Dwutysięczny: The Sonic Silkworm
Published August, 2013
by Easterndaze
Dwutysięczny, a Polish quartet shrouded in mystery, is releasing its first album before the end of August via Sangoplasmo Records.
I asked one of the members, for the time being identified as RD, if that enigmatic aura surrounding the quartet was created consciously from the beginning:
“Yes, but it was the result of our awareness that people tend to take hints from the names of involved musicians before even listening to the music. We agreed that we would let the music speak on its own. It was important for us that, at least at the beginning, we won’t be seen from the angle of our previous works and bands that we were or are in. Names often create contexts which are often hard to get rid of. We wanted to have a somewhat purer initial situation.”
[First song revealed from the album, the title roughly translates as „As you wander on a foothill, the mystery deepens”]
The album title means “Silkworm” and the band itself is named after the year 2000, when this unusual journey trough a silk road begun. It was then that BK, on his musical route, had got to know the solo or collective recordings by the musicians he invited later on to form this quartet. More than ten years had passed since when he decided to write to RD, JM and WK asking for their trust and a gift of a few minutes of sounds (loops, forgotten or discarded raw materials). In this way a sample library, which was a groundwork for the record, had been created. Each of the musicians sent his ideas, fragments or almost-ready tracks for further development. After a while the editing process of careful weaving was started and the sounds were chopped, smoothed, rotated, squeezed…
Here is what BK said about composing process:
“I had been sending out the pieces as I was putting them together, so the others could have their say, sometimes l listened to the suggestions, sometimes not so much and there was a lot of cut and paste and again and again… My favorite times for creating are late evenings or very early mornings and I reckon that in this particular case one can hear half-shadows casted by those times of day. “
Were the sounds you received edited a lot?
“I hadn’t suggested any leitmotif and so the guys gave me different pieces of this jigsaw puzzle. As it happens, in the end, WK’s instrument sounds like a prepared clarinet and what JM had played on a clarinet became percussive. But there are few tracks left intact.”
Later on the musicians recorded some additional material, mostly on synthesizer. The whole thing was edited by RD and mastered by Michał Kupicz.
How does this combination work? Judge for yourself.
[“The Lady of Silkworms” the piece which trails as a silkworm net – gracefully and smoothly]