LILY: What can you tell us about your creative process?
NICO: I’ll try to describe it such that that even a non-professional may understand. Imagine music as food and the musician as the cook. What precedes the cook’s work? Hunger! Desire for food. The musician or people around him are hungry for art. Food, and art, may be made for one’s own satisfation or that of others, of a specific audience. So how does the creative process start? It’s the hunger for art that triggers it. I’ve realised that I’m hungry. I’m going to cook, I’m going to compose music. Will I follow a specific recipe, do a cover song, or will I make my own meal, create music based on my own ideas? I always prefer to do the latter and seek originality. Which means I often go hungry (laughs). But the greater my joy when the result has a good taste. I choose the provenience of the meal I’ll cook: Slovak, Italian, Asian, Russian, American? In the world of music I choose from the styles: rock, pop/rock, hard rock, metal, to a lesser extent jazz, Classical, and blues. It frequently ends up somewhere around instrumental rock. Once I’ve read the recipe, I start cooking. I go to the kitchen, in my case my music studio. I tidy up my workspace and choose the instruments to use in the song. If I were in the kitchen, I’d be picking up pots, bowls, the food blender, etc. Now I know in which style I’ll be working, I have the musical motif, i.e. the idea and the basic material, the foodstuffs that will dominate in my meal. I could compare creating a musical phrase or a phrase-group to combining meat with potatoes, or pasta with broccoli. Imagine these sitting in the kitchen in front of you: now you’ve got to pick up the working tools and start cooking. I record the individual instruments, usually starting with percussions. I have the motif in front of me all the time and add programmed music to it. The bass line follows, the accompanying instruments such as guitars, piano, keyboard. I either record them myself, or program the more difficult parts. My favourite instrument, the guitar, comes the last. With everything recorded, cut, arranged to the digital track (the raw foodstuffs are diced), I start mixing and adding modulation effects. In the kitchen this is when you take the diced-up foodstuffs and throw them in the pan, add water, oil, season with ingredients. The final phase is mastering. It’s like serving the meal. The individual music genres have their special hue, which enables the listeners to rank a composition to a particular music genre after hearing only the first measures. Mixing and mastering are closely related. Recording, cutting, arrangement, they’re likewise technical musical processes related to one another. I always keep my mind open and that’s how new ideas originate, as well as new sound tracks, which I then mix together. I don’t have everything ready every time before recording in the studio.

LILY: Is there a hidden meaning to your latest single 'Give Me Five'?
NICO: Yes. The whole context is provided by the accompanying video clip, which is built on gesture and has its own narrative. It’s a short story about a musician’s effort to create music, but he’s failing, he’s burnt out and frustrated. I won’t tell you how it all ends. Watch the clip.

LILY: Did you collaborate with others to create this single? If so, who was involved?
NICO: We can call the times we live in the beginning of the quantum age. They’ve brought us many advantages, one of them being the transfer or ever greater amount of information within the same span of time. The existing technologies and systems are getting improved, integrated, they’re ever more sophisticated, in some areas they can literally replace the activity and thinking of the human being. That’s why I only relied on the technology that surrounds me (PC, samplers, guitar processors, etc.). The whole composition is the result of a single person’s work, from the beginning to the end. I recorded all the instruments myself, except the percussions, which are programmed. And of course the difficult piano parts, which are also programmed. My priority is guitar play. And I won’t let just anybody tell me what to do in my music creation. But in other activities I’m ready to trust specialists, people around me. The young cameraman Pavol Banáš is one of them. He directed the whole accompanying video clip to this new single. It’s the second project we’ve worked on together. It was Pavol who came up with the initial idea about an unsuccessful, burnt-out composer without ideas and then we wrote the scenario together. The young talented dancer Barbora Sedláková was invited to cooperate on the videoclip. Her performance exceeded our expectations. You can see the result in the video clip, in which I play the part of an unsuccessful— Oops! See for yourself!

LILY: What is your favorite part about being a musician? Your least favorite? Why?
NICO: I don’t support myself with music and maybe I wouldn’t even want to do it as a job. I have another, normal profession that helps me keep my head above water financially. I wouldn’t be able to live off of music alone. Why not do music as profession in my opinion? Imagine, all of you, your own job. Whether you’re an employee or an employer, you experience stress, disagreements, worries and sometimes wish to be in another, more beautiful place. I wouldn’t like to force music and push it into such toxic environment, although I know it can’t be avoided at times. This is also my answer to the question what I don’t like about the profession of a musician. Creativity, originality, independence, adventure, expresssion of emotions, fun, these are just several things I like as a creator of music. I like starting the process of music creation and performance with these moods and emotions. I also like the fact that music is one of the media that enable us to leave a message for future generations. Many music works that have outlived their authors are played to this day, inspiring new generations. We can learn from them and they represent the groundwork for the new genres.

LILY: Have you ever dealt with performance anxiety?
NICO: No! (laughs) I’m joking. Of course I’ve had to deal with performance anxiety when playing. It’s strange that I don’t feel or notice it before the performance. But I tend to have a blackout during a performance. I feel my heartbeat getting quicker and the psychological tension escalating in me. And suddenly, there’s a big blank on the stage next to me. Undesired thoughts push into my head and I have to do my best to stabilise the whole thing. My music is very demanding as far as performance is concerned and it requires concentration, preparation and training. If all this fails, then only improvisation saves me. If it doesn’t help, then it’s simply a “fiasco”. I’m left blushing red as a tomato with my fingers wooden on the fingerboard. Especially new compositions tend to be risky in this aspect, ones that I haven’t learnt that well yet. So far, however, I’ve never found myself in this situation and have always found a way to avoid it. But it’s certainly an unpleasant situation a personal failure for a musician.