...

The result was a creative jungle which assimilated everything from hip-hop to heavy metal, from typing on a keyboard to creative concert improvisations with the Suburban Orchestra band. Plazmatick played in numerous festivals; in one of them (Nikad čuo, 2000) he even performed under the very first VJ-ing session in Croatia done by VJ Eirenah. On the regional radio charts he was able to beat far more popular regional indie-ans (such as Disciplina kičme or Darkwood Dub) , and when he wasn't sitting in front of the screen, he led the NAN Association and promoted comic strips, Web design, creative power of youth... During this time, Marko graduated from Faculty of Graphic Arts, became self-employed, and Plazmatick completely disappeared. For almost ten years. “The scene changed, and I was fed up”, he says, explaining why “Toycars vs Puppets” (2004) was the last album that he threw to the public before he retreated and recoiled into many other projects – theater, books, films... Until the sudden, apparently unmotivated come-back in 2013. “In late 2012, probably the most wearisome and weirdest year ever, I took three weeks to rest, and it happened” – just like that, the “Rusty Times” album happened, the best, most mature and most colorful album in his energetic musical journey. During those seventeen years, it led him through a jungle of musical influences, melodies, rhythms, noises, and emotions. In a way, it culminated in “Rusty Times”, the right side of the equation, the output – a kind of a compilation of his whole career, with much less saxophone, but much more electro-noire. Something like an audio catharsis, boldly thrown on the urban jungle asphalt, with its main engine of aural and life experiences, gathered during the last ten years, a decade of poor publishing activity, but rich in listening experience. “Rusty Times” is the WD-40 for rusty times, a certificate of maturity for a musical career that is now a teenager, a playful, disobedient one, but one that is also grown enough; it is a piece of youth, ready both for love and for war. And, there is always enough time for youth.

References

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