“Anthroportrait” by Ondrey Zintaer (singer of Nicitel from Slovakia) boasts an impressive range of musical styles, featuring everything from acoustic experimentation to minimalist electronic compositions. Over the course of 13 songs and 60 minutes, Zintaer delivers a haunting and deeply engaging listening experience. The collaborations with a pianist, a drummer, and an electronic organ player offer a unique and diverse range of sounds and textures. With a focus on free improvisation, noise experiments, drone bits, and disturbing sounds, “Anthroportrait” creates an otherworldly atmosphere that challenges the listener’s expectations and provokes introspection.
“I came up with the word “anthroportrait” as a play on words while playing with random bitmap manipulation of my photos, where I inserted random pixels into them, creating various warped photos.” – comments Zintaer.
“I have posted them in my Facebook account just for fun. There were a lot of options artisticaly “destroy” my autoportraits. One of them is the cover art of this album. The connection of words anthroportrait is a combination of the words anthropo and portrait, i.e. something like a portrait of a human being, which with computer deformed photos was something like looking into a crooked mirror, I thought it was quite interesting. That concept began to resonate with me.”
Asked about the lyrical side of his new work, Zintaer says that he thought about a “reasonable insertion of lyrics into his music-non-music.”
“One of the attempts was actually one of my very first kid album called POAETRIA, (same as the title of a chapters in my zines belonging to my “poetry”).” he explains. “My Live concerts in the beginning were always about my lyrics-shouts. Later I dropped them, but after time and under the influence of social circumstances, I returned to them again. As well as on this album.”
The lyrics of the album “Anthroportrait” by Ondrey Zintaer provide a window into the personal reflections of the artist himself. The introspective themes of the album are centered on the turmoil and upheaval that the artist has experienced both internally and in the world at large, particularly during the past year since the outbreak of war.
“I gave some of them at my last concerts. So I wanted to immortalize them in this way as well. The texts are in Slovak, but there are also English translations on bandcamp, as well as in the booklets of the cassettes.” – says Ondrey.
Speaking about the sonic part of his new effort, he continues: “The basic effort was to create a “song” album. A varied selection of everything that interests me, from acoustic experiments to electronic minimalism, in not too exhaustive compositions. The result is 13 songs covering 60 minutes.”
“Album consists of approx. 5-6 minute songs, which confirm exceptions such as minute miniatures, and the last 11 minutes long song in cooperation with the Brazilian one man band Dead Oceans under the baton of Fabiano Pimenta, who also mastered the entire album. My Italian colleagues, pianist Paolo Tognola, who appeared here in two compositions as an electronic organ player, and drummer Filippo Bøtøx Cocozza also got a place. You can recognize both of them from our virtual ZTB trio. Daniel Goliaš (DeeXGee) took care of the overall resulting design-visual.”
