Zbigniew Chojnacki: Basic Man
(Self Release)
DL available here
Out now
Polish accordionist Zbigniew Chojnacki brings out an album full of contrasts between crushing noise and melancholy beauty.
I’m not sure many are acquainted with Polish avant-garde accordionist Zbigniew Chojnacki, but his world is certainly worth tuning into.
His new album, Basic Man, is as good a place as any to start. Hedgehog is a splendid opener; it starts very quickly, without any fanfare even: the echoes on the heavily delayed keys make a ghostly but very sympathetic backdrop for further experimentation, which is signalled by a howling Zbigniew. Post-howl we get what sounds like radio jamming, and then more echoed notes that slowly pick out a pattern between the bleeps and blurts of the still smouldering embers of the brutal white noise we copped a minute earlier. The melancholy Boy Made Of Wood follows: another excursion into a ghostly, dubby world driven by slight alterations of tone and pitch and some sonic glitches that topple the sound into the odd discordant passage that carries on into the discombobulating excursion known as Are You Sure (answer: no). These little wibbles and hisses and abrupt endings (and those howls, which he emits regularly) are Chojnacki’s trademark. It’s as if he has to throw in discordant elements to rediscover his love for melody.
The album recording took place in a hotel room in Riga, Latvia, in April 2023. Done in one take, apparently. Riga is a funny old city, large and weirdly silent, and somewhat mysterious, once you’re outside of the tourist schmalz of the Old Town. I can easily imagine Chojnacki staring down from one of the nondescript, utilitarian blocks of flats to the streets looking for inspiration, though at times you can be forgiven in thinking you are listening to the actual sounds of the street when listening to the eight-minute marathon bone crusher of processed white noise that goes by the name of Root Crushing Machine (The Beast). It’s similar in spirit to the larval flow of noise that ends Kraftwerk’s first album, though we also get to listen into a kind of hyper charged rave that sends echoes up and out from beneath the scree.
Where is John? brings merciful release in the sound of a gravelly silence punctuated by more chordal, if heavily processed sounds. The musty mnemonics of the track have something of a spy drama set in “Cold War One”: the typewriter noises certainly add to that feeling. Closer Sea U Mr. Z continues this ghostly soundtrack, the echoes of the notes almost dissolving before our eyes, like a fret off the sea.
Phew! Some trip…
The accordion is an instrument that can operate like an external set of lungs. Which makes this listener wonder just what is it that Chojnacki is trying to emote?
~
More about Zbigniew Chojnacki can be found here. Zbigniew Chojnacki’s site is here.
All words by Richard Foster. More writing by Richard can be found at his author’s archive.
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