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Maciek Szymczuk & Slowtion : ways Maximize

Maciek Szymczuk & Slowtion : ways

  • ZOHARUM
  • Release year 2012
  • 11 tracks, 47 minutes
  • CD in Digipak

More details

ZOHAR 024-2

12,90 €

The latest Maciek Szymczuk album was prepared together with a British artist hidden under the moniker Slowtion. 'Ways' is a musical journey into the depth of your own persona, the diary from spiritual journey in searchof the answer on the meaning of the human existence where, among the complexities and blind alleys, one can find an element of sacrum, the contact with the Absolute. Musicwise, 'Ways' show slightly different traits of Maciek Szymczuk's work. It may have happened this way because of the collaborative nature of the project and Slowtion's involvement in it. Also, it may have been the character of Joanna's voice-delicate, ethereal that resembles Bristol sounds a bit.( Chaindlk )



 ALBUM PREVIEW 1                ALBUM PREVIEW 2

 

REVIEW
Filing what this bicephalous project by Polish electronic composer Maciek Szymczuk and British musician Julian Coope aka Slowtion submit to listeners' attention is not so easy. In spite of the fact that their sonic streams where Maciek's wife Joanna sometimes drains some enchanting ethereal vocalizations - in many moments they have almost a "didactic" role...a sort of seducing guide through the stages of this "trip" - have been framed with possibly interesting references to an imaginary spiritual research aimed to represent the constant unravelling by most of human beings between clues, proofs and complexities in order to reach a contact with the so-called Absolute, the musical complexity due to its richness of supposedly unintentional cross-reference marks appears head and shoulders above any possible conceptual framework to me: even though it seems "Ways" partially represents the wide stylistical lawns and wolds Maciek Szymczuk normally fertilizes during his personal musical explorations and could be considered somehow "minimalist" as most of tracks are not obstructed with a plenty of sounds, you're going to listen many interesting crossbreeds of elements taken from diverse musical branches. In tracks such as "Northern Wind", "The Hills", "Step By Step" or "Windy North" there're interesting examples of bizarre hybridization between the so-called "click'n'cut" electronic style with movements and intuitions taken from post-rock, trip hop or dark ambient so that moments when past listenings resurface from some depth of musical memory are not so infrequent. For instance I had sometimes the impression of listening to the dried version of some post-rock bands or the sabbatic transposition of some post-punk voices (and in a moment I felt like listening a record by The Soft Moon broadcasted filtered by some esoteric sound machine borrowed from Sleep Chamber's studio!). The possibility to understand and appreciate the narrative concatenations of this record so that the final track, titled "Go Through The Green Gate", will sound not just like a good piece of dub-like ritual ambient but more as the final moment of a process (or supposedly as the very initial moment of a new one...), mostly depends on listener's sensitivity, both from an aesthetic viewpoint and from a spiritual one.
( Chaindlk )