Prague based producer Ursula Sereghy is a self-educated saxophonist with a history of playing in live jazz bands. At 25 years old, Sereghy realised her limits as a jazz musician, and with the support of the local educational platform and synthesiser workshop, Synth Library, she discovered a whole new field of experimental electronic music and sound design. When the pandemic hit, Sereghy escaped to a cottage in the woods. There, she translated her disconnection – and the idea of civilisation collapse as background noise – into her debut album OK Box, where the producer uses granular synthesis, manipulates field recordings, and deconstructs the sounds of saxophone and other wind instruments. Sereghy explores her 'terra incognita' and creates her own cartography with speculative sounds.

Miloš Hroch: You've just returned from your cottage in the woods, where OK Box was partly created. What did the escape into the wild reveal to you?

Ursula Sereghy: I still go there and try to spend there as much time as possible. It is a cottage near the Slapy dam in the Central Bohemian region, it is in the woods, and no one lives within two miles around. There is no water or electricity. Last year I understood what solitude is and how much of a city person I became. The civilisation collapsed, and I washed in a bucket of ice water, chopped wood and went to bed around nine in the evening, because when it gets dark and you run out of candles, what can you do? I had a laptop there, and I put together some ideas for the record, only when I could charge my computer from three solar panels on the roof.

I tried to get some vitality into the music I made there. Vitality is an important word, concept, or mood for me. I discovered this kind of vitality and enthusiasm in me only by detaching myself from many comforts, overload of perceptions, digital waste and visual smog. That separation was an opportunity to cleanse me, to have the chance to find something in myself that was worth expressing. That vitality carries some penetrative power and a form of spirituality in the 21st century, which is a big question for me. I discovered it in 'blank mode'. In addition, I had a lot of time there, which I think is crucial for art in general.

What can one imagine under that vitality?

I love when music reveals things you didn't have access to before. How it will stimulate the imagination beyond your means, limits and modus operandi. I discovered new roads and maps that I didn't even know existed, much less I had no idea I could choose them.

Finding new paths is essential for you personally because OK Box marks your continual shift from jazz to experimental electronic music – how significant was the change?

The whole of my life, I played various instruments from saxophone to bass and keyboards. For a long time, I considered myself an instrumentalist, someone who plays something. At one point, I started wanting to compose my own things. Because it felt limited. I desired to make my own music, and electronic music allowed me to do so. I immersed myself into a different format that suddenly offered other and more options.

How did you get into jazz?

My mother has absolute musical hearing, so she forbade me to play anything and learn to play instruments at home. I would tease my mom with my practice. Then I revolted at fourteen. I borrowed a saxophone, persuaded an eighteen-year-old friend, and forced him to sign a saxophone loan agreement, and I paid it with stolen money. Then I spent my teenage years [listening to] Herbie Hancock and John Coltrane. I can play a lot by hearing, which is an important thing how I learned to perceive and listen to music. I didn't need sheet music and notes. I was sticking to the saxophone forever. It is impossible to produce a pure tone from your saxophone unless you practice for four hours a day. I enjoyed the complexity of the music and I learnt a lot about patience.

But you still keep that complexity in your music, don't you?

I'm trying to unlearn the manners I have internalised. The connection is often subconscious. I wanted to free myself from specific harmony and detach from excessive formalism. The usual narrative of the melody annoys me, and the formality gets a lot of attention, and one forgets about the rest of the music.

In almost all tracks on OK Box, there is some kind of wind instrument, mostly a flute, sometimes acoustic and recorded, often made of synthesisers, sometimes there is a manipulated saxophone. I work a lot with granular synthesis, and I really enjoy the fact that it is difficult to control, and it is not very possible to understand it in some classical way. It's not very tuneable. The grains react in various unpredictable ways and cause strange sounds that are hard to associate with anything.

Otherwise, I work mainly in Ableton, I manipulate synthesisers and various samples, I manipulate with field recordings, with my own voice, and I record acoustic instruments. Still, mostly I somehow massacre the sound, so I can't even recognise it there.

The whole album was preceded by learning how to make electronic music – work with software and hardware – in the Synth Library in Prague. How did you get there? You are actually one of the first residents, and you had been growing with that community since its beginnings three years ago.

I read about it on the internet and thought it would be cool to go see it. That I will calmly sweep there, help with anything needed and learn what others are doing there. Producer and journalist MaryC – the curator behind the Synth Library project – signed me straight to the program for female electronic producers Trigger-System. This was my education. Synth Library is an educational platform and space in the Nusle district of Prague, where there are loads of synthesizers and hardware and an extensive library. It is the first sister library of the original S1 Synth Library in Portland. It is a feminist space; female artists and curators are mainly involved in the operation. There are various workshops, lectures, and discussions – and it's incredible because a similarly focused programme cannot be studied anywhere (whether the state or private university) in the Czech Republic.

I started learning how to work with modular synthesizers and all these machines. I discovered contemporary electronic music, which was a huge turning point in my life. It changed my view of music, and it showed me that I used to be limited in many ways. It gave me the technical skills and hope that there was at least a very undiscovered field for me. I just listened to how producers like AGF or Mala Herba talk about their creative process. Their lectures and workshops gave me the strength not to lose my head when I couldn't move forward. It was really emancipatory to hear that sometimes they wouldn't produce anything for three weeks at a time or that banal advice "go out every twenty minutes to walk out" meant a lot to me. I didn't resign, which is good.

Politics is also essential for the Synth Library. The space is organised according to the Feminist (Art) Institution initiative (created by representatives of the Central-Eastern European art institution's network tranzit.org). Was it somehow emancipatory for you in this respect as well?

It is based on the feminist practice of making education available to the community. I must have gone through personal emancipation thanks to the Synth Library. It offered me help and the means to smash and break some mirrors (my confirmed ideas about the world). It is necessary to have someone around you to support you – and in the music scene, it is also still important to uncover and analyse some systemic mechanisms of oppression.

In addition to the Synth Library, I see you as part of the experimental electronic scene, which is promoted in the Czech Republic by Genot Centre and Gin&Platonic, where your album is released. How did you get together?

For me, Gin & Platonic and Genot Centre were a gateway to the world of electronic music, which is hardly available in Czech clubs. So, through their releases, I went into a completely different dimension. After hesitating, I quite shyly sent them my record, shocked by how much support I received in assembling the album in response. I admire their perseverance.

The idea of motion is central to OK Box, isn't it? We see the car's interior with the rearview mirror on the cover, and you describe the record as a "friendly ride following unusual mental maps".

I try to explore the possibilities of moving on unmarked paths. The OK Box is an allusion to an environment that does not allow these trips to be made. OK is such a prank and should denote 0K, zero Kelvin, i.e. -273.15 ° C. This is the hypothetical lowest state of energy. At this temperature, the entropy approaches zero and is the closest state to an ideal arrangement of particles, with minimal chaos. This is a state from which the path is sought only by a radical change of conditions. However, we do not realise that these conditions determine our limits. You can only find the real problem with imagination and yet undiscovered ways of thinking. The car is related to this. I come across the concept of comfort, which can lead to the inability to listen to your surroundings or different opinions. It symbolises a closed environment: under the pretext of freedom, it forces you to see the surroundings from an artificial perspective and through a comfort filter. I want to break it.

OK Box is released by Gin&Platonic. Ursula Sereghy will perform at Lunchmeat festival At Prague National Gallery 1 October 2021.