WoKa 02 by OSTROWSKI
Imposing stringent restrictions on one’s creative process is an age-old technique and challenge that helps artists enter a new level of their craft. Ostrowski decided to reject the baroque characteristics of IDM and limit himself to a minimal base of sounds. The effect is that much fascinating because regardless of the level of reduction his music remains inimitable. Even though Ostrowski in the new form is tropical, bass-oriented, studying swing of African rhythms, he is still, deep down, the same Ostrowski admired for his great care of sound combinations and sonic worldbuilding.
Artist himself, while describing his new work, mentions terraforming, saying that ’while Volume 1 was a discovery of a new planet, Volume 2 is a journey to it’. It is a next step in a series of actions while basic structures and methods has already been established. Second part of ’WoKa’ is a development, a turn to more melodic and dance forms. The entire material was created solely on a computer using only mouse and QWERTY keyboard. Despite this, it sounds more organic than its predecessor. Sound is clearer, which allows a free proliferation of deconstructed tropes and cherishing the party character of this music. However, this is not a party that we know from Polish dancefloors, it is more like a psychedelic experience.
The opening track „pama” makes you move your hips with it sensual groove, but there is also an elusive, spectral melody hovering over the rhythm. The record is full of such textures - faded as if eaten away by strange substances - that become the ground for various experiments. It is the case when gqom and juke rhythms compete between cut-up vocal samples in „kudi”, or in „gAba” when a bouncy rhythm mutates into something that Andy Stott once called „knackered house”, a dance music on the border of dream and delirium. The culminating moment of the entire album is a euphoric „pola”, where muffled sounds of kalimba and roaring and droning synthetic wuwuzelas wiggle among the characteristic South African drum beats and the space-time bends so that retrofuturistic hi-fi vision becomes today’s lo-fi, unknown and rediscovered.
Krzysztof Ostrowski is an experimental electronic music producer also known as Freeze. He collaborates with Mateusz Wysocki in IFS. He releases his albums in Recognition, Pointless Geometry, Pawlacz Perski and Outlines among others. His work is characterized by carefully produced sound experiments between sonic abstraction and club culture from around the world.
In the future, Ostrowski will return to planet „WoKa” to orchestrate a full terraformation. - Łukasz Warna Wiesławski
Credits
mix & mastering: Krzysztof Ostrowski
gfx: Piotr Bukowski
License
All rights reserved.
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