Review of Let’s Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow [12k1055]

Boomkat (UK)

After establishing his considerable talent on Room40 with the two albums Painting Sky Together and Summer Feelings, Polish electronic composer Tomasz Bednarczyk arrives at 12k with this wonderful new release. Recent entries into the 12k discography have made heavy use of conventional instrumentation – the Pillowdiver and Seaworthy releases taking guitar compositions as their starting point. Bednarczyk’s new outing follows suit to some extent, utilising guitar and piano over the course of its ten tracks, but in this instance the instruments are far more deeply encoded within the Pole’s electroacoustic soundworld. Stylistically you might pick up on influences from the likes of Stephan Mathieu, Tim Hecker and Janek Schaefer as the album unfolds; Bednarczyk pieces together electronically modified tones, environmental recordings and the kind of sonic artifacts you’d associate with the recording and playback processes (vinyl crackle, glitches etc) resulting in some spine-tinglingly effective moments. After a first half dominated by strident, often very crystalline electroacoustic threads, the album reaches a watershed at “The Sketch”, which features piano by Triosk’s Adrian Klumpes and field recording by Sawako. The previously very outward-looking sonic landscape becomes introspective, embracing the sleepy grandeur of “Kyoto” and the somnolent whirring of “Little Spring” before arriving at the album’s final destination, “Night”. This last piece is another crackle-laden composition, this time calling upon a slow and wistful bass melody that loops its way towards a well-earned full-stop. Once its forty-three minutes are up, Let’s Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow has proven itself to be an uncommonly well-rounded album, filled with ebullient micro-melodies and soulful textural exchanges – it’s up there with the very best of 12k’s releases in 2009. Although still very young, Bednarczyk has added to his reputation considerably with this brilliant disc.

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