Off the Record - December Edition

For years now, I’ve been trying to compete.

To get to that professional pop sound. You know the one I’m talking about. Super polished, but with this calculated indie edge. The perfect balance of clean, stadium-size sounds and bedroom grit.

Today, I stop competing. That huge shiny pop tone? That ain’t your sound, Jack. Thousands of blokes are already after it, and doing it much better anyway.

Which brings the question: what do I love?

Organic sounds. That doesn’t mean poorly recorded. Au contraire. It doesn’t have to be lo-fi. Some sounds can, but it’s not that aesthetic. Organic, well-recorded, beautiful mediums. A little proximity, and its intimacy. Because at the end of the day, it’s honest.

That’s always been important to me. To make an honest record. To capture something real, raw.

Hence my infatuation with old jazz. I fell in love with their process before I fell in love with the music. Because the hard bop records are documentaries, fixing a moment in time.

That’s why Warm Bodies In My Room is still one of my favourite records I produced, close to a decade later. It has depth. It’s real. We’re in the room, and you hear the room. You hear a soul, pouring it out on the tape, trusting another soul to capture it.
That unique moment in time, never repeated. Was it the best take? Maybe not. But it was the perfect emotion, the perfect snapshot of that instant.

One project I’m working on at the moment is giving me these kinds of feelings again. It’s a simple bedroom record, with only a few people involved. One build-up on a song shook me today, I started to cry. That’s why I grabbed a pencil, I needed to remember this moment. To dig deeper and understand why.

And I think I know why. I understand at last.

This is my kind of record.

It doesn’t mean I can’t do anything else. But this raw emotion, that kind of balance, and not a super neat, polished, perfect mix. That’s what moves me.

Remember that Neil Young record, On the Beach? Al Schmitt, the legend, tracked it. He was still waiting to mix it, but Neil released it.
He loved the roughs. The vibe was there, and he didn’t want to loose it. To him, it was the record.

Such a thought is hard to conceive nowadays. Absurd even.

We all have to edit and tune the life out of everything. Every frequency range needs to be conquered and utterly defeated. Take no prisoners: any trace of life must be annihilated.
Before you know it, the post-production becomes a re-enactment of the Stalingrad battle.

All this hard work, only to try and pretend that we’re the best. Build flawless performances out of the thin air of our DAWs.

But at the end of the day, you don’t want to be the best. You want to be different. You want to be so different you escape comparison.

That, right there. That’s the target. Be so different you escape comparison.

Are you different enough from other artists? I feel quite different from most producers I’ve met in the last ten or so years. But as special a snowflake as I may be, I was still trying to be too many things to too many different people.

Now I’m gonna be me, flaws and qualities and all. As AI becomes better and better each day, it is the perfect time to embrace these emotions. To accept my sound, and encourage that way of making a record.
I’ve been a jack of all trades for so long, it might be time to become a master of one. Time to make some humble, honest, human records.

If you like it, wonderful. Gimme a ring and we’ll make something magical.
But if you’re after all the bells and whistles of the corporate sound, you’d better try your luck next door.

Be so different you escape comparison.

But then again, what do I know…

Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call

Tango

Ivna Ji is a Croatian producer and DJ based in the Netherlands. She’s released music on many reputable labels such as Brokntoys and 20/20 Vision. Quite active, she collaborates on many projects. Earlier this year, she co-founded Parcela Sound, her very own label.

Congratulations on Parcela! How did the label come to be?

Parcela started with two girls from Croatia. We never met, just talked online a little, and liked each other's stuff. Then, about two years ago, they sent me six tunes and asked me, “do you know anybody who would release it? We would like to have it on vinyl”.

I asked my friend Daniel, who owns Boax Records, if he knew somebody interested. He said “okay, we are gonna have a label of our own. We are gonna release them. I'm gonna support you when it comes to finances, you just have to give me six tracks of your own”.

I thought, okay, that's a good offer, so we started a label! The next record out is gonna be the girls, it’s collab of Tonota and FRGGRL. It's kind of a fusion of pop, punk and electro, but more leaning to the pop side, with vocals and stuff.

Lovely! How much is planned at this point?

I did plan five or six releases. Some of the artists never released before, and have been making music for 15, 20 years. Amazing music. We became really good friends. Some of them I met in person of course, some I still haven’t.

I wanna keep it as a family. I wanna release their music and not just sign new people. Because there is a bunch of other labels, of good music, of good artists. They can find their place somewhere else. I wanna keep this small, and give those people a place where they can do whatever they like.

That's a great approach. Do you see yourself primarily as a producer these days?

Yeah. I started producing my music when I was younger, and then I started going to clubs to promote it. Only some ten years after that, I realised a lot of DJs started as DJs, and then started to produce their own music. Or buy it, hire ghost producers to do it, so they get more gigs. For me, it was more natural to start making music, and going to clubs because that's where you promote it.

And I hate being a DJ. I don't like it at all. *laughs*

I prefer to stay at home and make music all day. Even for other people, commercial projects, jingles, whatever, name it. I love doing that, but DJing, I don't know. I go to sleep around midnight, so it’s not for me...

I was working in a really good club here in Amsterdam and wanted to quit because it was too much. I would drink six, seven Red Bulls, come back home around noon and I couldn't sleep the whole day. The next two days would be ruined for me.

It does mess up your rhythm, yeah. Do you play any instruments by the way?

I started playing guitar when I was nine. Still play like a 9-year-old, so that's it. Overall I'm happy with my life and everything, and I make this kind of nostalgic depressive music. In those rare moments when I don't feel super nice, I make happy pop music with my guitar.

I know a couple of chords, I can write a song, I can play it, but I wouldn't call myself a musician. Being a musician is not just about creating music. You have to play an instrument. I'm actually thinking of buying a trumpet. I think my neighbours will hate me for that.

Oh they will.

I tried it once, I wasn't good at it but I wanna try it again. I also know a bit of keys, a bit of theory, that kind of stuff. I did go through all that, but I don't think I'm a good musician. I’d like to be one day, at least play one tune from beginning to end on piano, without saying fuck every couple seconds.

I would forbid people to do any type of production without knowing to play at least something. I have a lot of young friends, in their early or mid twenties. And they heard from producers they admire, “oh, you don't have to do this and that, it's just techno, it's just groove”.

Why would you wanna sell that story to people? Don't put any effort into it and you're gonna make it. We know that’s not how it works. But I have a lot of friends who tell me “no, no, learning an instrument, it's just gonna ruin my flow”.
What are you talking about?

What pays the rent these days?

Washing dishes, working in the kitchen... I also compose music for commercial stuff, do some mix and master for a few clients. Oh and a few weeks back I started engineering in a small club here, doing live sound for bands. It’s nice.

I didn't have a day job for at least a year when I came here. I was just living La Vida Loca, making music, going out to concerts, spending money and after one year I'm like, ouch. I was supposed to save that money for my pension, coz it's coming soon. *laughs*

But I made 40, 50 songs in a short time. Before that, it would take me at least two and a half months to finish a song. I wasn't working on it for two and a half months but it took a long time to finish a song, because of work and everything. And in Croatia, every five minutes somebody will call you, “oh, you wanna go out for a swim? You wanna go out for cocktails?” And I'm like, yeah, I do, I wanna go out.

Then I came here two years ago and it was just raining and raining. The first couple of months, just raining, so I was on my couch with my laptop. I had sold a bunch of my instruments, so I only had a few, but I didn't use them.

For the first time, I was working just on my laptop, and I became super fast. I've progressed more here in the Netherlands in two months than I did in the last five, maybe even ten years back at home.

Then I released those six tracks on Parcela and I realised I have to find a job. So I started working in the kitchen, but it's actually in ASML which is kinda cool (editor’s note: Dutch corporation, world’s leader in semiconductor). They even offered to pay me a school, like cooking classes, because apparently I'm good at cooking. I didn't even know that.
Food here, everything tastes the same. Eating chicken or fish, it fucking tastes the same...

The Dutch aren’t known for food, are they? You’re familiar with Dave Pensado, the mixing engineer? He once said “it's better to sound new than to sound good”.

Yeah, a lot of people are playing it safe. I was just mastering a techno set, a lot of really nice tracks. But I don't know if I'm really that old, everything just sounds the same. There's nothing special to it, there's no soul.

And then I checked a couple of those tracks. It's new music at least: one of those got released two days ago, and what the fuck? 50,000 views already! Wow. For an artist that I’ve never heard before.

Sometimes I guess all of those musicians want to play it safe or want to sell. Not sell out, but just sell, so we can do something else in our spare time. But sometimes you just have to be brave about it.

It's the exact same thing with pop music right now. People you’ve never heard of, yet they drop a song and it gets to a million plays in a week. It sounds like something we've heard reheated a thousand times already. It brings nothing new to the table.

It's like somebody told those Swedish guys, you have this formula and it works. But it works because you're pushing that. If you push something else to people, it will work eventually. If you push jazz, like really push it, people are gonna start listening to jazz.

Back when I was young, what they were playing on our national television, movies after midnight, amazing fucking movies. And people talked about different things. People appeared more intelligent back then. They were talking about art. They were going to galleries. My mom was talking about it, and even when I was like 15, the thing to do to get free booze was to go to galleries.

But then you’d have to know about those paintings and stuff around. You can’t just drink cheap wine for free, you have to talk about it. And we did talk a lot about music and ideas and books and arts, because somebody actually pushed it through media.

And now nothing. Just hits, TikTok hits. Sometimes when I'm working, I hear those on the radio. You don't even recognise it, because the beginning and the end and everything in between is completely different. But you have this 15 seconds that is crazy catchy. That's what they do.

And then you have Rosalia. The idea behind her new album is quite amazing. And it’s still pop! I often think that nowadays, if you had people like Kate Bush or Bjork, I don't think they would be successful at all.

I agree, it would be a super niche kind of thing. It’s a weird game to be in at the moment for sure. Where does the fire come from? This creative energy that you carry?

Boredom. Definitely boredom. I create and I do stuff when I’m bored.

When you’re a kid and you do something bad, your parents take your games, take your books away. You're not allowed to listen to music and stuff like that. And then it's like, what am I gonna do? So you think about certain things. You’re engineering ideas in your mind, and you cannot wait to get anything, a piece of paper and a pen, something.

You're gonna transpose all those ideas into some medium. For me, at the beginning, it was painting. I think I was really decent at it, and then I discovered music and I was like, oh, I'm really shitty. Because all my friends and my cousins, they were playing since they were five, six, little princesses playing piano.

And I was playing with cars in the mud. My parents thought, yeah, she's kind of different. So I didn't start to play any instrument when I was young.

But since I was really bad at it, that's why I wanted to do it. I thought, I'm so shitty, nobody's gonna even notice me. Coz when I was doing art and paintings, people would be, “oh wow, she's amazing”. And I hated that. Like gimme something, some constructive criticism because I don't like this, I don't feel good.

And then it felt good being bad at something. Even to this day, I find something appealing when something is a bit off, when something doesn't fit, when something is considered to be wrong.

I think I just explained a couple of things to myself. This is like talking to a therapist. Thank you.

Ivna Ji released Archways this October. Connect with her on Instagram and don’t miss the future releases of Parcela Sound.

You read the 24^th edition of Off the Record. Whether you signed up yesterday or have been here since day one, thank you. If you’re still around, I guess you’re getting something out of my rants.

The addition of Tango a few months back has been refreshing. It’s quite pleasant to sit down and pick the brains of other artists I respect.
Full disclosure: it does take a lot of time to make these conversations happen, so we’ll see how long I can keep it up.

If there’s something you want me to explore in 2026, make yourself heard.

In the meantime, I wish you a lovely holiday season. And if you’re anything like me, hang in there, pal. It’s only a matter of days now. Soon, we’ll take down this damn tree, bury the holiday-themed music 6 feet under, and go back to regular life.

Til next year, cats.

Ps: did someone forward this to you? You can sign up here.