Presing - Povratak u krntiju

Imagine having a band hard to classify.
Sometimes I am angry at ourselves for not choosing to play... say punk rock. Or funk. Or jazz. Or jazz-punk. Or reggae. However, we play it all, and a lot more. We play whatever we feel like playing, and we enjoy it a lot. I can say I am genuinely in love with the sound of my band. And, like it or not, this band has its unique sonic identity.

Now, imagine having a band hard to classify in a small, economically and politically problematic country.
Imagine being fully independent, culturally, and politically. Imagine watching pillars of your cultural existence disappear one by one - clubs, free media, record labels, festivals, studios... Recently, even the indie record label we cooperated with for 15 years decided to quit releasing new music. And now we must figure out how to release our own music. Yes, we did release our new album on digital platforms, it is everywhere, you can listen to it on Spotify, I-Tunes, You-tunes, You-name-it-Tunes... We even released it on a CD. Still, we strongly believe our music should be listened to on a turntable because nothing sounds even near as exciting. We made so much effort to achieve a truly sophisticated sound, and we believe it deserves the best audio format that exists.

Short Summary.
Presing was formed in Belgrade, Serbia, when cell phones were as big as a brick, and when we recorded our first album, reel-to-reel tapes were still at large. Our second album, however, was recorded to a hard disc. We instantly became a critically acclaimed band, with a great collection of superlatives you could never convert into a solid career. But man, did we enjoy playing our music for each second of our long run?

It is hard to say how many band members we have - the core is four, usually it is one more, and whenever we have a bigger stage it is up to eight of us. The core is drums, guitar, bass guitar, and vocal, then almost always there is a flute and midi, and whenever possible there is a brass section and back vocals. Our age ranges from 23 to 56.

There is no one on Earth whom we are musically copying, but there are plenty of great artists we are in an artistic dialogue with. Songs on this album, for example, are in a dialogue with Kraftwerk, King Crimson, The Stooges, Pere Ubu, Lalo Schifrin, Serge Gainsbourg, Sergei Prokofiev, Miles Davis, Tortoise, Haustor, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Fleetwood Mac, Khruangbin, and many, many more.

What We Need & What You Get
We need to finance the manufacturing of our new album on a 12-inch vinyl record in a limited run of 100 copies. We had a record deal for this album, but then our executive producer died from Covid, and the record label had to give up their plans. But we do not give up our music. We decided to start our own label - Krila vinila (Wings of Vinyl) and to release the album on our own, via Diggers Factory.

The recording of this album was partially funded by Sokoj - a union of composers of Serbia. The grant did not cover the release, only the studio costs.

The Impact
It's hard to predict the impact of a musical album, and it can also sound boastful. Yet, all our records were created with selfless love and care, and they found souls to love them. We have enough reasons to believe this record will have a similar fate.

The specific value of this album is the proof of another musical transformation, another musical reincarnation of Presing. Most artists do not change their style that much, they learn how to achieve the winning aesthetic combination and stick to it for good. One may listen to previous Presing albums and compare it to this one to recognize the evolution from album to album, and each album is a claim of another piece of musical territory conquered. We hope you will enjoy it as much as we do.