Poland – Weirdo Shrine

6 July 20235 July 2023

Review + Q&A: Ampacity – IV (2023, Piranha Music)

This insignificant little shrine weirdo had never heard of Polish instrumental space rockers Ampacity before, and I am ashamed to admit it because it turns out they have been spreading their amazing keyboard laced take on the genre for ten years now and this aptly titled album IV is their fourth full length effort already. Just for the record if you, like me, were not in this loop: we have been missing out people!

On this new album Ampacity shines by being just a but tighter, a bit more experienced, and generally just better than most of their instrumental colleagues these days. They have been at this trade for ten years, and their full grown chops show it. IV is an album you wish would just continue for days swaddling you with a blanket of keyboards, locking your head in a tight bass groove, and then picking you up on a journey through the back of your own mind and back.

They make it sound so easy too. Like it is nothing to them to put these space grooves together so incredibly tight and machine like. Together with the clean and sturdy production this whole package could easily also transcend genre boundaries and do well -for instance- at a prog rock festival or any open minded stage that generally welcomes musical craftsmanship and technical prowess.

So he’s to the next ten years Ampacity! Glad to have hopped on in time to still be part of the journey.

How are you? How was the pandemic period for Ampacity?

We’re doing very well, thank you. We’ve been active between 2013 and 2017 and got back to the business in 2022 so for the most intense part of Covid we weren’t around as a band. On a personal level I think it was a really intense period that allowed us to take a step back from regular life. I think that kind of detachment from regular stuff sparked the idea to go back to playing together.

Can you introduce the band, and how did you meet, etc, ?

Three out of five of us played together in a stoner/grunge band Broken Betty. At some point in early 2012 they were invited to play some Hawkwind covers at a “Spacefest ” which was a really cool spacerock/shoegaze festival going on for a decade in Gdańsk. Initial idea was to start with jamming in a larger ensemble and then prepare some good old classic covers. Jamming part was really good and we’ve decided to ditch the idea of playing covers and start a new band with original songs.

What can you tell me about your musical backgrounds?

Our backgrounds differ a lot and I think what is a common ground for all of us are Classics such as Pink Floyd, Bowie, Stooges and such and the stoner rock scene. Another thing that I believe is a common inspiration for us is Krautrock.

What does a regular day in your lives look like?

We all have day jobs and kids so describing a regular day for each one of us could make a fairly boring book 🙂 Aside from that we are trying to make as much music as possible so I would say balancing those areas is what makes that interesting.

What is the best thing about IV?

The best thing about this record is that we’ve been able to continue some unfinished business. Our first album was very simple, natural and laid back. Ever since we were struggling to recreate that vibe but somehow couldn’t get into the right frame of mind. I think that IV is something that was made with a similar approach. Another thing is that I’m really happy about a balance between trippiness and some solid songs. I think we are not overplaying and we’re bringing something from both worlds.

Where do you live and what is the environment like for musicians like you?

We live in Trojmiasto, Poland (Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia). It’s a nice place on the seashore. We do have a really interesting, unique independent local scene. Musical environment around here is very diverse and inspiring. We have a strong tradition of improvised music which I think impacted us in a certain way.

Who are some contemporary musical heroes of yours?

There’s so many brilliant musicians that I don’t think I could name one particular person. I’m always looking for new music and currently my top 3 things I’m listening to are:
– Surprise Chef
– Peter Eldh
– Mischa Panfilov

Can you tell me about how you go about composing and recording songs?

This time around we’ve worked quite fast. Started with some sketches brought by our guitarist. We’ve spent several months jamming the initial ideas and refining them. After roughly 6 months we’ve booked a Vintage Records Studio in Porażyn. It’s a remote place with a brilliant vibe, great live room and everything a band can expect. We were recording live, in one room in order to have a more vibrant and organic sound. It took us 3 days to record the album along with guitar and keys/synths overdubs. Aside from our regular gear we’ve extensively used a Roland Space Echo. I think that using the tape delay was one of the details that gave the record a bit of a trippy vibe.

What are your immediate and long term future plans?

We are currently finishing the first run of concerts in Poland. We are also preparing for vinyl release which should be finalized around mid July. We’re playing several festivals in the summer and continue a Polish tour in the fall. We hope to play some shows in other European countries later that year. Once we’ve done that I think we’ll start making another record 🙂

What should the Weirdo Shrine reader do after reading this interview?

Check the album on the preferred platform and if you like it go to Piranha Music website and order some cool music and merch.

7 June 2023

Review + Q&A: The Howling Eye – List Do Borykan (2023, Interstellar Smoke Records/Galactic Smokehouse)

When you have been into this Weirdo Shrine of mine for a longer while, you know that we are all into this together. As the great and late Bill Hicks once said: “it is a choice between fear and love, if we choose love we can explore space together, both inner and outer, not a single individual excluded”. I sincerely believe in this statement, and I know The Howling Eye does too.

Just lay yourself down and put on List Do Borykan, first track Space Dwellers Episode 1 will do the rest. On the continuation of the album The Howling Eye will prove themselves to be a fun loving and versatile band, that loves to explore, rock out, space out, and have fun at the same time. The longer tracks like Brothers or the completely instrumental Caverns definitely open up new chapters of the galaxy to the listener, with its deeply spacey psych blues approach. The shorter tracks like Medival show a jumpier, shoutier side of the band, that you might even scream along on a festival field if only you knew how, because what language are they even singing?!

And there is of course the triptych called Space Dwellers, which returns for two more “episodes” to gradually turn your brain to mush by being weird and free (especially when shaking their bodies in the space disco of part 3!). In these moments of light heartedness and positivity the band nudges to contemporaries like King Gizzard and The Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, while at the same time never fully committing to any genre or style.

The Howling Eye explores space deeply, but keeps the journey light. It makes for a highly entertaining and versatile trip that interchanges the cerebral with the physical. If we ever colonise other planets together, I know a good soundtrack…

It is a good thing that I sought contact with The Howling Eye through the internet, because how on earth would a live interview take place when the members live all scattered over Europe? Poland is their home base though, from which they invent their plans to take over the world…I talked to Jan Chojnowski (guitars and synths) to find out more.

How are you? How was the pandemic period for you as a musician?

We’re fine! The pandemic fucked up our plans really bad, but we managed to get back on our feet. We were forced to take a semi hiatus of sorts because essentially we ended up living four different lifestyles in three different countries. Eventually, dealing with separation, grief and longing became one of the main themes of List Do Borykan.

Can you introduce yourself, how did you start your career, etc?

It all started in 2016, when Cebula (drums, vox), Miłosz (bass) and Jan (guitar, keys), three high school friends, embarked on a quest to find their own musical style, starting from slow and heavy psychedelia. Fast forward three years and we had absorbed a number of exotic influences, ranging from jazz and funk to post rock and garage rock. We were also joined by Johnny on percussions. With three albums released and a fair share of gigs played, we felt we were ready to start something new. We were to move to the UK and start gigging and writing a new album there. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, some of us had to return to Poland and the production of List Do Borykan stretched into (then seemingly) infinity. The reality of making an album remotely and living in different places started slowly seeping into the lyrics themselves, and so the final concept was born.

What can you tell me about your musical backgrounds?

Each of us comes from a different one. Jan was a blues player, Cebula was a punk and Miłosz was more of a grunge person. It took a bit of refinement and compromise, but ultimately we ended up playing heavy psych. This is how it was in the beginning, though. Nowadays each of us tries a number of different things. Miłosz, for example, plays bass in an indie pop band and Jan is working on some ambient stuff. We are always learning, so even theearly drafts and demos of List Do Borykan that we laid down in 2020 sound nothing like the final product.

What does a regular day in your lives look like?

Recently it’s mostly work and studying, trying to carve out as much time for music and our passions as we can. Also, it’s the festival season, so it means more work, but also more fun. We all aim to make a living out of music or audio jobs, but we’re not quite there yet.

What is the best thing about List Do Borykan?

The themes that make it relatable. We decided to make a concept album to tell a greater story that everyone can resonate with. Everyone has had these experiences, at least to some extent, whether is a miserable job for shitty pay with no perspectives for change (Medival), missing your friends and being unable to see them (Brothers), or struggling with self-expression in a world that kills genuine emotion and human interaction (Space Dwellers, Episode 2). We knew it’s all a bit preachy, so we decided to dial it up to 11 into a full-blown mystical cosmic saga.

What does the title mean, what does it stand for?

It’s a play on words in Polish which is tricky to translate. ‘Borykanie’ is a noun that means ‘struggling [with something]’, but it also sounds similar to words describing nations or peoples (Rzymianie = Romans, Mohikanie = Mohicans, etc.). So ‘List Do Borykan’ could be translated as ‘Epistle to the Borykans’, as it is a message to everyone who is facing the same struggles as we are and have been.

Where do you live and how does it affect your music?

Miłosz and Jan in Gdansk, Poland, Cebula in Hamburg, Germany, and Johnny in Spain. It makes touring a logistical nightmare. Moreover, by the time the recording started the songs from the album were still more like sketches, really. Some songs were just recently played for the first time since being recorded. We can only get so many rehearsals and it feels very different from playing stuff we wrote 6 years ago, but we manage. We have a lot of ideas to get the upcoming gigs as intense as possible, so buckle up!

Who are some contemporary musical heroes of yours?

King Gizzard. Every album they make is just so vibrant, diverse and unpredictable, yet it’s all solid and doesn’t stray into the gimmicky territory. All Them Witches know the best way to tell a story and set the mood. And man, Elder is just pure energy. Weedpecker and Causa Sui are excellent at stacking layers of psychedelic goodness. Also, Dixie Dave.

Can you tell me about how you went about composing and recording songs?

We jam. Like, a lot. We never bring finished songs to rehearsals. It usually starts with a single idea, like a riff or melody, and then we try and improvise the rest. There isn’t any rule or method, really. Sometimes there is some greater meaning behind the composition and sometimes it is just how the music flows. Once we know the vibe we are going for, then we work on the lyrics and details. All of us have education in sound engineering, so theprocess of writing and recording sort of merges into one. We record a lot by ourselves lately, List Do Borykan is, like, 80% home recorded, or something like that. We had one main session in 2020 when we recorded most of therhythm tracks, but the rest was just overdubbed at home. Before that, we would usually go to a studio for a couple of days and the relentless flow of time would make us comply and finish the album no matter what. Now we had no deadline, so the recording process just kept going. In the end, though, it gave us time to think about what we really wanted that album to be, so it was to our benefit.

What are your immediate and long term future plans?

Spreading our cosmic message across all channels and playing as many gigs as possible. We’re planning a tour by the end of 2023. Mostly Poland and neighboring countries (Germany, Czechia), but who knows, we’re open to anything. After that, publishing more stuff and touring more.

What should the Weirdo Shrine reader do after reading this interview?

Listen to the album! (Also, listen to more stuff from Galactic Smokehouse and Interstellar Smoke Records. Recent releases highly recommended.) Drink some water. Go for a walk. Check up on Your friends.

9 November 20228 November 2022

Review + Q&A: More Experience- Electric Laboratory of High Space Experience (vinyl release 2022, Sound Effect Records)

Birds are singing abundantly in a Polish forest near Lublin in the East of Poland. It is how this album by More Experience starts and ends, and where we find bandleader Piotr Dudzikowski musing about music, life, and the current affairs in his home country. Together with his band, his family, he has been perfectly re-creating the 60s atmosphere since the 1980s. And like their previous work, Electric Laboratory of High Space Experience sounds like some obscure and unknown album from that era that has been carefully unearthed, mixed, and remastered. It is nothing new under the sun, and that seems exactly the point.

Female and male voices interchange duties, a Hammond organ wails, and an electric guitar twirls and twitters. All the while it is like the 60s never ended, and echoes of Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Soft Machine, and Captain Beefheart reverberate all around. Sometimes rockin’ out, sometimes weirding up in smoke, always playing it from the heart. What more can you ask from a listening experience?

Of course we contacted Piotr, and asked him about his band, his life, and his passions. This is what he told us…

How are you? How has the pandemic period been for More Experience?

Well, I’m getting old, so I’m not strong enough to still be a psychedelic hippie warrior trying to celebrate the cosmos on stage. So actually I was under the ground in my recording studio and making music with great musicians just for ourselves and we had great fun without the witnesses.

Can you introduce the band, and how did you meet?

More Experience is a kind of artistic project. In the beginning (that was late 80’s) it was just the music and fascination of psychedelic 60s a especially Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd. But it must be said: that was Poland – wild, rotten, communist swamp without any musical tradition to listening anything which is avantgarde, any places to play and create the music and any professional equipment like guitars and amps. All that stuff was unavailable for young people. The first band we’ve made was on musical school and we were playing on pianos and old classical guitars. But instead of this we started to play as a psychedelic quartet with female vocals in my room! On the beginning of 90s there was spark in this dark tunnel and we started to play in some small, underground clubs and youth fests. Our friends helped us to make this gigs magical with some lights and dioramas and later on some para-theatrical spectacles. In that times there were probably only one band in Poland making music like this and that was More Experience. Of Course no one cared about that.

What can you tell me about your musical backgrounds?

Well, I’m a classical pianist and I really like Chopin, Debussy, Stravinsky and so on. But my life has changed since I heard Hendrix! (More Experience played a really lot of gigs titled a tribute to Jimi Hendrix but there is surprise: in Switzerland there is another great band called More Experience which is a great tribute Hendrix band!). Now I’m traveling to some progressive-psychedelic-space-jazz-rock bands like Gong, Soft Machine, Steve Hillage and stuff like this.

What does a regular day in your life look like?

I’m PhD of art history and I’m trying to study the relationship between Polish art and philosophy of the Far East, especially Buddhism. I’m also working on preservation office and giving a second life to very old documents and books. But the most important stuff in my life is music. I’m a studio owner and this is what I do, much to my wife’s despair!

What is the story about the band name? More experience of what exactly?

In the beginning it was about Hendrix. There is concert from Albert Hall London, first part of it is called Experience and second: More Experience. But later on the name started to be connected with east philosophy: and the meaning is that everything is the experience and all that stuff is creating your consciousness and making you a living human.

Where do you live and what is the environment like for musicians like you?

I’m from Lublin, the biggest city in the east of Poland. We have here five state universities and a few private ones. So lot of young people in one place but this is sad place, with sad history and no perspective to live and work in it. So almost nothing is happening! We have no clubs or serious places to play live music (like jam sessions) and there are no people interested in that stuff. We have two state jazz schools and no place to play jazz! Psychedelic stuff is deep under the ground and no one cares about it. In Poland we’ve sold five CD copies of our new album! (six in Australia!)

What is your main aim with your music, is it complete artistic expression, or an escape from the everyday world? (or something else ;))

Music is my life, I am the music, I live inside the music, everything in my life is music. I’m not thinking of any strategy, I don’t have any plans, I’m just the musical man doing his life possible and physical. My studio is the tool. Many years ago I’ve tried to show this miracle to people, now I’m old enough to be myself without any outside needs and fame.

Can you tell me about how you go about composing and recording songs?

It’s like out of the blue. Bang! and there is a song. It’s hard to say how it works. Probably is going about having an open mind and experience, more and more experiences. Recording is a process. Modern studios give unlimited possibilities. Your imagination is the only limit. So if you don’t know what you want, you’re done! It’s also knowledge if you want to recording music that sounds good for you, you need very specialistic knowledge and loot of experience. So I’m still trying to be better and I spend long hours and days in the studio and I love it!

What is “the dream” when it comes to being an artist?

I really don’t like my country. We have really stupid government that harms the country and I think there is no hope for our generation. But I have very talented son who is actually great drummer (you can hear him on the More Experience album). I hope, some day he will be independent artist, creating his art in more pleasant space for more educated and interested audience.

What should the Weirdo Shrine reader do after reading this interview?

Take a deep breath, be kind for others and get more experience!