Przepych explores their own manual limitations by reducing technique to its minimum and stretching the form to the necessary maximum.

The project originally began as a duo and became a trio in 2019. The members are clearly influenced by Rock in Opposition, No Wave, and Post-Punk. They recently released, ‘I Inne Zabawne Rzeczy,’ their latest album out on Fonoradar. All three members are an important part of Polish underground and are active in various projects that we discussed in the following interview.

Are you all coming from Wroclaw?

Łukasz Plata: We can say so, as we’ve all been settled here for a while.

Kuba Majchrzak: I’m so much from Wroclaw. Born here, raised here, will probably die here. Period.

Ewa Głowacka: [slightly not present]

Were you in any bands before forming Przepych?

Łukasz: I was in Ukryte Zalety Systemu before.

Kuba: I was, and I am still a member of Kurws along other non existing acts like Norymberga, Pustostany – to name those who left any official recordings on Earth. Before I was also a bassist in jazz-punk duo mikroflota, an accordionist in crust-punk band Dysydent and a guitarist/backing vocalist in noise-rock high school band Kromka, who actually self-released a sprayed stencil printed CD-R back in 2000. The cover was sewn from linum. It was fun.

Ewa: [Still absent; therefore not surprising that she appears as a voiceover; however, it’s definitely not her voice] Looong long time ago I was a member of Audre Lorde, a hardcore band from Wroclaw. A few years ago I was engaged in two ephemeral projects that didn’t stand the test of time: NIC and Chlamydia. None of them left recordings, besides a few gig videos on YouTube. I would say they existed for therapeutic reasons.

What was the local scene in your city? Any other bands that influenced you or that you would like to recommend?

Łukasz: Surely, Kurws was a big inspiration for me with their postpunk/funk/no wave/improv amalgama as well as their DIY approach. Back in the early 2000s Robotobibok made a big impression on me, it was kind of cosmic krautish trancy jazz driven by super thick grooves and discordant moog/brass melodic lines rooted in sci-fi/crime stories.

Kuba: I spent my childhood years in a local art academy as a son of its lecturer. Hearing a lot about, but not hearing the actual music of new-wave band Klaus Mitffoch, who at the time was rehearsing there and now has got kinda cult status in the history of polish underground music. I’ve raised pretty high expectations until I finally got a tape in my teens. Unlikely anything else could be more influential as long as we talk of the local music from the past. I was also a pretty dedicated Robotobibok listener although I’m not sure whether it actually had an impact on what I do now. For sure as Salka collective we are one musical environment where we keep inspiring each other, so other acts like Zdrój, Barłóg, Atol Atol Atol, UZS, Różewie (and more) shall be mentioned too. To conclude I would say that making music here, in Wroclaw, was never about warming in the shadows. Such a thing like Wroclaw’s sound has never existed – not to my ears. It has always been about coming with things unresent on the landscape – which I anyway find pretty obvious and default as an artistic strategy. If there’s no “scene”, someone has to make a first sound. Fulfilling your artistic desires is the best magnet to link with people who will eventually end up in brother and sisterhoods with you.

Photo by Krzysztof Wiktor

So you are coming from bands like Kurws, Ukryte Zalety Systemu (UZS), Pustostany, NIC and Norymberga. We would appreciate a few sentences about each of those groups to get a better overview of what is your musical background.

Łukasz: UZS was a post punk trio running on scratchy bass lines, incisive guitar and an electronic snare/keyboards, a set borrowed from cold wave and put in the creaky garage. We recorded two albums, the second of which was released in 2019. I played bass, keyboard and sang there. Initially, strongly inspired by Neue Deutsche Welle, I was even writing the lyrics in German, by flipping it several times back and forth in Google Translate – until after one more round I discovered that it actually sounds cooler in Polish [laughter]. We played quite a few concerts in Poland and abroad, and then decided to either break up or suspend. I’m still not quite sure what we chose. We’ll see. Check it out here.

Kuba: Norymberga was a one year existing project from a decade ago. First seven months were utilized for searching a common musical language – sometimes it meant searching on the very basis of vocabulary, since some of us were holding their instruments for the very first time – the other 5 months we spent on enjoying what we came with for five and the only five times we performed live. I have great memories from this short adventure. The music was a flipper of all the overdriven guitar behaviors we happened to be shaped by, like punk, noise-rock and metal. Dilettantish by choice [here].

Pustostany was an even shorter existing project, Kurws [at the time quartet with keyboardist Piotr Zabrodzki] with vocalist and visual artist Maciek Salamon [currently known from the duo Nagrobki, at the time still in Gówno]. It took us 5 days of heavy rehearsing to prepare 7 songs [and the songbooks xerox copied for the first show just after] and another 2 days a couple of months later to record it and forget it. Surprisingly the cassette was re-released as an LP in Canada and France so people still tend to ask us about this band. Meant as the most song orientated thing we ever did, in Poland it was commented as the most uneasy listening one – probably due to the lo-fi cassette production we chose to apply [here].

Finally, this reversed chronology order brings me to Kurws – my longest existing band. It’s been 14 years now. Since the line-up in various periods of time was welcoming saxophonists, clarinetists or keyboardists it’s only fair to say we’ve been also a power trio during all this time, playing partly composed, partly improvised music. Our clay is still post-punk and no-wave sound, but our musical grammar is changing with us – we will see where else it will bring us in future. Currently we are just after releasing our 4th LP ‘Powięź/Fascia’ and testing its musical meritum live on various stages in Europe.

Ewa: [continues as an off-microphone voice, her last words are barely audible] NIC, as I mentioned before, was rather an experimental project. The idea came with Stefan from Zielona Góra, who had some songs written and wanted to perform one of them at our friend’s birthday party. Iwona joined him for one rehearsal and they played together at the party. Then she invited me for the second rehearsal to play bass guitar. On the third one, we invited Adam, who just came from Switzerland for a couple of weeks and played drums. The fourth one we played in Zielona Góra and the fifth one in Warsaw. Then we played a support concert for Przepych in Wrocław [they were a duo back then] and then once again in Szczecin. And then NIC [NOTHING in Polish] disappeared.

Can you elaborate on CRK Salka center and what impact does it have on the local scene?

Kuba: CRK [Centrum Reanimacji Kultury] is a DIY center that me, Ewa and a lot of my friends used to be involved in. CRK Salka [with “salka” standing for “rehearsal space” located in CRK] – is a collective of musicians who share one space and often musical ideas thus we like to think of us as a musical scene. I prefer to leave it to music journalists and fans to hunt what is the common denominator we all stand on [apart from these couple of square meters of concrete regularly warmed up by our gear]. I find it inspiring that we’ve managed to create circumstances for new musicians to arise, begin their musical route or just happen to have a brief moment of being in a band here.

Ewa: [again not there]

Let’s talk first about the ‘(lost and found)’ release.

Kuba: As written on the Bandcamp page, this isn’t a real release, just a place to put the tracks that don’t appear on our albums. For example the reedit of ‘Przyszłość oraz Styl’ we made spontaneously for filmmakers’ event Movimento in Portugal.

Łukasz: Tak.

 

What’s the story behind working on ‘Regresarabas’ album?

Łukasz: Well, first, it was Kuba who proposed that I join him in the band, and this is him who came up with the name for it. Initially we were working on Kuba’s unreleased ideas, and the majority – or at least half – of the content of ‘Regresarabas’ derives from his sketches. We began as a duo focused rather on “studio work” than live performances, thus we felt free to work on multilayered arrangements, unrestricted by our actual musical capacity. Anyway soon we desired to have a regular band life, which meant a necessity to tackle the problems of multitasking. So our material was being tested, evolved on concerts, and it took a bit of time before we felt ready to record. We named the album ‘Regresarabas’ which comes from Portuguese, as both of us had personal links to Lisbon back then – simply as that. The meaning is also simple “return to the base,” yet somehow insisting, cracking the sound of the words made us see it as a kind of… social metaphor? And a sorcery? And bring the questions. What is the base? What belongs there? Who actually would come back – and where exactly? It overlapped perfectly with our then long fascination with the images from the pharaoh-style palace of Yanukovych, infamous president of Ukraine, taken over by the people during the 2014 revolution. We knew we would use those pictures as a visual base for our artwork [and all of the images come from these events indeed], they were capturing this enthusiastic revolutionary moment along with all of its weirdness, stunned people posing for a photo on a golden privy. It was kind of a return to the base [laughter].

Ewa: [imagine her moving her gaze from Łukasz to Kuba]

Kuba: These pictures in the media reminded so much of Disneyland, for once the throne was allowed for everyone to sit in, see how it feels, maybe try to understand something from this crazy way their [our] world is ordered. It corresponded somehow with this dream I had at the time: to have a band that achieved the ambitions I connect with rich orchestral music while still being a poor DIY band. It’s of course unreachable, and we were this “przepych” [which stands in polish for “excess”, “lavishness”] just for a while, but I also enjoy the glitches that come out from such failures. All this fairytale aura was also somehow consonant with the spell-like sound of this Portuguese ‘regressar à base’ which opens this album. The spell has been spoken and here we are in – so the album begins.

What led to working on ‘i inne zabawne rzeczy’? Would you say there’s a certain concept behind it?

Kuba: Contrary to the first album, where we were exploring the duo-but-orchestra-wanna-be formula, I wouldn’t say there is a clear concept behind the new one, though I appreciate it ending up that way. Maybe thanks to this, the album shows more what was this team trip about at that certain moment of time when we’ve approached finish [rather than showing what it could be or would wish to be like in the ‘Regresarabas’ case]. So it’s like a report, not a fairy tale. Even-though during the work the fairytelish connotation was present as a kinda leitmotiv of the album. There are a couple of sides of Przepych on this release that were forced to be faced to each other, loudly discussing as a result. It’s happened there is far more improvisation than ever; it’s happened we let some new person in – Szymon on the guitar – while before we were only letting friends to enter for the length of a sample or an overdubbed solo; it’s happened we are all singing on this release, singing the lyrics delivered mostly by Łukasz that were polished together at some point. And yes, I think also the song formula – as for the voice and words usage – is being approached here in several ways, sometimes it is a fluent storytelling, sometimes almost a protest song, sometimes it’s like a phrase sampler. Additionally to that all, some self-plunderphonics has happened too, some grooves suspended in repetition – the choices were intuitive and surprising to me.

Ewa: [imagine her moving her gaze from Kuba to Łukasz]

Łukasz: I agree with Kuba – there was no concept behind this album, which doesn’t mean we didn’t conceptualize it in the process. First album had a strong foundation on this willingness we had, to turn a duo into an orchestra. We have spent a pretty long time learning how to do it, what to use and how to still extend our capacity. So at one hand, it was very formal “exercises;” at the other, we had ready existing compositions to develop, so general music direction was already there – as well as our social focus. The work on the second album started at the point when we dropped all of this. Kind of. For me it was a moment to try something else, precisely speaking, the songs. We have already written a song or two, so they were ready to work on. This is when Ewa joined us. But we didn’t stop being a duo – we just started to have a double life, a bit separate as a duo and as a trio. This was evident on concerts, which consisted of half songs and half instrumentals. This is where the diverse material began to emerge. It was kind of multidirectional. Therefore liberating for me. At some point it became clear that maybe not everything, but a lot was acceptable [laughs]. Not everyone was equally happy with that, so that freedom started to show some signs of breaking down. And that translated into visual storytelling. We based the title piece [and then the artwork] on a text from the book ‘Alexander März’ by Heinar Kipphardt; these are excerpts from the poems of a schizophrenic, which are very impressive in their non-normativity; at the same time, they cannot break free from the basic family-social arrangement that haunts the author. This dialectic inscribed in them played very much to my imagination. Our material seemed to me enthusiastically distracted and sickly vital; beyond that, it was clear that the ensemble was cracking a little, as was the reality around it. I saw the similarities and that is why I proposed developing Alexander’s world as a cover art. Then Kuba and Ewa found a beautiful way of translating both things into each other, music and the pictures.

Do you give a lot of thought to the visual aspects that represent the band?

Kuba: I would say yes. I never treat the artwork as simply the package for music. Being in a band means all these exciting things apart from writing music like conceptualizing albums, making videos, communicating with other artists, making new friendships. The artwork of ‘i inne zabawne rzeczy’ is a result of a common brainstorm and quite a few drawing jams of Ewa and me – internet research and litres of black tea. All these being a visual processing of the words and sounds that were surrounding us for so long in Przepych. The last gesture was Ewa’s thought.

Łukasz: Totally. The visual artwork is one of the aspects of storytelling, and the storytelling is my key interest in creating the music or more specifically album release. I like the things that talk with its unique language, and to create additional background to what they are content. The very act of giving a title to the abstract instrumental piece integrates this piece into a broader frame, allows it to say what it already says plus something more; titles, read one after the other, produce a text, and this text provokes another, visual meaning – and you are the one, who control the way it takes. Making an album gives you a specific opportunity to design an intermedia object. I like the fact that, even without being a visual artist, I co-create such a multidimensional and shared object.

Ewa: [would definitely elaborate, as a graphic designer and co-author of two Przepych’s covers, but somehow she’s not here at the moment]

Are you working on something new?

 
Łukasz: Well, Przepych has been retired already. So I focused on my new band Atol Atol Atol, which consists of members of Ukryte Zalety Systemu [me and a drummer Sasza] and another Kurws member – Hubert, a guitarist. There are some common points between Atol Atol Atol and the last Przepych record; both bands are interested in using instruments to create polyrhythmic patterns rather than melodics, in both cases the inspirations of anything that you could call “no wave” seem to be obvious, even if both bands really trust in composition; also the poetics of lyrics cannot hide the affinity; considering all that, AAA derives more obviously from what I’d been doing in UZS. The goal here are the songs, and the songs who choose to be tight, packed together rather than wanting to run in several different directions, as in Przepych [laughter]. We’ve released our first album ‘Koniec sosu tysiąca wysp’ by the end of September and are starting to play around. So far locally – but then, a spring 2023 will probably see us touring West Europe. It’s gonna be fucking cool. [Listen here]

Kuba: I came out from Przepych with a couple of unrealized ideas – this time not sketches, but actually written compositions. The idea for the new project is pretty clear for me, which may be the same reason why it’s not easy to find the people to jump in. Right into my head. Well come on in! The struggle continues – keep the fingers crossed.

Photo by Jakub Knera


Let’s end this interview with some of your favorite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

Kuba: I keep telling people I don’t really listen to music for the past 5 years, but each time asked I come up with something that touched me. Here we go:

‘True History’ of Mordan Jaikel and more recently ‘DYMAXION×4+3=39:21’ of Dymaxion, for a great feeling while dealing with found audio material. The result in both cases is so organic, that the border between sampled and overdubbed is not important any more. You may recognize some recordings and enjoy the blend of known or you can completely get lost between actual recorded instruments that chase the sound quality of the lo-fi material. Composition-wise Mordan Jaikel shares no punchline attitude with their gurus the Residents, but they dance so far from that square shaped repetitive formula. I love when music is freedom.

‘Earth Flirt’ of Odwalla 1221, previously uploaded as Odwalla 88. Even with the teenage blaze there was still some bedroom modesty in these recordings. It’s like a spoken word with some content released by audio samples for a reason of human behavior being so determined by the culture, like they would want to say “here we go again” each time the stick hits the drum pad. Thanks to non musical but poetic connotation at the very start there is this breath giving space that eventually is being filled with surprisingly musical enjoyment. The sampler usage is terrifying – the samples must have become possessed eventually. “All I want is everything, is that a problem?”

Nusidm ‘Hatred Of Pain’ – basically this kind of what-the-heck-is-that recording. To call this musician naive would be naive itself – very clear artistic choice here. There is also some kind of virtuosity in this constant slide on the edge of performance, like such a thing as articulation [as an element of music that can be categorized] would be at all in question here. The thread that holds this fabric is subtle]

Brice et sa pute ‘Musique Actuelle’ – I see projects from Dur et Doux are present here from time to time – this is maybe one of the less obvious choices, but remains my favorite one. We had the pleasure to tour with them twice [the last one was part of DIY residency that resulted in having a common band, unfortunately never to be recorded], becoming friends eventually. I love them live, I love them on this recording. To realize this all came up from absurdist lyrics, two voices, bass guitar and wooden pallet formula is very inspiring for me. I love when the ceiling is so close and I keep being amused each time an artist decides to jump to get even closer, proving there is still hell of a space for virtuosity of its own kind.

At last, not albums, but actual compositions like ‘De Volharding,’ ‘De Staat’ or ‘Hoketus’ by Louis Andriessen – for showing me that minimalism may serve something very exciting and actually still adventurous [just by the band name very not Przepychish conclusion, fact, but only superficially] – ‘Et je reverrai cette ville étrang’ by Claude Vivier – I love forgetting how it is supposingly entirely unisono-based while listening to it – and ‘Central Park in the Dark’ by Charles Ives, who in general, along with Captain Beefheart helped me to understand what I was trying to achieve in Kurws, also sometimes in Przepych, like in ‘Out of the nest’ from the last album, but more in Kurws, by trying not to listen other musicians in a band as a next step after learning how to listen [for sake of improvisation et cetera] and in this piece I’m in particular touched by how very simple and modest idea can rapidly explode into some very complex and extravertic one while keeping it all very compact in its own way – that one is actually very Przepychich approach for a change.

Łukasz: [looking EVERYONE right in their eyes] I will just leave you some names to check. [seriously] Nape Neck’s first release.
Double Job ‘Ohne Tanzen Planen’
Forbidden Wizards whatever.
Sourdure ‘De Mòrt Viva’. Société etrange ‘Chance’. Rozwód ‘Gold’.
Kurvy Češi ‘We Are Family’.

Ewa: [talking simultaneously with Łukasz; in fact, she’s singing with a light voice] Recently I’ve been listening to music that calms me down and allows me to rest. Not the newest. Mostly done by women: Lyra Pramuk ‘Fountain’.
Caterina Barbieri ‘Patterns of Consciousness’
Carla del Forno ‘Look Up Sharp’
Mariah ‘Utakata No Hibi’

Thank you. Last word is yours.

Kociokwik.

Klemen Breznikar
(the article has been originally published on It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine website)

Przepych and Brice et sa pute during their residency in 2019