Paweł Kulczyński / Czarny Latawiec – Split
Published May, 2014
by Easterndaze
The split between two of Poland’s leading electronicians appears on a slightly lesser renowned, but nonetheless noteworthy imprint – compared the Sangoplasmo or Mik Musik – called simply BDTA after its owner Michal Biedota. Paweł Kulczyński, better known under his nom de plume Wilhelm Bras, has mastered his modular synth, tweaking and twisting them to get an undiluted analogue extract building and adding new sounds and layers, usually ending in a technoid rhythmachinism. The recording on this split was taken at the Canti Illuminati festival, an emerging, Wroclaw-based independent event happening roughly quarterly.
“It’s kind of work in progress snapshot as I’m trying to shape the territory of my interest, not an easy job, since there’s a lot of low quality ‘experimental’ music around, quite possibly mine included,” he says. “Each time it is really different, as I’m shaping the set freely. My initial hope was to make a dialogue with some drony field recordings I made in the country side last summer, including noisy harvesters’ sound bounced back from the hills, huge swarms of birds, close-up recs of bees foraging on the big pile of rotting fruits etc.”
The other side of the release is in command of Czarny Latawiec, a very interesting, and so far underrated Polish producers, whose mangled chopped-and-screwed offerings have previously appeared on Mik Musik (more about it here). Compared to the high octane stuff we have been used to from him, his Pradziady is dark and sinister, paranoid in a subtle way, as the austere slabs of piano emerge, accompanied by male samples, building up slowly and mercilessly.
Both of the tracks are experimental in a BBC Radiophonic Workshop kind of way, there is something old-school and timeless at the same time in this release – especially Latawiec’s part, conjuring images of mad sound scientists experimenting with different sonic ventures in their time-forgotten studio/lab, a genuine no-frills sound adventure