Mchy i Porosty: Untitled (Brutaż 03)

Album (EP): Untitled

Label: Brutaż

Release date: March 2017

I don’t write in English, usually. But I’d like to embed some text about this record. This is how the EP is described by its creators:

Mchy i Porosty stands for ‘mosses and lichens’. Its EP on Brutaż – a hopeless Polish party night and ‘label’ – is a story on broken dreams, mold, dying and crippled love.”

Give it a listen first:

 

I like that it’s being labeled as a bunch of love songs. It must be a rough love. Every love is, I guess.

The description goes on with the following understatement:

“Hailing from a deserted town in the middle of Polish nowhere, the artist failed to “deliver” – the record is not “effective”, “punchy”, nor it’s a “hyper-Techno”, “breathtaking”, and won’t really cause a testosterone overdose.“ 

In fact, the record (a vinyl-only one to be released in one or two weeks) fails to deliver a genre product. One of its main strengths.

The EP starts with this one:

“The opening song – “Czarna plaża” [black beach] is a bleak and relentless beat about disillusioned teen romance – the two stand on the black beach with black tar oozing from their hearts.” 

Brutaż releases music via Lobster distribution (the distributor behind/beside the label Lobster Theremin) and the first track is almost like a tribute. Lo-fi house.

The EP then leaves the safety zone and goes exploring. A very good deed. (It remains lo-fi all the way, which corresponds to the Zeitgeist, I guess. I never really got what the lo-fi fever, in general, wants to express. In a high-end era, we deliberately make records sound bad (quality). Is it again an escape to our sexy past a’la Mark Fisher?)

“A2 – “Dziwna
śmierć” [strange death] is a melodic song about funny and surprising things that happen after you die.”

This one is my favourite. The track reminds me of Fridge’s Of, somehow.

“Wężowe ruchy” [snake moves] is an off-beat, guitar-driven impression about the way her body moves when she’s a snake, it’s also about love.”

Yes, this can definitely be a love song. A jam in your heart on day one. No idea what the vocals say. Vocals appear in all tracks. Some native hint:

“Gloomy dark-trip industrial of
“Cholewa” tells a story about a guy named Maciek Cholewa – funnily, he had abnormal overgrowth of a bone in his neck that almost tore his spinal cord. In a track, the doctor describes the dangers of a possible medical procedure. A magical flying furry shit that somehow helped.”

The final track is dark as hell. I remember the Contort parties in Berlin starting at noon on Sundays. I loved them. They would play the darkest techno in Berlin’s probably darkest club but it was still fun and easy-going. It was just a silly Sunday afternoon after all.