Walking around Warsaw has an uncanniness unique among European cities. Its very architecture creates a sort of illusion; after the city’s old town burned to the ground in World War II, its citizens came together to reconstruct many of its historic sites, even reusing rubble from buildings that had been lost. Paintings by the Italian landscape artist Bernardo Bellotto were used as a reference point, his use of camera obscura offering highly detailed depictions of structures that had been reduced to ash. But this same method resulted in slight inaccuracies, causing dissonance for those who remember the city as it actually stood before the war. Seeing these centuries-old buildings constructed from memory in person, one encounters a strange sensation: Is this really how it felt to stand next to, say, the city’s Royal Castle when its paint was still fresh? Or is this closer to a reimagining of that feeling?
Staś Czekalski’s debut likewise sees Warsaw through a surreally half-simulated lens. Recorded upon moving to the city from Poznań, the album documents the Polish composer’s explorations of Warsaw, uncovering new wonders around every corner. Czekalski’s music has a lullaby lilt—his marimbas playfully bob up and down like tadpoles, while dinky MIDI guitars strum as if plucked from a daydream. Czekalski colors his music with a similar restrained touch as Mondoj labelmates Piotr Kurek and G.S. Sultan, calling to mind the meditative grooves of Andras Fox crossed with Kate NV’s silly-brained exercises. Gently carving sparse shapes from silence, Czekalski lets each sound bounce off the others like floating objects in an old desktop screensaver.
Przygody translates to “Adventures” in Polish, and Czekalski imbues his music with this wide-eyed sense of searching, fixating over every small sound like a child turning over pebbles. On “Pogoda ducha,” he jams out on a simple pizzicato motif, layering one click-clocking woodblock after another over its delightfully cartoonish echo. Czekalski relishes in the smooth surfaces of his MIDI instruments, whether it’s the nylon spa guitars that waft through “Koniec lata,” or the Casio-like keys of “Dim Lounge,” which putter along over amateur drum machines straight from the GameCube era of Animal Crossing. The further the album goes along, the greater the empty space becomes: the pan pipes of “Mini Farmer” and “Muzeum Ewolucji” seem to call out into silence, their unnaturally breathy tone taking on an absurd psychedelic tinge.
Though Przygody doesn’t exactly fit in the new-age bin, Czekalski’s approach to texture doesn’t feel far off from the pitch-shifting wooziness of modern zoners like Cole Pulice and Lynn Avery. His toylike sounds play almost like an heir to the Mark Mothersbaugh school of electronic whimsy (the arpeggiating synthesizers of “Pogoda ducha” and “Zamek” wouldn’t sound out of place on the Rugrats soundtrack). At points, Przygody can become comfy to the point of sameness—its biggest shakeup comes on the distorted “zegarek,” whose looped bongo groove and warping synth samples disrupt the album’s cutesy calm. In moments like these when Czekalski journeys deeper into his own chintzy sonics, he uncovers a peculiar resonance within their artifice.
