British South African composer and producer Galina Juritz has spent years moving between worlds: classical training and jazz improvisation, Cape Town and London, the precision of notation and the freedom of electronic production. Her debut solo album, One Weird Trick, refuses to settle into any single space. This music is lush and inviting, pulling listeners through ambient expanses, rippling techno, jazz-inflected R&B, and orchestral minimalism with a restless intelligence. Juritz is so talented and chameleon-like that One Weird Trick effortlessly moves between (and beyond) genres, creating rich, interconnected soundworlds. While her background as a classically-trained violinist is apparent throughout these intricate sonic passages, Juritz bends those skills into so many different shapes and spaces. The way she composes is smart and infectious. One Weird Trick is a little bit of magic in the world.
One Weird Trick is out now on Kit Records. Galina Juritz’s website can be found HERE.
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What’s your earliest memory of sound? Not necessarily music, but sound itself – something that stopped you in your tracks or wouldn’t leave your head?
I remember a sound that used to visit me often was this thick cloud of pulsating white noise, almost like muffled wind being let in and out of a piping bag at regular intervals. It always accompanied the view of a long paved walkway through a public garden. Whenever I tried to get myself to sleep as a child, I would conjure this enveloping sound and this particular path – I’m not sure the path ever existed in reality. Another early one I remember is the sound of indecipherable ambient adult chatter and how mysterious and exciting it felt. And Stevie Wonder’s Hotter Than July.
When did you first pick up the violin? I’m curious about that moment when the instrument stopped feeling like an object and started feeling like an extension of yourself.
I first picked it up (or rather, it was handed to me) when I was around 7 years old. It takes a woefully long time to get comfortable on the instrument, and I’d say it moves between being an extension of myself and feeling like something I’m wielding quite tenuously. When I’m writing music and hearing successions of notes and chords in my head, my muscle memory of the violin is always there, helping me. As a compositional device, it’s an instrument that intrinsically understands drama and vulnerability, so I’d say those feelings are probably ramped up in what I write by default. Sometimes I can have a moment improvising on stage where things align, and I can say what I want to say, while other times my head gets in the way, I feel a disconnect, and the violin can become a stranger. I’ve tried to quit many times as an act of protest, but (for better or worse) it is the instrument that knows me the best, so I think I’ll have to live with it. Perhaps it’s about opening up our relationship…
Classical training can be rigorous, sometimes oppressive. What did it give you that you’re grateful for, and what did you have to unlearn or push against to find your own voice?
Like most relationships… It’s complicated! A music education is a huge privilege, and I will always be grateful for having had the opportunity. I had some brilliant teachers and lecturers along the way who opened up worlds of detail and complexity, introduced me to works I might never have heard, and handed me some hard-won practical advice around every corner. With that said, the exacting standards and, at times, rigid parameters of this world also left me with a lot of unlearning to do. I had to put to one side that insatiable desire for perfectionism in favour of experimentation. I had to learn how to call myself a ‘musician’ despite not having completed the path that I subconsciously believed earned one this title. I had to interrogate the dominance of classical music’s aesthetic assertions – to take it down a peg and see it as one of many equally rigorous and expansive approaches to wielding sound. There is indescribable beauty in the music (as there is in so many other musical worlds), and concurrently, there is undeniable snobbery within the culture. Becoming my own musician was about picking out what I found valuable and choosing what to leave behind. I’m still working on it…
You’ve worked extensively in collaborative settings – ShhArt Ensemble, Inclementine, film scores, and the Madness cantata with Dizu Plaatjies. What made this the moment to step fully into solo work?
Though this album is in my own name, I don’t entirely think of it as a solo project. Much of it is built off and inspired by improvisations and moments of performances with other people, as well as two tracks in which I don’t play at all, so there are many voices baked in there. Still, I think it was important for me to do a solo record at this stage because it was a personal challenge – there’s nowhere to hide. You have to make an artistic statement and own up to it, which felt like a scary thing to do. I think I had what German speakers would call Torschlusspanik (thanks to my friend composer Matthijs van Dijk for introducing me to this word a few years ago). I didn’t want to turn 40 without having had the courage to do this. I had a growing collection of unfinished projects burning a hole in my hard drives, and I needed to be free of them! A lot of it also felt very personal – things I needed to get off my chest, before moving on and re-entering the more comforting world of collaboration.
I love how One Weird Trick refuses to sit still, moving from ambient to techno to jazz to R&B to orchestral minimalism, etc. When you were making this album, were you consciously resisting categorization, or did these worlds just naturally bleed into each other for you?
I think ‘genre’ is a shorthand we use, but not interesting in and of itself. Perhaps streaming platforms and digital marketing have pushed us further into these categories, as monetisable metrics of ‘who’ in society enjoys ‘what’ – when in reality our tastes are all a lot more messy, and shaped by more human stories. (I remember when my brother’s streaming service had pegged him as some sort of 4/4 90bpm electro-guy and, to my horror, would not suggest anything outside this narrow bandwidth)! So to answer your question, these worlds did very much naturally bleed into each other. I love more different types of music than I could begin to list here – and the truth is, even when I try to emulate the music that I love the most, what I make comes out sounding different. What inspires you and what you end up creating can be worlds apart. I like to try on genres like one would clothes in a vintage store, but I move on. I never arrive anywhere because I never feel truly comfortable anywhere. Because I never know entirely who I am. If I did know, I wouldn’t need to make music. That would be the question answered.
You’ve composed for film, animation, ensemble, and now this deeply personal solo record. How does your approach change depending on the context? Or is there a through-line in how you think about creating music regardless of the medium?
Writing music, for me, inhabits different processes at different times. Fundamentally, whether you’re in a DAW, score notating software, playing around on a sampler, or noodling on an instrument, it’s problem-solving. I have this premise to illustrate, this melody to harmonise, this frequency to tame, these two sections that seem to have nothing to do with each other… how do I meaningfully sew them together? It’s lots of micro-decisions, an itch that needs scratching, sometimes something you have to step away from entirely and seek out a fresh outside perspective. In more recent years, I’ve worked in more audiovisual contexts, and that requires you to commune with the rhythm of the visual material in a way which feels like an improvisation, a dance, even. You have to free yourself up and move with it, because if you don’t, you can get locked into a parallel musical logic which stops speaking to the image. You constantly need to ask yourself: ‘Is this working? Is this emotionally moving? Is this too obvious? Is this serving the story, or have I become disconnected?’ In the industry, a client will not be shy to tell you what doesn’t work for them – and it helps train you to think outside of your own ears, your own taste, even. Writing music in this context feels like an honest day’s work, which I like. Making things purely for yourself can be hard, as you don’t always know where to stop.
“Time Split at the Seams of Your Departure (everything is now before and after)” is such a devastating title. It sounds like music for standing on vast shorelines, processing something irreversible. Can you talk about what you were carrying when you wrote that?
Thank you for that beautiful image! I was indeed carrying a lot at the time. Something I observed about grief (be it the end of a relationship, the death of a loved one, or something more universal) was that very particular way it splits your life into two distinct parts – the second of which will never be as carefree, or as trusting as the first. Grief dissects you. It robs you. It can riddle you with darkness and anxious thoughts, or smother you in empty noise. There is a beauty in it, too. As a friend once told me, a broken heart is an open heart. There is a humility one finds in grief. A submission to being part of this vast universe and its shared mourning, which existed long before you did, and will exist long after you are gone.
Elizabeth Freeman, in her book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, conjures an image of melancholia as negotiating ‘the past as past, in a crypt imperfectly sealed off from the present, in a psyche with unpredictable leakages, in a body semiotically and sensually at odds with itself.’ I loved this idea of ‘leakage of memory’ zooming in and out of the scales of time perceptible to the mourning subject: from the metered-out mundane gestures to the grand tragedies, and the moments that get stuck on a loop in between, and cannot move forward or backwards.
On this track, I owe the melancholy opening (be it on a major chord) to an improvisation I had with guitarist Sir Kay. That jam we had was a moment of connection in a sea of sadness.
You’ve worked with musicians from Cape Town and Johannesburg’s classical and jazz scenes, collaborated with folks like Neo Muyanga and Mr Beatnick, and brought in the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet. What do you look for in a collaborator? What tells you someone will understand what you’re trying to reach for?
For the most part, I’ve always worked with friends – when you live and work in that world, it’s often a natural progression, and whether the friendship or the music came first is something of a chicken-egg situation! I tend to understand what I am reaching for through the relationship. It unfolds and makes itself known within the collaboration – that is what is so exciting about it. A free and flowing currency of co-creativity that simply cannot be conjured alone in a room. It’s risky, freewheeling and surprising, shaped by the love, humour and tensions of human relationships.
Beyond friendship, when people I do not know approach me for work, it is always flattering, and when I seek out others, all I need to know is that we can have an interesting conversation about where we might go. In some instances, an organisation presents an interesting collaboration, such as the one with the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, which was made possible by the Sterkfontein Composers Meeting in Stellenbosch, South Africa, which invites composers to write for a new visiting ensemble each year.
On this record, you’ve got moments of solo intimacy and moments where you’ve handed parts of the music over to other players. How do you know when a piece needs other voices, and when does it need to stay just yours?
A lot of it is logistics. I have projects in my mind which would sound pretty cool with a 120-piece orchestra, but that’s unlikely to happen any time soon! It is a real privilege to hear music you have written played by other people, and to feel their presence in their interpretation, when the stars (and finances) align for that to happen. It’s also a luxury in that I can avoid the neurosis I experience when recording myself, which I find quite agonising. On the other hand, the electronic production has been a slower and more solitary journey. In that context, working alone allows me the time and patience to tweak and tug at sounds, go on tutorial deepdives, and tweak and tug some more. At the moment, my more electronic pieces are almost ‘Etudes’ for myself – a way of practising and refining a logic of sound that runs completely parallel to the world in which I was trained.
You’re British South African, and you’ve worked extensively in Cape Town and Johannesburg’s classical and jazz scenes. How do those geographies live in your music? I’m not asking about influence in an obvious way, but more about how place gets into the guts of what you make.
Recently, I reached the point at which my life has been equally split in both hemispheres, which was a strange realisation. I love both these places deeply and in different ways – and real love is messy, glorious, infuriating, and exposing of all your vulnerabilities. I feel like I carry resonances and murmurs of both always, often in conversation with each other, or laughing with each other, sometimes disconnected, which is when I am hovering somewhere in between and can’t quite locate myself. There’s also that uneasy feeling one gets when our experiences of places on a community level feel ever more at odds with the disturbing political trajectories we see rapidly unfolding around us. Don’t get me started on what’s happening in the UK at the moment.
Musically, I suppose the feeling of these layers of self in and out of sync plays itself out in an abstract way. Idiomatically, there are certain turns of polyphonic phrase and improvisation, and a preoccupation with interesting and melodically moving bass lines, which I cannot untangle from my connection to South Africa, while there is a particular textural, restless melancholy explored by many electronic UK musicians, which is also very dear to me.
There are also such distinct cultures of humour in both places, and humour is something I cannot live without. It’s absolution in a dark world. It’s something I want to find more ways of exploring in music going forward (sad music that is humour-informed).
More than anything, people from both places feature in this music, and they are everything. In “Spirit Level,” for example, I sent the score over from London to Cape Town-based musicians (Buddy Wells, Stephen de Souza, Andrew Lilley, and Jonno Sweetman) and they sent back this beautiful recording. Their improvisations and interpretation felt, in equal parts, both familiar and surprising, and it was very meaningful to have them on the record. Then, on “Things I Know to be True,” my dad played baritone sax (he has roots in the London-South African jazz scene, having played in Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath over the years) as well as Kit Records founder Richard Greenan, who recorded alto sax in a small cold room in the Sussex coastal town of St Leonards during COVID.
The title One Weird Trick has this internet-era, clickbait quality to it, but the music is anything but disposable. I really love that dichotomy. So… what’s the trick? Or is the trick that there isn’t one?
I love that you got that from the title! There is a certain kind of loneliness that comes with the bottomless trawls of disposable digital media – and that feeling is what I find compelling. The album artwork was created by the amazing Toronto-based artist Brandon Celi, who hand-painted this stone iPod, depicting the title in a hall of mirrors. It is an object which, in my view, wants to be as relevant and shiny and new as when it first came out, but is trapped in this kind of pathetic, unsolvable obsolescence and repetition. I think there are a host of emotions that run through this record – grief, anxiety, irreverence, bemusement, overwhelm, embarrassment – which the back end of the internet knows so well… I wrote a lyric around that time (it didn’t make it onto the record, but the feeling is there): ‘I am receding | nothing but needing’. In a sense, each song on this, each genre flip is some sort of doomed new trick – a searching for expression of something which can’t quite be articulated. I see that underlying desire in myself as both a musician and a person – to express something which feels like it is completely synchronous with who you understand yourself to be… but as soon as it comes out, it is not quite right, and your locus of self has somehow shifted to the left or right… and you try again. Another weird trick.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
I love comically-timbred warbly basslines and plucked strings in decadently resonant spaces, audaciously compressed snare drums, and multiple brass instruments enmeshing into a thick chordal weighted blanket. I love electronic sounds like glowing neon plastic, and all permutations of the harmonic series (forged by nature and impervious to human preferences) creeping out of wooden, metal, and gut-wound instruments. I love unapologetically juicy chord changes, and ritardandos where you can hear the distinct humanness of each person slowing at an ever-so-slightly different pace (yes – Fuck You, AI). Like everyone, I love birds, sea, thunder, roaring fires, and anything you could put on a ‘sounds to get you to sleep playlist’ – that stuff is popular for a reason. I love the sound of coffee beans grinding, onions sizzling, and wine bottles popping. I love the nasal friendliness of a pilot’s intercom announcement and the changing of the plane’s humming frequency as landing is imminent. I love the sound of my toddlers’ shallow-breathed snoring and unfolding groans and sighs as they begin to wake up. I love the thought of what space would sound like if it weren’t impossible to hear.
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