Grzegorz Bojanek - "Remaining Sounds" (a CD by Dynamophone.com)

[bojanix]

Hi there,

Here is my new release "Remaining Sounds", published by a California based label Dynamophone http://dynamophone.com/

You can get the Download and a CD here:
http://dynamophone.bandcamp.com/album/remaining-sounds

Soon a nice limited edition with the set of postcards wrapped in the tape will be released.


The first review by Richard Allen from A Closer Listen: http://acloserlisten.com/2012/08/14/grzegorz-bojanek-remaining-sounds/

A short info how the album was composed:

In 2010 when I returned home from the Shanghai Biennale where I performed with Zen Lu music to the Isaac Julien's film "Better Life", using different instruments, sometimes DIY boxes and contact microphones I realised that I don't want to use any synthesizers or plugins to create my music. I thought that all soundscapes can be created out of the remains of the sounds which you can hear using the reverbs and delays. I also thought that I can play all sounds myself, or I can use field recordings and try to find all that remaining sounds.

This was the basic idea hidden behing the project called "Remaining Sounds". I started each track with just one sound, and sometimes this sound was transformed so many times, that almost the whole track was made of it. Sometimes I started adding different sounds, to get more space. I also recorded many of the tracks into a tape, and than back into the computer to get the characteristic analogue hiss, I simply love.

I love playing traditional instruments, so I recorded many guitar loops and some piano sounds. I things which surrounded me became the source of sound recorded in many different ways.

The first sketch of the album was ready just after a few weeks. Later I started changing things and recording more tracks. When the album was almost ready I experienced a hard rive failure and lost many tracks. Than I recorded a lot of music using only Tascam 4-track taprecorder. Some of the loops created during that session were also added to the final version of the album.

Although some of the tracks sound more or less experimental, I implemented some melodies into the cpomositions. I must say, that I am a big fan of harmony and nice melodies, and no matter how hard I try to get rid of them, they simply slip into my tracks and became an integral part of the music.

The whole album was than sent to my friend Krzysztof Orluk who uses mostly analogue toys in the mastering process. One of them is the prototype tube saturator developed by a Polish engineer Andrzej Starzyk, who later incorporated it into his Looptrotter Monster Compressor.

[bojanix]

Review: A Closer Listen by Richard Allen

The title of Grzegorz Bojanek‘s latest effort implies sorting, attrition, deterioration.  At one time, more sounds – perhaps all sounds – existed.  Now, only these remain.  In the process of composing, Bojanek distilled a batch of possibilities, settling on these distinctive sources.  By eliminating the banal, the artist creates an aural allure.  Take for example the opening (title) track, which incorporates bass, static and electronic samples, mixing them with something that sounds like a NASA transmission.  No guitar, no piano, no drum – and yet a keen and discernible structure.  The final minutes are filled with chains and soft traffic.  Part Two (two tracks later) is noticeably busier.  The static field has become a cloud, and a bell tolls through the unearthly gloom.  As the mood darkens, the perspective changes; the opening part now seems but a prelude.

These pieces are separated by a woodwind piece; a bass clarinet stands between the halves like a referee at a football match.  A wandering pulse develops as the piece progresses, establishing a sonic bulkhead.  But in Track Four, breath becomes the primary instrument: drifting, echoing, looping, and finally diving into a pool of scattered, stuttered woodwind notes.  This variety continues throughout the album, which invites the organic and the processed to the same reception, but never forces them to make small talk.  Instead, they flirt around the edges of polite conversation, dropping hints that perhaps they should slip outside for a more private tete-a-tete.

If all music sounded like all other music (as it often seems on popular radio), we wouldn’t want to write about it.  We need this sort of experimentation – brave, yet accessible – to retain our interest.  It’s difficult to be different without losing a shot at mass appeal, but Bojanek walks this tightrope well.  Remaining Sounds is never in danger of alienating.  Instead, the album makes one wonder why a wide variety of sounds is often difficult to find.  Bojanek may choose the sounds left behind when all others have been taken, but this “second tier” of instruments comes across as more hungry and earnest as the first, and the album more distinctive than the majority of its peers.

http://acloserlisten.com/2012/08/14/grzegorz-bojanek-remaining-sounds/

[bojanix]

Get the previous album by Grzegorz Bojanek
“Live in May”

50% OFF

BandCamp password: “bojaneklive”

http://bojanek.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-may

[bojanix]

Review: IGLOO MAGAZINE

http://igloomag.com/reviews/grzegorz-bojanek-remaining-sounds-dynamophone

Active, organic ingredients merge and submerge themselves and new soundscapes—which include bass, clangs and flutter—are constantly shifting, almost invisibly around layers of dust and molten electrical fog.

Clicks, crackles, clips, found sounds, loose tonal activity, buzzing, petrified electro-acoustics, musique concrète, prepared and unprepared electronics, static hissing and warmth—this only begins to describe Etalabel operator Grzegorz Bojanek‘s Remaining Sounds. Tagged as a “collection of analog-experiments with breath, woodwinds, bass and microscopic found sounds;” Dynamophone were able to harness these subtle objects of audio extracts and enable them to meander in various directions. Active, organic ingredients merge and submerge themselves and new soundscapes—which include bass, clangs and flutter—are constantly shifting, almost invisibly around layers of dust and molten electrical fog. Migrating these experimental objects—as Dynamophone puts it—keeps Remaining Sounds in a state of flux. The new old is an adequate description which highlights Grzegorz Bojanek’s skills as he delivers classic instrumentation morphed into a digitized landscape. All the while, an organic sheen is ever present throughout the compositions that are well worth sitting back to and absorbing.

[bojanix]

Just a different track for you to download and enjoy... :-)

http://soundcloud.com/bojanix/when-our-past

[bojanix]

Stephen Fruitman reviews "Remaining Sounds"

http://avantmusicnews.com/2012/09/15/amn-reviews-grzegorz-bojanek-remaining-sounds-dynamophone-records/

On “Remaining Sounds”, Grzegorz Bojanek toys with the idea of making music out of what music leaves behind. Starting each acoustic experiment with a single source, like the two notes being urged reluctantly from a throat of a clarient, he massages it, scrubs it with vinyl pumice, and bathes some of the results in reverb while others are left to hang dry and exposed.

The sum-total is a portfolio of complimentary colours, the common theme of combining contrasts readily apparent and easy to access, the aesthetic experience warm indeed, all cozily embedded in tape hiss off an old Sony reel-to-reel. In its best moments, a kind of pure, textural bliss is achieved. At other times, that bliss is undermined by fiddling around with small, kitchen-sink sounds in the background, or approaching the sound source too literally, as the single string plucked on “Rewind” threatens to break out into a carillon of bells, breaking the spell. The recourse to one particular sound source is just distressing, when human breath is hard to catch on the track which bears roughly that name; the addition of short-circuiting electronics only helps to make it sound more like torture than nurture.

However, a truly happy marriage of melody and phonography is achieved on “Remaining Motionless”, whose gentle guitar ruminations echo softly through a Zen garden of flagstones, crickets and rain just a few inches away, constructed, it eventually becomes apparent, out of vinyl run-on.

[bojanix]

Frans (from Vital Weekly) has interesting comparisons for people who like 12k...

What is strange, that back in 2010 when I was composing most parts of the album, I wasn't a big fan of 12k. Definitely not as big as I am now...

http://www.vitalweekly.net/859.html

GRZEGORZ BOJANEK - REMAINING SOUNDS (www.dynamophone.com)

Besides running the Eta Label, Grzegorz Bojanek is also active as a musician with a strong love for field recordings, electro-acoustic sounds and computer treatments there of. The nine pieces on this album use all of this. Piano sounds, guitar, field recordings, reel-to-reel loops, and all of these single sound events are expanded into what we hear on this release. If I understand the liner notes on the cover right, he also recorded some of the pieces on a four track cassette recorder (also a great plus in my book). The overall mood here is set to 'atmospheric' and 'dark': this is pure, textbook glitch like music, warm, sustaining, crackling, with a fair amount of guitar sounds to remain a musical sense. Bojanek does a really fine job here, I must say. There is a great organic flow to the music, calm, tranquil, and also darker/more grey. Having said that, I must also say that as such I didn't hear something that I haven't heard before in this particular branch of music (think releases on 12K, if you have no clue what I am talking about), and that's perhaps the downside of things here; it lacks originality. Should you not care for that (and be honest: why should you?), and should you be on the look-out for more music alike 12K, then this album won't let you down, one bit. (FdV)

[bojanix]

It's a pity that my album "Remaining Sounds" didn't get much of attention (although it has had some really good reviews). Please tell me, if you like it, or not - what is good, what is bad... I'm really confused.

I am also sure that you all should love it cause you all know that BROKEN HEROES NEVER DRINK COLA!!

Maybe you gonna like it. If yes, I would be grateful if you could SUPPORT!

http://bojanek.bandcamp.com/album/remaining-sounds

[bojanix]

Yes, it's my birthday today (8th May). So if you want to make ma a present (and one for yourself at the same time), just get one of my ambient albums here:

http://bojanek.bandcamp.com/