Time to say good-bye: this is the last post from Poland. It was a real pleasure to write this blog and I hope you, the readers, found some interesting sounds here throughout last month. In this last post I want to share some music with you – and of course it will be music that at least to some extent is based on field recordings: sometimes as an additional sound source, sometimes as the most significant element of the compositions.

Let’s start with one of my favourite albums released here last year – Martyna Poznańska‘s „Hoarse Whisper”. Martyna is a young Polish sound artist living in Kraków and London, however recently you can meet here more likely in Berlin. She’s active in the local improv scene, working also on her sound art installations and visual projects. „Hoarse Whisper” is her debut album, highly recommended:

Young artists, especially working with electronic music, are strongly supported by the very prolific and for many years enormously active EtaLabel run by Grzegorz Bojanek. Even though their main focus is on ambient electronica, some of their releases utilise field recording samples in quite an interesting way. Browse their catalogue at the Etalabel website. Here’s one of the examples:

Probably one of the first soundscape-aware musical projects in Poland were Theatre of Sound Atman. It’s easy to file them under psychedelic folk label but in fact there’s much more to their music than just it. As a kid I was most fascinated with the sound and the concept of their „Talking Meadow” cassettes, a field recordings of their musical workshops recorded outside the studio – the music itself was not at all more important that the sounds of nature in those recordings. It’s not easy to find this music anymore, however musicians involved in that project are still active – and still very much concerned about acoustic ecology and field recordings. Read more at the Magic Carpathians‘ website and listen below:

Finally, Rafał Iwański a.k.a. X-NAVI:ET. He is a percussionist and electronic sound artist working in the field of electro-acoustic music, a combination of analogue and digital electronic devices with acoustic instruments and field/found recordings. He was a co-founder of HATI, a duo whose improvised music employed the sounds of traditional ethnic instruments and re-cycled objects to create ritual and meditative atmospheres. In his solo works field recordings are very important sound source:

Of course, there are more examples and there’s much more great field-recordings-based music here – but let’s leave some for other occassions… or for those who want to make their own research into the subject. Thanks for reading this blog and even bigger thanks for listening.

Have nice soundscapes!