Reviews

Anti Gravity Bunny

Goddamn, I wish I heard Out Of Forgetting last year. Not just for my Top 10 list or anything, I just mean it’s been out since July and it’s a fucking tragedy that a half year has gone by while this drone magnifique sat on the sidelines waiting to be devoured by me. That is 6 months of my life wasted. 

Szymon Kaliski is an incredible soundcrafter from Poland. I normally shy away from the name dropping comparison thing, but Kaliski totally deserves this one. He takes pieces from all the greats, lots of vintage Jeckian crackle, subtle glitches like Hecker, some Basinski melancholy, and Deupree style processed minimalism, all while not sounding too much like any one of them. 

The textures & tones on this record are unbelievably deep, frozen blue drones stacked with fluttering glitched piano like flurries in the drift, the most delicate static slowly sifting through ice cracks, smooth white sheets of bliss warped with warmth, dusty resonance topped in timeless grit. The sounds are pure, they’re beautiful, and everything about them is a subtle affirmation of what contemporary drone is all about. This is what the rest should be striving for. 

Out Of Forgetting is only a half hour long, but that means it’s not bloated with excess or 20 minute meditation exercises. Kaliski didn’t overdo it, but he also didn’t wimp out and drop an EP, he trimmed out the fat and made every second count, resulting in a record of precisely the proper length. If he never released another album, he would still make it into my all time list of top droners. Forgetting is unwaveringly unforgettable (sorry) and absolutely stunning.

Tome To The Weather Machine

I'm wearing out my ambient descriptors… this year has just been so incredibly consistent and unrelenting within this style of music, I just don't know how many more times I can use the word "swathe" or "drone." In fact, I think I've actually listened to and reviewed so much ambient music, I've maybe fallen into the trap of losing sight of its function: Have a quiet moment. Allow the music to fill that quiet. Allow the music to take you somewhere. Relax. Focus your mind. Have a sip of coffee. Close your eyes. Breathe…

As a matter of turn, the young Polish composer Szymon Kaliski has done a lot of this work for you up front. The cover on the record shows a single cup of Joe and an unlit cigarette, just waiting for you to have a session with its humbling beauty. Kaliski weaves together wavering, breathing long tones with subtly plunked piano keys into seven steadied, tempered, and patient works that remain short enough to resist trying your own patience. In fact, sometimes the pieces don't feel long enough as the mix is quickly stifled with not-so-subtle turns of the volume knob, almost showing Kaliski's cards. But the substance between the opening moments of each track and their final evaporations ebbs and flows very nicely, thrumming with gentle volume and stereo shifts to give your brain a relaxing massage. And Kaliski's approach to form is refreshing, too—a track like "In Twelve Scenes" comes as an especially unique treat with a plucked string that measures the piece out among spoken world samples that sound lifted from an old film, almost aggressively emphasizing the notion of time that many ambient artists purposefully disguise or negate. 

The entire album is laced with small micro-pops that can have the undesired effect of distracting you from the listening space Kaliski's worked so diligently to present. I'm not sure if this was intentionally done as part of his own method, or if it's a limitation of the material conditions of creating the music. On the one hand, it gives the music a cracked quality, drying the sound out as smoldering charcoals at the base of a bonfire. On the other hand, I desperately want the music as a whole to be as smooth, wet and lush as the gorgeous tones beneath it all. Still, Kaliski's got exactly the right ideas here, letting representations of memories come out fractured and broken, and his well-rounded style definitely places him among some of the genre's heaviest hitters. "As Unimportant" is a near dead-ringer for Tim Hecker's earlier material, conjuring a wealth of varied electronically generated tones and working them into breath-taking swoops that travel by like wind atop a high green pasture. And the piano strokes, that really stick out like a sore thumb (in a great way, by the way), keep the music grounded and accessible. Not much is known about this young fellow yet, but you can check out this and more by visiting his Soundcloud page, and it appears the record is readily available. If Out of Forgetting tells us anything, it's that Kaliski's on the brink of making a serious name for himself in the rapidly growing world of ambient composers.

Fluid Radio

Hailing from a small town which neighbours Poznan, Poland, Szymon Kaliski works with acoustic instruments and field recordings to give rise to his vision of minimalist music with audio which is imperfect by design… Out of Forgetting begins with a poignant piano track, slow-paced and deliberate. The phrases and melodies are perfectly timed, every note is of paramount importance. Crackle and static are used tastefully and add texture to the recordings. Consecutive numbers follow a similar pattern, evolving and exploring with a loose style which meanders gently, compelling the listeners rapt attention. Drones, piano and snatches of field recordings take turns in leading each piece. Meticulously crafted over long winter nights, Out of Forgetting feels intimate and forlorn. Though he wears his influences on his sleeve, Kaliski proves to be a talented composer who’s work can stand alongside other contemporary artists of the genre such as Library Tapes and Machinefabriek, whom he echos in style. The refrains performed are minimalist, sometimes to the point of simplicity but Kaliski possesses that rare touch of being able to make what may be humble parts if unaccompanied add up to a complex and moving whole. There’s a feeling of restrained passion, each note holds a weight behind it and when snippets of conversation and field recordings take centre stage, it sounds natural and unhurried, not just on afterthought. A promising solo debut, Kaliski has emerged onto the experimental music scene and one gets the sense that he will be around for some time to come. – Review by Adam Williams

Lend Me Your Ears

Imperfect by design. That’s what Out of Forgetting is. Linking his spoilt poesis to a theme of ‘destroyed memories’, Szymon Kaliski composes by blending ‘badly played’ (his words) instruments and field recordings in pieces providing for both planned and improvised musical gestures. The young man from Poznań brings to his debut - on Audiobulb man David Newman’s digital-only label, Audiomoves – a kind of homespun Mitteleuropa take on 12k-style post-digital electro-acoustic minimalism, cloaked in crackle and sad wisps of piano pathos.

In seven brief well-tempered works woven of tremulous tones, respiring sustains, and piano plonk, this minimal mover of sound captures and releases his timbres, gently maltreated, commingling aleatory forays into introspective vignettes. Although minimalist in spirit, Out Of Forgetting does not want for sonorities, with various ebb and flow undercurrents in dark waters, gently thrumming, micro-pocked and crisped with crackle like a softly smouldering fire, and various fractured sound tokens of memory slippage. The monochrome cover shot of a cup, ashtray and unlit cigarette, with lugubrious titles compound a certain just-so flatness of musical habitus; motifs are almost deliberately simplistic, as if wanting to be honest and eschew all pretentious conceit. There’s a feeling of restraint and withholding, as if each gesture carried a small cargo of repressed emotion behind them. 

"A point to" emerges in a field of static and a lugubrious two-chord piano motif, that gets increasingly (ill-) treated, somewhat in the style of Matthew Cooper/Eluvium’s Concert Silence. "As Unimportant" brings forth swathes of tone colours and choreographs them into arcs and dives with maybe a ghostly familiar of early Tim Hecker attending. "Or Delicate" has piano droplets falling in a fog of drones in a sad simple sequence that, Basinski-esque, finds fellow-feeling between abstraction and intimacy.

"Of Decay" is initially so perfectly textured it feels like Stephan Mathieu may have passed close by – that is until some distracted mix-fidgeting comes late in the day to mar the event. "In Twelve Scenes" comes with a reverb-doused plucked string resonance that forms the spine of the piece around which spiral snatches of speech and silence sprinkled with interference. “For Patterns” ruminates over doleful piano bleeding into reverb/delay-doused drones. 

Though this is Kaliski’s first release, it shows an ability to make modest parts amount to more than their sum, proving himself fit to be filed next to others of a similar stripe. A propos of which, you can find a mix of Szymon-selected tracks at the estimable play my tape.

Leonard's Lair

Poland’s Szymon Kaliski might wish to choose a more attractive press release next time around. The prospect of “lingering drones from badly played acoustic instruments and field recordings” is unlikely to get fans of ambient music salivating. Yet this is an often inspired release whose wintry charms are ultimately very persuasive. 

‘A Point To’ quietly emerges in a field of static and sombre piano and is the perfect scene setter for this subtly unsettling album. Whereas ‘As Unimportant’ is all about the drone and frosty soundscapes, ‘Or Delicate’ revolves around a sad and simple sequence of piano keys. Despite being interspersed with spoken word, ‘In Twelve Scenes’ recalls the languid, reverb heavy guitar work of Yellow6 but it’s the last track – the lengthy ‘To Specific Place’ – which lingers longest in the memory as every shift in note sends a chill down the spine. Static and drone don’t always form the basis for compelling music but Kaliski ensures there’s an undercurrent of dark emotions running through each track. In short, if this is his “badly played” stuff, it would be marvellous to hear him when he’s on form.

Savaran Music and Sound

Somehow I managed to miss this debut release on Audiomoves, the digital download offshoot of the Sheffield based Audiobulb label, where there have been a string of excellent releases lately by artists working in the experimental and minimalist music genres using field recorded sounds and sound processing techniques.

Szymon Kaliski is a young musician producing music from his home near Poznan in Poland. He composes track elements using loops of acoustic material blended with field recordings captured in his local environment and mixes the results using Ableton Live and Max4live. He is refreshingly honest about the fact that many tracks result from happy mistakes that produce interesting material (a technique I thoroughly subscribe to :) )

The album Out of Forgetting was made during the long Winter of 2009 and the quiet reflective time that harsh Winters seem to provide has certainly triggered some excellent soundcrafting from Szymon. Sparse piano chords and notes treated with plenty of spacious reverb and delay are accompanied by trembling background drones and ever so subtle field recorded sounds of people talking, perhaps someone writing on paper, microphone noise and low washes of white noise, wind, or the sea. Many tracks are also accompanied by the now familiar and dreaded vinyl crackle or static noise which I am really not a great fan of, as many of you will know by reading my past reviews. With the exception of the second track, As Unimportant, where the crackle is really quite intrusive, it is fair to say that the technique is mercifully used with care throughout and never really dominates the mix. 

Overall this album has a gentle melancholy atmosphere conjured up by subtle shifting textures. It is an accomplished debut which manages to find its own place in this crowded genre without pushing the boundaries too far this time round. Szymon clearly has a lot of hidden potential to create something really unique and special in his future releases and I look forward to hearing how his musical output develops over the next year.