Lech Nienartowicz – Wzdłuż Pasma

Kosmodrone

Unfolding like a landscape seen and heard through thick fog before sunrise, Lech Nienartowicz‘s Wzdłuż Pasma emerges fuzzy and uncertain, never quite able to be pinned down and as hard to define as the shapes of the digitally smudged and smeared found objects and images that adorn the cover.

Electro-acoustic tones and trails unfold with a gentle insistence, undefined or approximate as they might be to the sounds of nature and electronics, whether applied to those sources or of their own devising. The glitching and clanking on “Północne Słupy” (“North Poles”) soon become indistinguishable, while the cowbells here are apparently real rather than synthesised, though mired in effects as much as the next sound. It may be defined as an ambient journey, one that flickers along software-processed pathways and plucky FM-sounding basslines, the distinction between analogue and digital left to the listener to bother with making, should they so care to do.

Which is not to say that tonality is avoided; far from it, “Nowe Ślady” in particular being possessed of a luxuriantly smooth rolling rhythm that steps in the faux-woodblock tones of synthetic percussion as the wind blows its processed way from the background to the fore, lifting up in ethereal waves flecked with echo-trail swarms of gathering dusty somnolence. There’s something almost inevitably Coilish about this combination of nature and unnatural sounds, their blending together alchemical and decidely bent toward contemplation and perhaps ritual for those so inclined.

Others (or listeners at other junctures) can take pleasure in the deft constructions that Wzdłuż Pasma offers, peeking into the eye of a sampled seagull or wavering along to the sting-like drones as the delays whirl in intensity all around. “Dwa Kamienie” (“Two Stones”) is the best of all for this, brought to a level of concentrated flotation tank-friendly immersive listening, droning then stuttering and clanking across the best part of half an hour’s excursions into the eclectic unconscious that lets the musique concrète flow. The finale comes rising up in ear-bending runs of circular discordance that evolve into the outer reaches of resurgent klang and crinkle, insistent shimmer and disturbed drowsiness, completing a finely atmospheric album that deserves of deep listening.

-Antron S Meister-