Tobias Zaldua: "I was observing the chaos and letting it guide me"

Singer-songwriter and electronic alchemist, Tobias weaves spoken word, narrative songs, and immersive sonic textures into shadowed dreamscapes. Obsessed with the dark pulse of 1980s Düsseldorf, he draws from Leonard Cohen’s introspective glow, Laurie Anderson’s surreal inventiveness, the raw energy of Suicide, Sakamoto’s delicate precision, Yello’s playful edge, early ZTT experimentation, and the electronic soul of Detroit and Chicago. In dreams, he mutates these influences into fractured, unexpected forms, though much of his time is spent awake. Raised without television, he lost himself in radio dramas, cultivating a fascination for the unseen and unheard, which continues to shape his intimate, strange, and uncomfortably beautiful music.

Your album "LIPPER" was recently released on Chaos A Go-Go. What emotions or states of mind were you trying to capture with this record, and how does it differ from your previous work?

How does it differ? I'd say it's freer and more instinctive. Usually I have a collection of ideas I want to try, whereas this time I wanted to jump into the flow,  observe the chaos and see what grabbed my attention.

I went along to the 'Electric Dreams' exhibition last year at London's Tate Modern, all about the artists who experimented with machine art in the 70s and 80s, pushing early computers to the limit. I was really struck by the symbiotic nature of the work at that time. The technology was limited but each artist was bringing something unique and exciting. I think nostalgia is always a bad thing but something has definitely been lost since that time.

Limitations bring out creativity. Infinite possibilities limit creativity.

Perhaps as a result of the exhibition I set myself a limited sound palette for this album. I have to admit I kept a couple of 'go to' sounds that always work for me from previous albums – but I put them in a glass case labelled 'Use only in an emergency'. It turned out I needed them for the last track. 

You’ve mentioned being obsessed with the dark sounds of 1980s Düsseldorf and listening to artists like Leonard Cohen and Laurie Anderson. How do these influences transform in your creative process and your sonic landscapes?

Actually I should add Sheffield to that list – the music coming out of Sheffield in the 80s & 90s completely rewired my brain.

The first time I heard Leonard Cohen was 'First We Take Manhattan' which was blasting out of a record shop – and I was thinking 'what the hell is this, a singer-songwriter version of Kraftwerk? I love it' So I got lots of his back catalogue not realising that track was an outlier. I loved all of it regardless - the subversion, the humour, the beauty and the bleakness.

But I always remember that first instant when I heard that song. Those moments are magic, and pretty rare - it happened again when I first heard Jamie Principle's 'Your Love'. Time just stopped.

With Laurie Anderson it's about the shape and delivery of the words themselves that seem to exist on a separate magical plane above and beyond the actual lyric or its’ meaning – it feels like no one else can do this, it's mesmerising.

However, I think anyone who tries to copy their idols is a fool, for several reasons. Firstly because your idols are the ones who are the best at what they do, secondly because they have already done it better than you ever could and finally because it's a really odd thing to aspire to be someone else. Isn't that the job of an AI?

It's better to try to discover the intention behind their music, get inspired by the energy itself. It's about knowing your limitations while still believing that anything is possible.

I like the tension between these two states of mind but I also think that if you have enough conviction you can define your own rules. 

Your bio talks about dreams where you combine influences in "mutated and broken" forms. Can you share an example of a dream that directly inspired a track on "LIPPER"?

There are two tracks on LIPPER directly built from dreams but in totally different ways, the first one is YELLOW JUMPER which completely misrepresents the style of the rest of the album but it was the start point for the whole project. Everything came from that track.

I had a dream in which a DJ was playing to a packed room in a large house – the decks cut out so he panics and passes me the mic saying 'Say something, do something, anything'. In this dream I started improvising a song 'a cappella' style with some rudimentary lyrics to a hostile crowd while he desperately tried to repair the decks before people rioted. Unusually for my dreams this went down quite well – so when I woke up I grabbed the mobile and tried to sing back the track from the dream.

When I listened back to it in the morning it was almost incomprehensible but I could 'hear' this song like an echo at the edge of my consciousness, it feels like I got pretty close to it. Now when I remember the dream I'm simply performing this track as it is now - so the memory has been rewritten which is an odd feeling.

The other track that really did come from broken fragments of a dream was DEFINED/EMPIRES FALL/CURTAINS where, as I was waking up, I had a momentarily terrible sense of losing the most beautiful piece of music – so I wanted to describe that feeling of loss. I spliced in a few other bits of the dream which I interpreted as being about the battle between the left and the right brain, the accelerating madness everywhere, it was one of those tracks where I went with the flow, which are my favourite kind. I was also trying to get something close to the texture of the music I thought I’d lost in the dream and Francesco Barbara manifested that with his guitar improvisations. It was like magic.

I truly believe social media is the manifestation of the subconscious given priority over the rational. Our psyche has been flipped. That's the main message.

Growing up without a TV, you immersed yourself in radio dramas. Do you think that experience shaped the way you write narratives or build atmospheres in your music?

That's a good question – the short answer is definitely yes.

Everyone at school had visual associations with all the music we loved, prime time performances, videos on MTV, so I always felt I was missing out – but in hindsight I realise I never had to worry if the band had a brilliant or a terrible image, I was oblivious to it, it was always the music first. It was liberating.

In a radio drama you can't see the film set is made of cardboard, it was always cinematic. Also a lot of early electronic music pioneers were associated with the BBC Radiophonic workshop such as Delia Derbyshire and Wendy Carlos. I know that their work ended up on films and classic shows too but radio was at the heart of it.

I'm always structuring tracks in three acts without noticing, or adding another perspective to the lyric – a contradictory point of view or a voice over or getting sidetracked by trying to build different scenes and spaces in the sound design. Normally I'd try and force the ideas back into a more recognisable song structure – this time I went with the idea and tried to stay true to it. The exception here is EVIL UNDER THE SUN which is a track I wrote way back. I couldn't stop thinking about it so I had to include it. 

Among city lights, wind in the trees, and the sound of the sea, which natural or urban elements had the strongest influence on “LIPPER”, and how did you translate them into sound?

I love all those things – did I miss out the sound of rain? That's probably the most evocative for me,  particularly the rain in the city. So many early synth sounds remind me of rain. The Eurythmics instinctively knew this way back when they made  “Here comes the rain again' – all those classic sounds are like electric rain. Even now when I listen to Cybotron or Dopplereffekt they remind me of rain-soaked neon-lit future cities – which is odd as they would all now be LEDs. Can't imagine Kraftwerk rewriting the classic “Neon Lights' as 'LED lights' anytime soon though.

My spoken word track OUTLINED is built on layers of rain pitched / detuned/ and messed with, then I added secondary layers of reverb to create various textures and tones to capture the feel of a flooded field and the desolate landscape. The higher speeds and pitches created the sound of crickets and the lower registers became like distant trains.

I love the sound of wind in the trees too, as the wind picks up a little it starts to sound like rain and then as it starts to turn into a gale the leaves begin to sound like a distant angry sea.

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