Wsie

Published July, 2015
by Easterndaze

Bartosz Zaskórski is a Polish illustrator and occasional musician. According to his own words, he likes to draw “ trash-like things the most”. This rough and tumble aesthetic also translates into his noise driven musical project Mchy i porosty. Wsie is his project and also self-titled album, which has recently appeared on the BDTA label. “Wsie is a series of radio dramas about villages isolated from the rest of the world. Each village has a distinct character, which is due to obsessions over certain actions: inhabitants of one village build cathouses everywhere, inhabitants of another spend an entire winter at the bottom of a frozen lake, and when winter ends, they emerge and return to cooking steamed beans,” he says. 

Villages, which used to be thriving communal habitats during communism, have now turned into ghostly shells, marked by aging population and unemployment in the region. Wsie’s villages have all the ailings of 21st century villages, immersed in various neuroses – scared of loneliness, scared of the internet or wanting to leave, but not being able to. The stories of each of these villages – or village archetypes – are told by the deadpan narrator in Polish. Each village a sort of Trieresque Dogville. “Some of the villages may seem dark or sinister, each has a different character. I’m not particularly fond of the term “surrealism”, but I think it suits this project well. The narrator is an invisible researcher, he doesn’t interact with the subject of his research, but merely describes what he observes.”

The sonics are pervasive, created from samples and made on analogue equipment. As the author says, villages are “best location for telling strange stories” and strange albums, for that matter.