i love taking a bath... when there's hot water in the pipes... even during visits to my friends i enter their bathrooms and fill their bathtubs... if they don't force me out in 5-6 minutes, i stay as long as i can keep the water warm enough... when a bathtub is filled i enter it and go calm and quiet... i listen to tiny noises that water makes upon my every tiny move and recollect things... children from the neighborhood, people that can't stop laughing, misdirected phone calls i get, girls... sometimes i don't have to recollect the girls, sometimes they are there... i love taking a bath with a girl... some bathtubs are so small and it's hard to make love in them... sometimes it works, though... i try to play guitar in my bathtub... i try not to make it wet... this makes me play too stiff... and it goes out of tune because the air is too hot... i give up... i go quiet again and remember... children from the neighborhood, people that can't stop laughing, misdirected phone calls..... i'm spoiled, too - i don't have a boiler at home, i use public hot water pipeline... i can lie in a bathtub as long as i wish... sometimes i fall asleep... if i should sleep long enough with hot water running, a flood would turn my bathroom into a sea... i'd send my friends a soundcard from the seaside.

Milos Tomic

Milos Tomic is in constant search of forgotten or undiscovered things and people on the margins of city and suburban life. He is fascinated with common people and their common lives, homeless people, children, people at market places... He constantly mingles with them and makes audio/video recordings. Although their destinies are sometimes quite interesting, he never tells the stories of their lives - he just takes audio/video snapshots of their voices and faces and puts them into his collages afterwards, making his picture of what Serbia sounds (and looks) like. Sometimes, these people can't stop laughing, other times they just make noises or babble.

Therefore, don't be afraid of so many spoken Serbian in this piece - the language is not really important. I speak Serbian quite well, yet I don't know what these people are up to, either. What fascinates Milos are emotions that are passed by their voices themselves, not the specific messages. And he does not try to make his audio recordings sonically pure, sometimes he lets people and children record themselves and gets dirty results which he considers as valuable as those made in studio environment. He records his works in mono, not trying to re-create any kind of "realistic" audio environment. At this point I look at his work as some kind of nostalgia for the early days of radio, when audio "fidelity" wasn't the thing one could rely on in telling a story.

Interestingly enough, it seems that audio quality/purity/fidelity of Internet Radio nowadays is quite the same as one of early radio many decades ago. And it looks like introducing new technologies, which are always notably lossy in their early stages, reveals the fact that reality doesn't have to be (and can't be) faked. This fact is always present, but is often blurred with further developments, which we call "steps towards fidelity" or so. But what is fidelity good for if we all know there's no "little people inside the radio"?

Milos Tomic doesn't try to hide any stage in audio processing: microphone, tape, A/D conversion, etc. are made quite obvious in his work, yet his general point survives all these obstacles - and this is that people have the need to laugh and speak and make sounds. And like to be listened to. If no one else would listen to them, Milos Tomic surely will. Maybe you will, too. They will be there anyway.

Aleksandar Vasiljevic