Musician, guitarist, vocalist, music producer and educator. One of the pioneers of field recordings in Poland. He has created noise-rock, minimalist electronica and improvised music. He is a curator of exhibitions and an educator. His interest could successfully fill several biographical articles.
Marcin Dymiter (born 1971 in Słupsk) recalls that already as a child he was interested in so many different things that he could not decide on one direction – education at a music school. However, from this period he well remembers the songs he listened to on the radio, radio plays, and the soundtrack of plays for young audiences.
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Going regularly to the puppet theatre with my mother was – this I can see in retrospect – very important. These performances aroused my admiration, but it was the music and special effects that particularly impressed me.
Eventually, Dymiter became fascinated by the guitar. Initially in its classical form. The artist remembers studying fragments of classical pieces and popular songs. This learning didn’t last long, however, as the classical guitar was quickly supplanted by the electric guitar. He recalls:
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I got my first such instrument from my dad, it was a black Jolana Diamant. Classics and pretty songs were replaced by guitar feedback, noise and energy. It’s hard to consider me a “classically” trained musician.
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Cover art for Ewa Braun's album 'Stereo', photo: publisher's press materials
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From the aforementioned noise and feedback, Ewa Braun was born in 1990 – one of the most important groups of the Polish underground, founded by Rafał Szymański, Dariusz Dudziński and Dymiter. A cult band that evolved with successive albums, moving from committed hardcore-punk towards noise-rock and post-rock. Long trance-like songs based on the raw sound of guitars and lyrical lyrics, sung from the perspective of a person commenting on the accelerating reality of exploding capitalism, built the myth of the Słupsk group. And it should be remembered that it was a special scene on the punk map at the time, one that gave birth to Karcer and Guernica y Luno among others.
Dymiter explains:
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At the time, the map of cultural activity in Poland looked different, and sometimes all it took was a few people for a city to make its mark on it. At the time, the independent scene was taking an accelerated course in grassroots activism and survivalism in the realities of the transformation and the hard-liberal reality of Poland in the 1990s. There were no grants or subsidies, and yet people were active, which I still admire.
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Cover of Ewa Braun's album 'Esion', photo: publisher's press materials
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Map of inspiration
Despite the success of Ewa Braun, Dymiter also sought an outlet for his creativity in other groups. As early as 1997, he joined the Tricity band Mordy, with whom he recorded four albums, for which the rock tradition was only one of many points of reference. In the pages of Antena Krzyku magazine, the following was written about the debut Normalform: ‘Abstract vibes, improvisatory freedom, jazz feeling, dub-noise cut.’ Although Mordy boldly drew on music scenes scattered across different periods, styles and continents, the recordings that Dymiter made with Paul Wirkus were even more surprising.
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It's somewhat a hassle that if you play noisy music on guitar, people think you only listen to that kind of music. Paul and I were both active in noise bands at the time, but we were both listening to revolutionary jazz from the 1960s, the Japanese scene, the Tzadik label, Steve Reich’s minimalism, Komeda, Can, Tortoise, Ruins and new electronica from Germany. Mapa was born out of a fascination with all this.
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Marcin Dymiter, photo: Łukasz Głowala / Forum
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The artist admits that a similar sensibility and shared inspirations were not the only things we had in common. Equally important was curiosity about the form and a desire to go beyond the rock, or punk, canon. A growing need to find a new, more personal language. Eventually, Dymiter and Wirkus found it in minimalist post-rock immersed in electronic effects and loops. Released in 1998, Fudo was in line with trends eagerly explored in the North American and German independent scene at the time. Not surprisingly, the album was also reviewed in the foreign media. Among others, the British magazine The Wire wrote about it in a positive light. Dymiter recalls:
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Working on “Fudo” was very interesting. Wirkus lived in Cologne, so we recorded ideas on cassettes, sent letters, and then talked on the phone. And let me remind you that international calls were nightmarishly expensive at the time.
Emiter & other emissions
The beginning of the 21st century was a time of major changes in Dymiter’s musical development. Mapa ceased to exist after the release of one album, while the Ewa Braun group broke up in 2002. Marcin Dymiter still recorded the improvised, Tortoise-inspired Antrology (2004) with Morda, but left the group a while later. The artist began composing music for theatre performances, collaborating with Ludomir Franczak, the Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre in Gdańsk and the Contemporary Theatre in Szczecin.
Dymiter has recorded experimental radio plays and music for films. His guitar can be heard in the documentary Beksińscy. A Videophone Album and the feature film Simple Things directed by Grzegorz Zariczny. Although he ultimately did not take the classical education path, he developed artistically by participating in scholarships, conferences and workshops on improvisation, sound art and composition (under the tutelage of Le Quan Ninh, John Butcher and Robin Minard, among others).
Dymiter often applied the lessons he learned from the workshops to the recordings he made as Emiter, a project he started in 2000. Initially, echoes of Mapa can be heard in it: less guitar, less distortion, clear themes, repetition.
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Since the first album, “#1” and “#2: Static” and the mini-albums “#3” and “#4”, I have been working on a sound that would combine guitar with electronics, loops and slowly introduced field recordings. The breakthrough in this process was the album ‘Sinus’, which opened an electronic chapter with no guitar involved.
Dymiter sometimes invited other musicians to record albums. Regardless of the line-up, one of Emiter’s aims was to cover up the boundaries between electronic sounds and the sounds of the world around him.
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Contrary to appearances, there are not that many field recordings on Emiter’s albums. I sometimes talk about it with people who hear them, for example on the album “Sinus Balticus”. These supposed sounds of the world are music, electronics. It’s a miracle of listening, of creating worlds.
Field operations
Similar confusions are justified not only by the similarities between these two sound worlds, but also by the biography of the artist, who is associated with field recordings not without reason. Dymiter has been involved in field recording since the beginning of the 21st century. He records soundscapes, which he publishes as part of the Field Notes series, or implements them into other recordings; he conducts educational workshops and sound walks. Together with Marcin Barski, he also curated the exhibition Polish Soundscapes, the first cross-sectional presentation of domestic field recording.
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Mostly I prepare for the recordings: I read, look at maps, do research. Something has to interest me, make me think about a place. I don’t count the hours in the field, sometimes I record very little in a given month. Because it’s not like with instant messaging, you’re there all the time, you’re posting. With me it’s a process, good recordings take time, thinking, listening.
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Cover of Marcin Dymiter's book 'Notes from the field', photo: 'Części proste' Publishing House
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The result of such reflection accompanying listening is the collection of essays Notatki z Terenu [Notes from the Field], published in 2021 by Części Proste. The accounts of distant and nearby journeys with the microphone are accompanied by reflections on culture, history, nature or the ecology of sound. For years, Dymiter has been offering similar reflections to participants of workshops, sound walks and other educational activities.
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This is an important part of what I do: meeting, communicating, sharing experiences. Listening is an open proposal, an attempt to broaden our understanding of processes, to catch those elements that build our sound environment. I would like my workshop work, to be an element that connects, opens up the field of common issues, makes us talk and think about the audio sphere.
Even if field recordings are at the centre of interest, they do not dominate Dymiter’s artistic explorations. His work remains multifaceted and consistently avoids categorisation. The artist participated in a world exhibition on sound art curated by Francisco Lopez (Audiosphere: Sound Experimentation 1980-2020) organised by the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid. Since 2010, he has been active in the guitar project niski szum [low noise], performing works at the intersection of drone music, indie folk and minimalism. Surprisingly, he also returned to creating with Wirkus, resulting in the Mapa duo’s second album – No Automatu (2017). A year later, on the other hand, the debut album of the trio Trys Saulés was released, whose raw post-rock, grown out of improvisation, must have brought associations with the late recordings of Ewa Braun. It was as if Marcin Dymiter decided to remind us that the evolution of an artist occurs through the development of what is, and not through the elimination of what was.
