Michał Jacaszek during the C3 2012 Festival, photo: press release
One of the original figures in Polish electronic and electroacoustic music performs two gigs for U.S. audiences. Jacaszek plays in Seattle on the 20th of July and in Los Angeles on the 21st of July
The first concert takes place as part of Michigan’s audiovisual festival, Substrata 1.3. The young artist plays pieces from his latest album Glimmer, released by the Ghostly International label in 2011. He is accompanied by local musicians Kelly Wyse on harpsichord, and Beth Fleenor who plays the clarinet. For the Californian concert, L.A.’s Automata club resonates with haunting material from Jacaszek’s earlier record, Pentral (Gusstaff, 2009).
Glimmer is an album which has garnered international acclaim. America’s leading music platform, Pitchfork, gave it 7.7 points out of 10. Throughout the record electroacoustic sounds reverberate in twines with live harpsichord and clarinet, for a wistful and stirring baroque-like effect. According to Pitchfork:
Rather than simply process previously recorded sounds, [Jacaszek] smartly trusses those qualities, shaping an album that feels like some science-fiction waking dream. In an atmosphere that's very pleasant but vaguely eerie, the humans and the robots interact, each occasionally slipping behind the cover of the other. Jacaszek's again craftily corroded another binary.
Glimmer's nine tracks work best as a whole, built with hard-won peaks and long-sloped valleys that disappear into the distance. (...) Think of Glimmer as a little symphony, just with singles, and made by a musician who can't decide between the roles of producer or composer. Really, he shouldn't anytime soon.
The earlier Pentral fits somewhere between ambient and concrete music, and it is based mostly on recordings of the “air” of gothic cathedrals, with minimal sound attempts to convey the atmosphere of a shrine’s interior. The pieces on Pentral were recorded by Jacaszek in three churches of the Polish Tricity area - the Mariacki cathedral in Gdańsk, the Archcathedral in Oliwa and Gdańsk’s Dominican church.
In a review for the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, Paweł Janas wrote:
The thing is its own kind of a sound collage, although thanks to the carefully thought-out structure we avoid a sense of unclarity or chaos. Moreover, the whole takes on a almost contemplative quality. While evoking the technique of open-air recordings, Jacaszek gave the interiors of gothic shrines their own voice.
The musician’s tour in the U.S. is financed by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as well as the City of Gdańsk as part of its Cultural Scholarship (Stypendium Kulturalne Miasta Gdańska).
JN, translated by Paulina Schlosser, source jacaszek.com, press release, 11.07.2013