Niko Potočnjak, Bear Stone Festival and the liberation of disappearing into oblivion

He says this while stepping outside of his rehearsal space, buried deep in an abandoned Croatian industrial estate: "There's no volume restriction, we play super loud, around 110-115 dB." But now, after the flick of his lighter against his joint, he is surrounded by silence.

It's a fitting scene for someone so hellbent on exploring the world through sound.

The musical maestro – a legend in the underground and experimental music scenes of Croatia – has, by his account, "70 or 80 albums behind me, with 10 or 12 bands," and with this has come a world-weariness. Mostly in part thanks to his travels and age. Just shy of 50, he's now pretty set in his ways.

His journey to this point has been one of late-blooming discovery. Potočnjak's upbringing wasn't particularly musical. It was the likes of classic rock acts such as Led Zeppelin and Queen, and later the 90s grunge titans such as Mudhoney and Soundgarden that were his foundation. In fact, his first bands wouldn't come until he was in his mid-20s.

His real musical turning point came when he was ousted from his school in Croatia for being caught smoking pot. "Fortunately, my parents were old hippies, and they were open-minded. They said, Fuck this shit. We are sending you to finish this stuff in the States," he says with a gleeful cackle as if it were yesterday. Getting to Texas in 1995, as the likes of Pantera and Primus were thriving, this time became explorative and fertile for the teen Potočnjak.

Playing with a stream of black musicians from whom he learned technique first and foremost, but also "the mindset and the way of practising." Mostly playing old-school funk, it allowed Potočnjak to tighten up his craft and understand the guitar's placement and positioning within the bigger picture. That's not to mention an equally key fact: "And I was taking a shit tonne of drugs."

Altering his mental flow state has been central to Potočnjak's creativity. It emanates from his hypnotic, driving riffs, unspooling into a netherworld of his design, mechanical krautrock rhythms tick over, beneath walls of overwhelming volume. It's these lessons from his time in the depths of Texas that he took home with him after graduating.

Returning to Croatia, and heading to study in Dubrovnik in the late 90s, which was in a post-war state after the Croatian War of Independence a few years earlier, he notes it was a place of "complete desolation". This made it ripe for the young Potočnjak to do nothing but play guitar and embark upon further psychedelic experiences. It wouldn't be until the turn of the millennium that he began writing music and assembling bands, some of which are still active today.

Listing all of Potočnjak's projects is a herculean task. The whims and fancies of his creative spirit are what keep the catalogue endlessly expanding. But his most notable outings include Seven That Spells (a psych rock delight) that formed in 2003, Jastreb (doom and drone in full supply), and Otrovna Kristina, which he's cited as a "stadium bar band" according to Bear Stone Festival organiser and founder Marin Lalić, and the act he'll be playing with at this year's iteration.

Amassing an internal dialogue of genres as he grew older, from Primus and his Texas years, to Japanese noise-psych disruptor Hanatarsh, and 20th-century minimalist composers like Terry Riley, the result is an entirely singular body of work.

"He's a guy who is completely into his core beliefs of what a band should be, of what a scene should be, and what you should invest personally, how you should dedicate yourself to a band," Lalić offers. "And he has kept those core beliefs throughout his career from different bands of different styles. No two bands are the same, but you can feel that artistic spine of his inside each of them."

Potočnjak has been involved in almost every iteration of Bear Stone Festival, a unique event dedicated to Psychedelic, Desert, and Stoner Rock. "Sometimes I even make a project just to go there, I won't lie to you," he chortles. It's a space that, luscious landscape aside, he believes delves into the same elements of music that first made him fall in love with it. "The most important thing is he gives a chance to the kids to play, all these Croatian bands, horrible or good ones."

For Potočnjak, who's of a generation raised in the late 80s/early 90s, when music was at its apex before the advent of major labels swallowing all and sundry and spitting them out on the internet, it was the tangible aspect of music that swept them away.

"We got hooked by music, by seeing something and feeling something," he remembers. "This is the only way. Today, most people listen to the music over Bluetooth and over phones so you don't get that emotion, and also the live shows have become quite stale…no, actually, I'm talking bullshit," he says abruptly correcting himself. "I'm completely detached from the new generation."

He's of the school of thought that seeing bands physically is where inspiration as a young person can strike hardest. You're supposed to go to shows in dingy, dive clubs, feel the rhythms assault your body, the crunching sounds force their way into your eardrums, and to be swept away in the tsunami, "and then you try to copy it, but in a bad way."

Bands are made when they indulge this awful interpretation of their catalysts. "If you're not a quitter, if you continue to polish that badness, you actually have your own style," which is where the gold lies. "The better you get at emulating somebody, the more you lose yourself. That's the entire philosophy"

This storied creative existence of his is entering its twilight, which Potočnjak is more than happy with. After 20-plus years of touring, he's taking a back seat. Since 2020, he's only been playing shows as he sees fit. "If you want to live from music, I think it's hell, actually, especially after 2015, everything went downhill. I would have to play 200 shows a year and become this broken husk of a man, and for nothing."

He sagely says he's at peace with himself, between drags on his joint he blows into the space around him. "I have zero bitterness. I have zero need for fame or money," he smiles.

He freely invests his resources into what he wants to do. Recently, that has included a solo drone project called It's Always The Motherfuckers With No Magic That Tell You What To Do With Yours and a jarring, static-soaked cacophony entitled My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Experimental Band. Potočnjak has discovered what most older than he often fail to realise, a self-awareness and serenity. All of this plays into his self-fulfilling prophecy of uploading into the internet ether. "I just put it on Bandcamp and forget about it – let's move it into oblivion," he shrugs.

"I have zero aspiration to be remembered. When I disappear, it's okay that everything goes away with me and nobody mentions my name or whatever I did," he continues. "It's liberating, because you only live now. You're not bitter about the past, and you don't have fear of the future."

He rates his journey as a "six or seven" out of ten. He recognises he's achieved a serenity that comes with not aspiring beyond a basic level of means. "I was never poor. I'm not doing financially extremely well because I'm fucking lazy, but I'm not blaming the country for it. I'm not blaming the immigrants for it. I'm not blaming the States for it. I'm blaming myself. I decided to live this way."

And while most find creative stagnation as they age, Potočnjak keeps cruising in his lane, finding new avenues to explore with little care for what end they may find. It's part of the magic of life. That physical reaction to something that inspires you. Or the sound of a beat-up amp stack cranked to high heaven in a practice room in the depths of an industrial estate.