- Melancholy disco edits from Earth Trax that unearth Polish musical history.
- In a new Adam Curtis series, TraumaZone, a beauty pageant takes place in communist Poland. A photographer takes pictures and creates a breeze on the model’s hair with a vacuum. This kind of resourcefulness is at the core of The Very Polish Cut Outs, a label that archives, contextualises and releases Polish electronic music old and new.
Pejzaż—an alias of a prolific artist Bartosz Kruczynski, AKA Earth Trax—is at home on this label. He's helped unearth the late 20th-century Polish music gems since the label’s earliest days with his duo Ptaki, including the iconic sample-based album Przelot. Kruczynski has a specific interest in the '70s and '80s, a period that popularised electronic music and which Poles associate with unwanted Soviet influence that followed the occupation during and after World War II. By sampling music from this oft-avoided and painful period, Kruczynski reclaims its legacy.
His approach is smart and playful. He borrows the title of "Nadal Lubię...Życie Inaczej” from a 2001 album by the hip-hop band Beat Squad, but lifts the vocal sample, which features some of the same lyrics as in the title, from elsewhere. Kruczynski uses this mystery to ignite further curiosity in the material—someone looking at this EP as a ready-made guide to Poland’s music history will be puzzled.
"Nadal Lubię...Życie Inaczej" and "Kochaj Mne" are both written in Kruczynski's signature bittersweet style. Some call this sound the Baltic beat, a cold-wave interpretation of the Balearic beat tailored to the natural landscape of Poland's northern coast. With airy, chilled rhythms, horns that tug at the heartstrings and the retro feel of the vocals, Kruczynski pays respect not only to the landscape that surrounds him, but also to the artists that lived there before.
Tracklist01. Kochaj Mnie
02. Nadal Lubię...Życie Inaczej