Interview: TeHÔM

Date: 05/07/2025

Place: Zagreb, Croatia

Beyond being a cult name in the dark ambient scene, with a history spanning more than thirty years, TeHÔM also has the most peculiar, tragic, and fascinating history of all dark ambient projects that I'm familiar with. Formed in the early 90s by Sinisa Ocurscak, TeHÔM was making some of the most avantgarde and forward-thinking forms of dark ambient out there while Yugoslavia was disintegrating in blood. Just when the war ended and things were finally looking up for both TeHÔM and the newly independent Croatia, Sinisa got diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and passed away in 1997. After more than a decade of dormancy, Sinisa's close friend and collaborator on the second TeHÔM album, Miljenko Rajakovic, decided to breathe new life into the project, giving form to the TeHÔM we know today. My visit to the Ambientalika festival in Zagreb last month was the perfect opportunity to connect with this enigmatic persona and examine the past, present and future of one of the genre's most impactful artists.

Careful not to veer off to the deep end too soon, I started off the conversation lightly by asking about the occasion that brought us here together in the first place - the fourth edition of the Ambientalika festival, whose organisation rests primarily upon Miljenko's shoulders. Specifically, I wanted to know how he came up with the idea of launching a dark ambient festival in Zagreb of all places, a city that is charming and quaint, but mid-sized even for Central European standards, with a similarly-sized alternative music scene.

The idea had been around for a long time, but I couldn't come up with a suitable space to actually do it - I didn't want some random club where the performance would be marred by people talking, clinking glasses and whatnot. Luckily, I came across Vedran from KIC (The Cultural-Informational Centre) here in Zagreb and was blown away by the venue and the sound quality. It also happened to have the right capacity, so I really liked the idea of putting my anchor down there and making it a permanent partnership. The first person I reached out to was actually Frédéric of Cyclic Law, as I've been releasing my own music there for a long time and I have huge appreciation for his entrepreneurial spirit and everything that he does for the scene. I managed to convince him to make an appearance as Visions at the festival's first edition, alongside the Portuguese artist VelgeNaturlig. After that, I made it into a national evening of sorts: first with Norwegians, then with Germans, and now with Italians; I'm working on having a couple of high-profile Swedes over for the next edition. We've been slowly building this story; the beginning was difficult, but people seem to genuinely appreciate it.

One thing I highlighted in my live report a few weeks back is how KIC with its cinema-level video and audio system completely blew me away. What a stroke of luck to find such a good venue for dark ambient!

Visuals are an incredibly important, yet often overlooked aspect of dark ambient performances. I wanted to make sure I wouldn't get some random small piece of canvas to project on. After a few rounds of negotiations with the venue management, I managed to put together a concept, including what bands I'd like to see, and so Ambientalika came to life. Needless to say, few people involved in the process knew much about dark ambient music or even what it was, but I was fortunate to stumble upon culturally-minded people who were eager to expand their horizons and do something new and interesting - not only in this venue, but in Zagreb and even Croatia on the whole. Having been part of the dark ambient scene for quite a long time, I have a lot of contacts, and I've met a lot of people at my own live performances abroad, so it wasn't difficult to get traction once the project was kicked off. After all, this scene is all about friendships, so bringing an act over for a live performance is more akin to having a friend over for the weekend than a business transaction of any kind. It's especially satisfying when I'm able to pull off a quid-pro-quo; for instance, I participated at Blåsvart Aften in Trondheim, Norway in 2017 hosted by Svartsinn, so I told him that if I'd like to have him in Zagreb if I ever manage to pull something off myself; fast forward seven years, and he was one of the artists on the second edition of the festival in Zagreb. Of course, the list of names that I personally find good and interesting within a live context is long, so I wanted to make sure that I didn't overstretch myself. That's why there are only two artists at each edition.

This is a clever approach. I know myself from conversations with Jan Roger of Svartsinn & Blåsvart Aften that the logistics of getting four different acts to perform in one evening can be hellish.

No one plays this music for a living, which means that most people will have jobs, families and other obligations to take care of, with precious little free time for luxuries such as weekends away from home for a live performance. Take tonight as an example - it took several years for me to get a suitable slot to feature New Risen Throne. One of the negative sides of my setup is that, unlike gig-oriented venues, KIC doesn't have its schedule all planned out months in advance, so I have to operate on somewhat short notice. For instance, I wanted to organise the fourth edition of the festival before the summer, but a guy who was releasing a movie moved his premiere date just a few weeks beforehand, so we had to postpone our event for early July instead.

One peculiarity of the final date for Ambientalika IV is that it coincided with a massive concert organised by a controversial nationalistic singer in Croatia, Marko Perkovic Thompson. This meant that hundreds of thousands of people would descend upon Zagreb at exactly the same time as this modest dark ambient festival.

We decided to go for it for two reasons. One, we didn't want to postpone the event any further, and two, we wanted to have a cultural counterpoint of sorts to the insipid mass entertainment that was simultaneously taking place. Thankfully, the city authorities managed to ensure a functional public transport network for people to actually be able to come, and the fact that there were new faces in the audience is encouraging.

Moving over from Ambientalika and to the main topic of the evening (at least in my mind): TeHÔM. It's a very peculiar project on several levels, starting with the name, which is the Hebrew word for abyss.

Sinisa was deeply involved with spiritual beliefs and practices from the very start of the project, in addition to studying linguistics at university. I cannot tell you exactly why he went with this specific word instead of any other, as it happened before my time, but I know that he always held the concept in high reverence and considered that it had an almost magical quality to it. When I took over the project, I decided to stick with the name, because it felt to me like everything came to a standstill exactly when it was on the cusp of truly taking off. As you know, the second TeHÔM album Theriomorphic Spirits came out three years after Sinisa's death, and unlike the first album, where Sinisa had full creative control over all aspects including the album artwork, the second one was left to the mercy of the record label, which didn't do the material justice, so I wanted to make sure to reclaim the TeHÔM name and restore it to its proper standing.

Miljenko is referring here to a rather unfortunate episode; in the 1990s, TeHÔM was releasing for Twilight Command, a sublabel of Douglas Pierce's New European Recordings. As he had the audio material in hand by the time of Sinisa's death, Douglas decided to release Theriomorphic Spirits with his own idea of the cover art, featuring the coat of arms of a Croatian paramilitary unit from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

This was a grave misrepresentation of the material, and you can instantly tell that this artwork sticks out like a sore thumb in TeHÔM's discography; just compare it to the first one, which was much more elaborate. It's true that Sinisa participated in the war for about three months in the early 1990s, but he never entertained any strongly nationalistic ideas, let alone fascist ones, and certainly didn't want to integrate any overtly political topics into TeHÔM; he joined the war because he felt a sense of duty to his homeland. Douglas was completely fascinated by Sinisa going to actual war and even visited him on a few occasions during Sinisa's time at the frontline, taking photos and whatnot; in any case, the cover art of Theriomorphic Spirits was entirely of Douglas' making. To this day, people are confused by this mismatch between the music and the cover art, because the latter implies some strong martial, industrial or neofolk influences, and it took a long time to correct this misconception. I even had trouble with one of my live performances in 2015 because of this; I was slated to appear on the Schlagstrom festival in Berlin when the organiser contacted me to say that TeHÔM was popular with certain unsavoury, far right-affiliated characters in the Berlin scene. I was completely appalled by the situation, and shocked at how much controversy a single cover art can generate. So at the same time, I tried to explain the situation, but I was also jarred by this type of guilt by association that was being so indiscriminately applied to TeHÔM for no apparent reason.

Coming back to the 12-year gap between Sinisa's death and the resurrection of TeHÔM in its current form, I could only imagine what a difficult undertaking it was for Miljenko to take up the banner of the project in such an emotionally charged context.

I was among the last people to see Sinisa alive when he was undergoing treatment in the hospital for his cancer, and he somehow conveyed this message to me that he'd like the project to live on even if he passes away. It took an incredibly long time for me to figure out how to do this while doing justice to the original work, sonically, visually and conceptually. Once I set things into motion, however, it didn't take a lot of dust removal, so to speak, to bring things back to speed; in the intervening years, TeHÔM had become something of a cult project in the dark ambient community, alongside Kerovnian, another Croat, who was releasing on Cold Spring at the time. Those were the only two projects from this region dabbling with dark ambient in the late 1990s.

This is understandable, since even today, Theriomorphic Spirits sounds incredibly fresh, which makes it far ahead of its time, compositionally speaking.

I can only concur, and that's what gave the album the cult standing it still enjoys. I wanted to develop that sound further, and so, after a long period of gestation, I decided to dip my toe in the water and release a track on a Kalpamantra compilation. Frédéric heard this, and as he was familiar with TeHÔM's previous work, he proposed me to release a full album on Cyclic Law. At the time, I had about a dozen finished or half-finished tracks, so I decided to bite the bullet, polish up the work and go ahead with the release. My primary motivation in doing this was to correct the aforementioned misconception about TeHÔM that Douglas had created, intentionally or not; this is why the first thing I told Frédéric after giving him the go-ahead for the release was that I wanted to have control over all aspects of the album, not just the music, which he gladly agreed to. That's how Lacrimae Mundi came to be, and it was very well received - positive reviews kept pouring in, and people appreciated the fact that this cult dark ambient of old was being given new life. That in turn encouraged me to think about doing a live performance - another unfulfilled wish of Sinisa's. After several successful smaller festivals, I finally felt like TeHÔM was course-corrected to its true environment.

Other musicians might have been happy to call it a day after such success and perhaps start another project under a different name; not Miljenko, though.

I didn't have a clear vision of an endgame once I re-took the reins of TeHÔM; the plan had always been to take things one step at a time and see what happens, although I do admit that the success of Lacrimae Mundi and the fact that people seemed to enjoy it so much elevated my enthusiasm for the project to a new level. As compilations, live performances and album release offers rolled in, it became its own thing beyond just bearing the torch for this cult project of the past, although the idea that Sinisa was smiling from somewhere above upon the justice that had been done to the project was certainly inspirational to me. That's why I never set out to do his vision justice by simply rehashing old material; instead, I wanted to fundamentally improve on it and take it further. I'm sure you've noticed that no TeHÔM release, old or new, is purely dark ambient; there are always elements from other related genres, whether it's ritualistic rhythms, experimental sounds or even electronics. This is an approach I fully plan to maintain going forward as well. In fact, it's not even something I control - I often start working on a piece with one plan in mind, but the end result ends up completely different because the material takes you down its own path.

Curiously enough, these days TeHÔM is one of the easier dark ambient acts to catch live (relatively speaking), as Miljenko has been quite active in this respect in the past decade.

Live performances are something I take incredible pleasure in, perhaps because I try to actually perform live as opposed to just playing my material in a different setting. It needs to feel like an upgrade of the experience one has when listening to the album, whether by singing, chanting, or creating drones in real time using amps and tubes; the opportunities for improvisation with this music are endless, which is a fact that often goes unrecognised nowadays. This is why I don't figure out 100% of my set ahead of time; I do make the necessary preparations at home, of course, but I like leaving certain things to be driven by the moment itself. The same will be true for my upcoming performance at Rituals over Limburg III, which is taking place this November.

Still on the topic of live performances, TeHÔM has several official live albums to its name, a rarity for the genre.

I never set out to do a specific performance knowing that it will become a live album; in fact, what ultimately came out as Live Assault was recorded unbeknownst to me in the first place. I accepted the invitation to appear at Brutal Assault 2016 as part of their dark ambient stage (in its first edition), and a month after the gig, I received an email with the recording from the organisers that I didn't even know existed - so much the better, as I might have focused on different aspects of the performance had I known that it was being captured. The sound quality of the original recording wasn't amazing - there was a lot of clipping and other artefacts - but I was really satisfied with the feel of the performance itself, and I thought it represented exactly that elevation of TeHÔM's sound that I was speaking about earlier. I gave the recording to a friend to see if he can remaster it into something more polished, and as he did a great job with it, I offered it to both La Esencia for the LP release and to Cyclic Law for the CD, and it became Live Assault. The same happened with a Moscow gig in 2019; I received another recording of an even higher quality than the first, and it became The World You Live In. The trilogy was then completed with Phobos from my performance at the eponymous festival, also in 2019, and I think the three albums showcase three different aspects of my sound quite well; I don't have any immediate plans to release any more such recordings.

I expressed my hope that this means that Miljenko's focus is now on new material, as a follow-up to 2024's excellent Legacy, although I fully expected the said hope to be dashed considering his frequency of releasing new studio material.

[laughs] Yes and no. I am constantly working on new material, but I'm not one of the acts that will release new albums each year, and I dislike the trend of hyperproduction that I'm noticing in the scene lately. To me, each album needs to not just be new music, but a completely different frame than the last one. That's why I took such a long time between Lacrimae Mundi and Legacy; I wanted to space the two albums apart in terms of ideas and not just time. Then there's the fact that I also have my other project, Principia Audiomatica, which is more electronically oriented, so between my quality standards and my working pace, it could indeed take a while. That said, I'm currently working on a special edition of Lacrimae Mundi with remixes of the original tracks by truly cream-of-the-crop artists, such as Raison d'Etre, Atrium Carceri, Sysselmann, Phelios and more. There will be a total of nine tracks and it will be released as a standalone entry in the discography through Cyclic Law. Another important aspect is the cover art, since the original artwork was done by none other than Dehn Sora of Treha Sektori; for this special edition, the cover art was done by Ivan Antunovic, my partner in crime for the previous three or four album covers, and he has produced yet another masterpiece with his signature aesthetic. I'd also love to release it on vinyl, but the issue is that most labels nowadays prefer to have the licence for both CD and vinyl, which I can understand to a certain extent considering the complexities and cost of vinyl releases. Frédéric did release both CD and vinyl versions of Legacy on Cyclic Law last year, but he was unable to commit to the vinyl this time around because of operational complexities, so I'm still on the lookout for any opportunities in this regard.

Other than not knowing when new TeHÔM material will come out, it's also seemingly impossible to predict on which label it will come out, considering that Miljenko seems to change them with each release.

There is no intent behind it, it's just a function of timing and opportunities. Despite having released on many labels across the years, one thing that unites them all in my mind is the dedication they have to their craft, in terms of presentation, distribution, PR work and so on. There are even labels that I've wanted to release on but haven't had the opportunity until now, such as Cryo Chamber. In short, it seems there are more labels that I know and respect than material that I have available for release!