We caught up with Neacal, the up-and-coming chamber pop project of a Belgrade-based musician. Neacal released his debut single ‘The Bell’ on 19 July 2024, via his own imprint Neacal Music. Neacal has been a composer for over 16 years, with his musical journey beginning as the founder of one of the most renowned instrumental progressive/post-rock bands from Eastern Europe, garnering nearly 5 million streams across platforms and tours in Europe and Asia.
‘The Bell’ was written, produced and mixed by Neacal, with co-mixing by Ivan Lubianyi and mastering by the legendary Ian Shepherd (Deep Purple, New Order). Neacal has shifted his sound to craft orchestral pop songs as a means of navigating through trauma and growth. Through resilience and adaptation, his story is a testament to the enduring power of creativity amidst adversity.
Read our interview with Neacal below:
I was born in a country that no longer exists, and as I was raised by my great-grandmother who still had to work during that quite turbulent and chaotic period, there was a quest of finding something to keep me occupied with in the meantime. Despite the fact that no one in my family had anything to do with music, I was taken to a local music school for kids, and passed the examinations for my hearing, getting to learn the violin. And even though the path of being a professional violinist was not something I chose to pursue when I reached my teenage years, I got too deep with music and started composing as an amateur when I became 16, as it was the only way to express myself. So what started as an accident, due to years of exposure became an inevitability. Music has an infinite capacity for emotional depth, and when the words failed me, sonic tapestries always came to the rescue.
2. The music industry is super competitive these days, was there a moment in your life that you wanted to give up on music? How did you manage to stay focused and achieve what you want?
There are different motivators when it comes to us, musicians, some internal, some external, and there are no universal ways to approach this, I reckon. For years I’ve been practicing composition as an instrumentalist, played shows with a band, and even though the industry wasn’t very welcoming, I realised that I keep doing that for myself, not for anyone else. At times I thought that I require external appreciation, as one of my core coping mechanisms was to excel in order to receive love from others, but getting deeper into that uncovered, that my motives are mostly internal. There were times where I couldn’t make music, but no matter what happened and how hard it was, I always came back to the process of creation. It gives me the opportunity to cope with what I experience in my life, by expressing all the feelings as pieces and now even songs. And now I know that I’ll keep doing that for as long as I’m alive and physically/cognitively able to practice this noble craft.
My process seems to be different for every project. As Neacal I had glimpses of these songs in my head as the starting point—those could be melodic ideas from which I later expanded the whole song, or snippets of lyrics either standalone or with a melody as well, so I guess that even within this project there’s variety in the techniques used. With lyrics it was the most intriguing, since that was my first experience with vocal music, and at first I thought that I was chasing the rhymes for the ideas of images I had in mind for this or that emotion I experienced at the exact time I was starting working on a song. Only after I completed the work on the album, I realised that the actual author of those lyrics was a suppressed part of myself, who came a long way from a prisoner expecting its inevitable demise to an enraged revolutionary ready to break out and wreak havoc. The latter actually happened, and I was completing the production along the process of putting myself back together from pieces, which is symbolic for me personally. And as I think about what I might do with this project going forward, I actually wonder how I’ll be able to write lyrics again (or would I even be able to). Was that ability re-integrated in me along with the suppressed part? Or once it gained its place, the ability vanished? Only time will show, as I want to properly release my first album as Neacal before fully immersing myself into the next chapter.
Life. It wasn’t merciful, and as I gained more and more trauma, I resorted to therapy, which I started ironically around the time when the world started to end in early 2020. Back then I realised that I am losing my emotional range, becoming more and more insensitive, and it made me scared. This was caused by the fact that I was completely out of sync with my emotions, functioning solely on cognitive models to survive. I got diagnosed with clinical depression, and slowly started to regain my life in full, learning how to deal with the way I feel, which is something I kept doing for two and a half years. Then I had a year-long pause from therapy, mostly as I thought that I’m now in a good place, achieving an internal balance, but I couldn’t be further from the truth. It turned out I also had a part of myself buried ever since I gained cognition, and as I was suppressing my emotions, I didn’t have any clue about such an imprisonment. But once I started bringing back emotions, the cracks started to appear on a prison wall, ending up in an implosion, which freed that part and drastically changed my life ever since. The process of this liberation that took effectively two years is when I was composing those songs (which I’ll release as my first album), and it was fueling them all the way, capturing what I was going through internally.
So whatever future brings, I am certain I’ll keep buggering on, and hopefully you’ll be hearing more from me :)
