Even though El-muzyka nowadays may sound out-dated, its fans still form a very active and committed group. Until 2010, they gathered around Jerzy Kordowicz’s radio programmes broadcast by Programme III of the National Polish Radio, and when Kordowicz stopped fitting in with the radio station's format, after organising vehement protests, they moved to the Internet, starting numerous blogs, YouTube channels, and forums. Here is a short list of them:
Because writing about music is like dancing about architecture, let’s have a look at a few venerable El-muzyka masters' lives and works. Writing their proper biographies seems to be useless for the purposes of this guide (tl;dr), so let’s jump straight to what is so specific about each of them and let’s take for granted that their life was a success story and that they performed at all major festivals and hit the top of the electronic music charts (which, in fact, is what all of their biographies say).
Marek Biliński
As previously mentioned, Biliński is a co-creator of the term El-muzyka. Moreover, his most popular music video has become a flagship of El-muzyka and was voted the best music video of the year 1984 by viewers of state (there was no other) television.
Marek Biliński - Ucieczka z tropiku, 1984.
He is a true pioneer of El-muzyka, and was one of the very first to give live concerts with popular electronic music in Poland. His preferred way of performing is to take part in sound & light performances, because he thinks that electronic music needs a bit of illustration to get the listener into the desired state of mind. The music of Marek Biliński has been a source of inspiration for many artists from different fields of art, such as a ballet written to his music from Dziecko Słońca / A Child of the Sun. A fact surprising for foreigners – for several years he lectured at the Academy of Music in… Kuwait (which is not really surprising for those who know of the intense cultural and scientific exchange between Poland and Kuwait in the 1990s).
Władysław Komendarek
Komendarek is a truly iconic character of Polish electronic music. His personality, uncompromising attitude, and strange image, as well as his being a member of the progressive band Exodus, made him a very popular solo artist in the 1980s. His music is an extremely uncommon combination of progressive rock (Komendarek loves King Crimson), classical piano music and an endless craving for the wildest electronic experiments. Recently, he has been cooperating with Polish pop star Tomek Makowiecki by appearing during his live shows to play ground-shaking solos, proving his incredible showmanship. His output is so varied that it would take at least fifteen examples to give even the most general overview of his creativity.
Czesław Niemen
What Niemen is commonly known for is his 1960s protest anthem – Dziwny jest ten świat / Strange Is This World (click here to listen...). The song made his career and assured him a place for evermore in the Polish pop stars hall of fame. Yet, he would never appear in this guide if it wasn’t for his unstoppable drive to push the boundaries of his musical inspirations. From the early 1970s, Niemen started intensive experimentation, and soon became a leading figure in avant-garde and psychedelic music. His first solo electronic album was Katharsis.
This extremely original album earned him a lot of attention and many comparisons to the classics of electronic music genre, such as Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze. Noteworthy trivia – he was the first pop musician to use the Moog synthesizer in Poland.
Konrad Kucz
The youngest of the El-muzyka creators presented in this guide. His debut electronic album was released in 1993, and right from the start, he established himself as the most intriguing minimal/ambient artist, with his works inspired by Polish folklore and catholic spirituality. Throughout his career, he has recorded albums from industrial through kosmiche musik up to alternative pop – with the band Futro and then with the well-known singer Gaba Kulka. His name will come up again in this guide…
A Brief Step Aside Before We Get To Electronic Dance Music
Before we get to electronic dance music, there is one more character to be presented – Zbigniew Karkowski. He was a widely recognized composer of noise music (however, he always rejected being pigeonholed). His artistic attitude was the epitome of the constant chase for unlimited freedom. For this purpose, he left Europe as a teenager:
I never wanted to live and work in a society based on state grants (which is very common in Europe). I wanted to be independent, to make money on my work, without any institutional support, because I deeply believe that one‘s mind cannot really be free when you are always dependant on something. Without a free mind, there is no way good, strong things can be created – said Karkowski in an interview with Marcin Barski for Glissando Magazine.
Karkowski was very often opposed to the society of contemporary classical music. He used to criticise the fact that for 50 years, the same records had been sold and advertised (Steve Reich, Schönberg, Webern or Berg). He never took up an academic career, even though he was taught by the best masters imaginable (Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez and Georges Aperghis). Zbigniew Karkowski died of cancer in 2013 but his works and character remain iconic among listeners of truly avant-garde music all over the world.
Electronic Dance Music Seeps into Poland
To understand the beginnings of electronic dance music in Poland, a very brief historical background has to be presented. Until 1989, Poland was a communist country, therefore subject to several rules that applied to all states within the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. The most important of them was full state control of the media, travel abroad, and the import of goods. The way that the communist authorities executed this power was by ensuring there was no free and independent media, letting no one have permanent passport (you had to apply for it each time, and applications were rejected more often than not), and treating importing goods as the most suspicious of activities, which could easily bring the importer accusations of doing some dodgy dealings.
Electronic dance music was treated as a fruit of the moral decay of capitalist countries and was banished from the state-owned media. This is why until 1989, electronic dance music was almost absent from Polish music, and the only way it could get through the iron curtain was by private citizens buying vinyl records abroad and bringing a very limited number of copies to Poland in their own luggage. People like Krzysztof Knittel or Czesław Niemen, who could go on scholarships (Knittel in Buffalo) or tour abroad and buy synthesizers in Western Europe (Niemen), were some of the very few that had a chance to realize what the trends in new music looked like abroad. This is why the only word that appropriately describes the relationship the between Polish electronic music artists and those of the rest of world is: ISOLATION.
This is also why the first traces of Polish electronic dance music date back not to the 1970s but to the very late 1980s. In 1985, Polish punk band Bexa lala started introducing electronics into their music to create some sort of experimental ambient.
That was also the time when people already involved in creating listening electronic music and industrial rock started to engage in producing more dance-y tunes. One of the very first projects that was born this way was Trumpets & Drums. Daniel Kleczyński who was tired of being stuck in the industrial rock clichés decided to do something fresh. What he came up with was a combination of electro and heavy industrial sounds, resulting in music with a very dark and catastrophic mood.
The album Buy & Die was (ironically, given the title) the first and the last by Trumpets & Drums that was to be released in Poland (two more were released abroad in subsequent years), but their successors soon started to emerge. Bexa lala was in the game again. Its leader Cezary Ostrowski changed the band’s personnel once more and released an album inspired by industrial music and the early work of Prodigy.
1990s: Techno and House on the Full Throttle
In 1989 and 1990, Eastern Europe was finally emancipated from the yoke of the Soviet Union. In Poland, democracy gradually took over the power, and in Germany, the Wall dividing the country (and Berlin) was demolished. At that moment, the vivid, trance-like and hedonistic music from Detroit known as techno turned out to be the perfect soundtrack for the generation of youths coming out of the era of stagnation and overwhelming state control. In the documentary about the most famous Berlin techno club, The Story Of Tresor by Tilmann Künzel, the narrator says in the very first minutes of the film:
There was no freedom, there was frustration. When the wall came down, Techno arrived in Berlin. In 1990, 1991, 1992, the authorities were not interested in what we are doing. There was this feeling: ‘Hey, we can do whatever we want!’. The avalanche started and we went from a couple of hundred to about ten thousand people in one year.
The aura of spontaneity was present in Warsaw. Thanks to the new freedom to import music, DJs could buy vinyl records abroad, and they started playing pieces of all the new genres, non-existent in Poland until then: hip-hop, trance, jungle, breakbeat, etc. Moreover, it became standard for dance clubs to be organised into two rooms: one for dancing to techno, house or whatever, and the other, usually called the chill out room, where they served mostly ambient, minimal and later, trip hop. By this means young people could enjoy the freshest pieces from Western Europe and the United States.
Jacek Sienkiewicz & Recognition Recordings
One of the kids amazed by this wave of new music was Jacek Sienkiewicz. He started as a DJ but after his journey to Berlin, where he bought records by Robert Hood and Cristian Vogel, he started the gathering gear indispensable to a professional producer.
Eventually I bought a Roland TB303 in 1996 – he said in an interview with Paweł Gzyl for muzyka.onet.pl – At first I thought that it is enough to produce a whole piece but than I discovered it was only a bass synthesizer. This is how I started completing my equipment: TB303, then a sampler, drums, and other synthesizers. To be honest, I never stopped this process.
Jacek started producing in 1997, and in 1999 he self-released the very first Polish Techno album, titled Recognition. Surprisingly (for him as well) it became widely acclaimed not only in Poland but also abroad. He was invited to perform in the capitals of European electronic music – Berlin and London. Soon, he moved to Berlin and got the opportunity to record an album for Cocoon – a label owned and run by legendary DJ and producer Sven Väth. Jacek Sienkiewicz immediately became the most recognizable artist in Polish electronic dance music. In the following years, he released many magnificent albums and founded Recognition Recordings – to date, one of the strongest voices in Polish techno, gathering artists and collectives such as Chino, Sroczyński & Prus, Tumult Hands (Jacek Sienkiewicz is a part of it) and Jurek Przeździecki. Yet, when Jacek’s popularity started to grow, he backed down and continued his path as an uncompromising artist:
Back in the day, when I was beginning, everything was natural and spontaneous, people used to have fun and really devote themselves to music. Capitalism, though, did its job. Nowadays, electronic music has a similar status to pop and is subject to the rules of typical marketing. It is no longer the underground that I used to love. This is why I backtracked and decided to step aside. I returned to my psychedelic experiments designated to a more adventurous group of listeners.
Learn more about Jacek Sienkiewicz: