Igor Boxx, photo: www.domicil-dortmund.de
Igor Pudło began his musical career in 2000 with his friend Marcin Cichy, founding the DJ and production duo Skalpel. Their aim was to take Poland's jazz traditions and bring them into the future with innovative electronic sampling and production, letting new audiences rediscover jazz legends like Tomasz Stańko. Their music was noticed by the London-based Ninja Tunes label and they published two albums that were well-received by the critics. In 2004 pitchfork.com praised the album's, "fluid, meandering solo samples that help push Skalpel above decaffeinated café jazz. The inclusion of liner notes detailing the original players they've sampled here gives some insight into their modus operandi, and a pleasant effect of the duo keeping enough of the original players' bars intact is that the music absorbs some of the soloists' stylistic overtones, without ever feeling like shameless plundering". In 2005 Skalpel received the Passport award from the Polityka weekly for their “unique marriage of jazz and electronica, for an easy and creative crossing of the boundaries between musical styles”.
As Igor Boxx says of his music,
I’m old enough to remember the birth of punk rock, witness the glorious days of golden era of hip-hop and to evolve with my homeland Poland from communism to capitalism and from analogue to digital with my music, and since 1991 I help the entropy by being a DJ and mixing music (without stylistic limitations) and other noise that people, animals and machines make. I cut and paste all that jazz.
Several years later Pudło established himself as Igor Boxx and founded his solo project known as Breslau. Breslau is heavily rooted in the historic-political legacy of what is today the Polish city of Wrocław, formerly Breslau - until it was renationalised at the end of World War II. Agnieszka Le Nart writes about Breslau's music on Biweekly.pl
Boxx reverts back to his earliest memories and impressions of the city in order to create a very ambient sound that brings together dance, punk, jazz and rock, interspersed with various snippets of original film dialogues and other curiosities. Overall, the album is a musical fantasy based on the siege of Festung Breslau by the Red Army in 1945. The resulting sound is like a time machine that zips audiences through the vinyl era, live jazz, blues, big band and swing, the furtive pursuit of samizdat recordings in the time of the iron curtain, a hit of hip-hop and a sudden blast into the eerie, futuristic sirens and tempos of contemporary club music – with a twist of Tarantino. It is a sweep through all of Europe, landing with a thud between the East and West – the heart of Central Europe.
With such a deep-seated, complex background, Boxx is not your run-of-the-mill DJ – but he’s taken a heavy topic and poked some fun into it, playing with the notions of historical fact, fiction and the way human memory wavers between the two, gathering a great deal of nostalgic dust in the process. The video Boxx’s Last Party in Breslau is a graphic roast depicting Nazi soldiers enjoying a decadent evening at a local cabaret just as the city is getting bombed. The drunken revelry is punctuated by a jumpy, swing-inspired soundtrack that is fun, but cut with a sharply sinister edge. It carries the spirit of carpe diem with the promise of payback lurking just around the corner.
Igor Boxx is performing works off of the Breaslau album at the Domocil Club in Dortmund as part of the 2012 Klopsztanga cultural programme.
For more information, see http://www.myspace.com/igorboxx
Sources: Biweekly
