Jakub Janicki's (performing as Qba Janicki) childhood and youth are inseparably linked with the Bydgoszcz-based club Mózg established in 1994. Open for artistic explorations, the place soon became an unofficial headquarters of the Yass scene – the most exciting Polish movement in improvised music of the time. The club's founders spent most of their lives there, playing, listening, and forming an artistic community. Janicki recalled:
They were there all the time, and I was with them […]. I regularly listened to what they were doing. It was my daily entertainment. In between rehearsals, I often sat at the instrument and played a bit myself. It is how I took my first steps in improvisation, thinking in terms of music and sound in general.
The fact that percussion is the instrument Janicki has specialised in is also a result of his club-based life. After all, as the artist says, it's an instrument that doesn't like to shuffle around. So if there is a club and a rehearsal room, there are often drums there. Janicki took his first steps playing on the instruments of Jacek Buhl (Trytony), Tomasz Dorn (Abaddon) and Jacek Majewski (Arhythmic Perfection). Listening to music for the future drummer would not end even at night. 'I often slept in the dressing room behind the toilets, so I woke up many times during the night', Janicki said. 'Then I would go in my pyjamas to my father, so he would come and play me something to sleep on his double bass'.
Until he left for Kraków to study, Janicki was at Mózg almost every day. It was only natural for him to go to the club straight from school to meet his friends, flirt with girls and listen to music. He worked there at all jobs: as a sound engineer, bartender and a delivery boy. 'I was only fired once – as a janitor. I came to work hungover and fell asleep with a mop in my hand. My father got pissed off because the club was untidy'. In retrospect, the artist admits that Mózg shaped him not only musically but also ideologically:
Thanks to it, at a very young age, I exactly knew what my path in life was.