Aleksandir: In My Head
Aleksandir is in Madrid. He’s a couple of weeks away from relocating to London and is battling imposter syndrome.
I take my seat on a train in Barcelona heading towards Madrid on an August afternoon. I look out of the window and the sun is high and I am comprehensively burnt. In between the two cities, the Spanish hinterland consists almost entirely of sundried brown grass and olive trees standing equidistantly, akin to the crosses in Normandy’s American Cemetery and Memorial site. The ambience of The Primitive Painter’s eponymous LP plays in my ears and a phone line joins alongside the train for the duration of the journey as it slightly curves from pole to pole and juts in and out of view from the top of my window.
When I get to Madrid that evening, I go to meet Alex, aka Aleksandir, at Placa del Dos de Mayo. I arrive slightly earlier than agreed and sit on a bench by the square’s small archway centrepiece. Alex appears a few minutes later and saunters over to me, calmly introducing himself with a slight grin. The roots appear beneath his bleach blonde hair and his headphones are wrapped around his neck. He has been in the Spanish capital for a month, he tells me, but has just gotten back from a trip to Cambridge to see his sister.
With a number of bars skirting the small square, we pick one with a large terrace, sit down at a shaded table under an umbrella, and order two drinks when the server of the bar approaches. Una doble for Alex and a non-alcoholic beer for myself.
“So, are you going back to the UK after this?” I ask Alex as the server walks away. He had recently posted on his Instagram about relocating to London.
“I'm going back to Istanbul,” says Alex. “I live there. I've been back living there for a couple of years since I graduated from uni in Bath. I'm bad with dates, but it's been a few years.”
“Is there as much of a cultural difference as I might imagine?”
”Yeah, they're very different. My Mum is Turkish and my Dad is English, but they were separated when I was really young. I grew up with my Mum, my brother and sister, mostly in Turkey, so culturally I've always associated a lot more with Turkey.”
“I see.”
“I'm going to move to London in October, but my girlfriend is here. That's why I come to Madrid a lot.”
“And the move to London is the typical trope of needing to be in a place like London in order to grow artistically?
“Yeah, I think so,” Alex says. “I think it's just a good time for me. I've been craving something new, I guess.”
“Yeah, isn't that it,” I say.
“But also professionally. My career has been dead for a while because of the pandemic and everything. I just feel like getting into a scene and meeting people that do the same thing that I do. In Istanbul I kind of just do my own thing. I mean, we have a scene, but it's small.”
“Being the big fish in the small pond,” I say, “to being the small fish in the big pond.”
“I enjoyed being the big fish in the small pond, but that gets boring at some point.”
“Yeah, you want to challenge yourself.”
“Sorry?” Alex asks me to repeat myself amongst the noisy terrace.
“You want to challenge yourself.”
“Yeah, exactly. There's no challenge back home, really.”
A server comes over and places our drinks on the table between us and walks away back inside the bar.
Alex continues, “I released my album, Skin, during pandemic times as well.”
“What was your thinking behind that?” I ask. “A sense that you had delayed it enough already and then at some point you just wanted to get it out?”
“Yeah. I mean, I had been working on it for a while and I just felt I had to get rid of it so I could go on with everything else, which I guess kind of maybe wasn't true because I haven't been able to go on with much else since.”
The server comes back with tapas in the form of ready salted crisps.
“I think somehow it ended up breaking my heart a little,” says Alex, “just having to do it in that way. Since the album, I've made like two tracks in the last — how long has it been? Nine months?”
“Just because the creative impulse isn't there?”
“Yeah, I've tried working on stuff but just feeling super dry. I think without the feedback of gigging in real life-”
“And a live audience.”
“And yeah, an audience. Or even just knowing you're part of something bigger than just you and your room doing shit.” A lamenting tone arises in Alex. “You feel like the world is moving but you get left out from all of it, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess that's why, but yeah, I just felt really uninspired for a while and I think the longer that goes on the more you start doubting yourself.”
“And your ability?”
“Yeah, and just imposter syndrome wise,” Alex says with slight distress. “I worked a lot on the album and, for me, it felt like a good step up from what I was doing before. I don't think I ever felt truly content with my music until Skin. Until then, I was trying to make music that lived up to my expectations of what I wanted to become. But tunes like “I Used to Dream,” for me, are like, really good.”
I nod my head in agreement.
“That's the only song, maybe, of my discography which I can actually listen to and actually say it's world class, or that I'd put that on an album from anyone that I respect musically.”
“It is quite a special track,” I say.
“I think it's also the fact that I had achieved a goal like that in my head and now anything less, potentially, scares me a lot.”
“So, there’s a bit of pressure to follow up from Skin?”
”Yeah, but that's all in my head. I should've felt that way after ‘Yamaha’ if I was ever going to have that type of expectation. ‘Yamaha’ going viral or getting millions of hits, that never scared me. So I realised it must be an internal struggle because it's about what I think about the album or the music.”
“Definitely.”
“Like, metrics wise, I think Skin could've done better at another time. It hasn't gotten crazy numbers, but that's not some form of success which scares me. It’s more that I think I started believing that I could be worthy of my own expectations, musically. I could put that down to imposter syndrome and just a lot of comparison, which is a really bad way to go about things, I guess. It doesn't make you very happy.”
We signal the server and ask for another round and he quickly returns with our drinks. “Gracias,” we both say as he places them on the table. We take the first sip of our cold beverages in the trapped heat of this summer evening and we each light a rollie.
“I know you said you wrote Skin during a break up period,“ I say. “Is it distant from where you are now, just emotionally speaking, or can you still see yourself in the record when you're listening to it?”
“I definitely can,” Alex says. “It's probably the only release of my own which I sometimes listen to. When I was making it, it started as a break up album. But then the pandemic happened and obviously that played into the themes quite a lot. Then I met my now girlfriend and I fell in love. That happened first and then the pandemic happened. So it had three of those very intense experiences of my life channeled into it.”
“Was it strange releasing such a personal album?” I ask. “Obviously we feed off poignant, honest albums and that's what true art is: honesty. But, when it's us and we're releasing it, then doubt and thoughts of it being cringe begin. Self-doubt which is obviously self-induced.”
“That didn't bother me that much actually,” Alex says. “I really wanted to experiment with that and I think I will again. Before Skin, I didn't feel like what I was making was art, without that personal touch to it. I think the music I generally like and enjoy is melodramatic, so in my case maybe it helps to hurt. But, I don't know. Obviously not being in a good place mentally is also a bitch and hasn't helped my output in the least. There's certain heartbreak which is just heartbreak and it's romanticised to a certain degree.”
“Of course.”
“You enjoy withering away in that feeling.”
”There's been albums,” I say, “that I've listened to, and I've had that strong connection to, because I was going through that period. But, when you feel good again and you should feel good about feeling good, you then listen to the same album and you don't feel that connection. You're almost bored. It's a blank void. The despair was almost better than feeling sane and healthy because at least I felt something. Of course, that's self-sabotaging.”
“Yeah, it's a fine line. I think a lot of the clichés surrounding artists and having to be depressed or deep and dark is also quite unhealthy.”
There is a crescendo of chatter as the square fills up even more and the sun pokes up behind the tops of buildings even less. The orange sky now merges with the orange buildings that wrap around the square.
“Should we get another?” I ask. “Do you have any obligations now?”
“I'm going to meet someone at 9,” Alex says.
“Ok, cool.”
“We're basically in Malasaña, no?
“I think so, yeah.”
“I could ask him to come here and that would save me the trip. It's the guy who directed the music video for ‘I Used to Dream.’”
“Oh, yeah? Sick.”
“He's from Madrid,” Alex says. “He just emailed me asking if he could make me a music video and I happened to have met my girlfriend and I was about and then we met up and stuff.”
“The stars aligned.”
“The energy pulled it.”
“Would you be a big believer in that?”
“Not at all.”
“No?”
“I'm very un-mystical and spiritual,” Alex says. “I'm quite cynical and scientific in my thought.”