Young musician, prepare for a meeting with your God! Prepare yourself in such a way so that your heart approaches only towards Music. Cleanse your body and choose a secluded place where no one will be able to hear your voice. Sit there in your cell, and reveal your secret to no one.
If you can, do it at home during the day, though it would be best if you did it at night. Be vigilant in your efforts to turn all thoughts away from the disgust and filth of this world, at the moment when you prepare yourself for entering into conversation with Music, when you desire for Her to reveal Her powers to you. Surround yourself with instruments, place one hand on the turntable, the second on the guitar, the third on the trumpet, and then place all your other hands on electronic equipment. Clean your garments. It would be best, in fact, if they were all black, as all this helps to incite in the heart a love and awe for Music. When night finally falls, light a few candles, so that it will not be completely dark, then, take the instruments into your hands and think about the fact that soon you will be serving Music with bliss in your ears.
Then, begin to juxtapose a few sounds with each other, alternate their places, and put them together, until your heart warms up, and the surrounding space becomes filled with pleasant oscillations. And when you feel that inside your ears it is getting too hot, and when you see that thanks to the musical combinations you can suddenly grasp new things that you would have never grasped neither through textbooks on musical traditions nor by your own powers, and when you are finally ready to receive a stream of musical power – then direct all of your true hearing to imagining the Picture of Music inside your heart, as if she was standing beside you.
And when you finally hear everything for yourself in your mind, put all of your intellect to work to embrace with your thoughts these various sounds, hums, crackles, and even melodies, all that which will enter your ears and your heart through thought, and think about them in general and then in all their minute detail, just like someone who is being told a parable, or a dream, or like someone who is pondering a deep problem from a scientific book.
Your whole body will be taken over by a strong quivering, you will think that anyway, one day you will grow deaf, because due to the excessive joy of this kind of knowledge, your soul and your hearing will begin to separate themselves from your body. It is at this instant that you should be ready to consciously choose silence, and then you will learn that you have moved far enough to be able to accept and take these sounds inside you. Then, return to the body’s affairs, get up, eat something and drink, or cheer yourself up with some nice scent and force your hearing back in, although it tries to break free. And rejoice in your fate, and know that Music loves you.
*
My encounters with Bezkrólewie took place every few days, over a period of about two weeks. They were quite intense, because Bezkrólewie is an album that lasts over an hour and it’s very difficult to break away from it. Every musical thought expressed there leads to another one, even if sometimes they have little to do with each other. When you interrupt such an alluring compound of sounds, it’s hard to function normally afterwards, scraps of melodies and crackles keep on reiterating in the back of the mind. They are scraps that seem worthy of tidying up, but since they no longer resonate, what can you do? That’s why, during a morning staff meeting, I declared that I would write the following review of this record:
It is such a strange project. Over a year ago, I wrote about their album Zła Krew / Bad Blood, I don’t really actually know what genre of music this is, but there is both trance and improvisation there."
Then I concluded that it’s a bit indecent – did I really want to analyse the meeting of these musicians, to describe it, and then maybe even judge it? That is completely meaningless, and it even makes me think of some obnoxious voyerism. I listened to Bezkrólewie once again, and then I remembered a text that I once read. Although it deals with something completely different, it seems to me that after adaptation it is perfectly capable of rendering the process of making and listening to music, the kind of music which we conveniently label as trance, improv, and psychadelic.
The instructions cited above paraphrase commandments pronounced by a 13th century kabbalah mystic from Andalusia, Abraham ben Shlom Abulafi, a representative of the prophetic trend in kabbalah. Gerschom Scholem quotes him in his book titled Mistycyzm żydowski i jego główne kierunki (Jewish Mysticism and Its Main Currents) (Warsaw 2007, trans. Ireneusz Kania).
Msza święta w Altonie (The Holy Mass in Altona) is a project by two groups, kIRk and Altona. The Mass squad includes Paweł Bartnik, Olgierd Dokalski, Filip Kalinowski and Wojciech Kwapisiński. The recordings were made on the 22nd and 23rd of February, 2014, in Studio Centralna in Płock. The recordings are excerpts from longer sessions.
The record is available for listening through the website of The Quietus magazine
Msza święta w Altonie – Bezkrólewie (Holy Mass in Altona, Interregnum) was released by Requiem Records in June, 2014.
Author: Filip Lech, translated by Paulina Schlosser, 11/07/2014
