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CD Feature/ Pawel Grabowski: "Arh"

  Tobias

Should we be afraid of the day Pawel Grabowski turns into a completely happy man? Even though it is a sorry myth that great music inevetably derives from sadness and misery, his fascinating musical diary seems like an endless lament:

”This album dealt with the experience of death”, he writes about the final album with his former band Miastoniespalo, an experimental chamber music outfit, and "Diarakth”, his first offering as a solo artist, “was recorded when he was very sick”. One of his following two works took shape “during a very lonely Christmas Evening” and the other was about drowning. So it should seem as though this album, a reminder of troubled times, only continues the theme. Admittedly, “Arh” is not the kind of music you would want to play on your child’s birthday party. The greyish cover alreadys sets the mood for a sonambule set of the loneliest tracks imaginable – musical material is scant, sparse and stripped down to a scary sceleton sleepwalking on a full moon night. Part I and III of this composition in four movements use a two-layered approach to create an intense effect: While bleakly shimmering drones breath and heave a sigh in perfect isolation, bizarre noises open up the gates to a strange land: Doors are creaking, bolts are locking, metallic parts are moaning, tiny drops of water are trickling down the cavern walls. The other two pieces are even more intimate, allowing plains of longing to swell and shift, passing by the mind’s eye in a surreally slow tempo.It is in these impressively deep and infinite tracks that the transformation takes place, which allows “Arh” to stand apart from the usual Dark Ambient works. For they succeed to somehow take the listener closer to a truth within himself instead of pulling him down a bottomless hole.

A ritual of healing, therefore, a place of refuge. Even its stupendous power hasn’t as yet saved our hero, though – Grabowski’s current album is still called “Notes from the house of dead”. Which is maybe not the saddest thing. While we sincerely wish Pawel Grabowksi all the best in the world, we wouldn’t mind if he doesn’t turn into a completely happy man right away.

Homepage: Pawel Grabowski
Homepage: Mystery Sea Records