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Dariusz MAZUROWSKI (b.1966)
Electronic music
Pseudaria (2011) [30:59]
Divertimento (2010) [31:58]
Music composed, performed and engineered by Mazurowski
rec. Oct 2010-Feb 2011, De e M Studio.
World Premiere Recordings
ACTE PREALABLE AP0241 [63:02]

 
Dariusz Mazurowski is a master of the synthesiser. That much is evident from these two half-hour pieces. He also has the distinction of being a virtuoso practitioner of the modeller’s craft. Have a look at his website where his penchant for modelling German Imperial warships of the Great War is most impressively on display. He mentions his musical leanings in the modelling website but his modelling is not mentioned in the CD booklet. What is mentioned is his interest in cinema, astronomy, nature, fight sports, animals, literature and maritime wars and fighting ships of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Also very active as a journalist, he was born in Gdansk and his only musical education came in the form of two years of piano lessons. His avant-garde music appeared in the early 1990s under the names Adrian Rott and Stone Dancer. A small independent label issued his first CD in 1990. He honed his electronic music skills in Prague in the 1990s. His music takes into the mix the sounds of conventional instruments, instruments he has invented and analogue synthesisers using tube technology.
 
Pseudaria is a twelve episode sequence of electronic music postcards of between 4:00 and 1:22: 1 Prologue (Reference Level) – chittering, sink gurgles and arc-welding noises [2:09]; 2 Postcard from Prague - distant pneumatic drill and gloopy noises [3:26]; 3 Distant Twinkle – remote star noises [3:15]; 4 Strings to Nowhere – like an electronic sitar [4:00]; 5 Random Resonances 1 – short-wave radio blather [1:22]; 6 Caravan – pulsy chewing noises [1:52]; 7 Ghost Battleship – sounds evocative of submarine warfare [1:31]; 8 Random Resonances 2 – distant planetary signals [2:10]; 9 Vintage Photograph – radio interference [3:26]; 10 Garden Gate – steel band sounds but tautened and not resonating [2:08]; 11 Empty Cages – distorted atmospherics [3:13]; 12 Epilogue (Definition of Decibel) – silvery phone ringing with pixellated speech and then a real female voice defining decibel [2:27].
 
Divertimento is a single continuous half hour span. Incidents are quite distinct and could easily have been separately tracked. It’d a shame they weren’t. Glassy dulled metallic noises, intimations of Morse, electronic burbles, deep-cycling murmurs, heart-beat warbles, liquid sloshing into galvanised hollow-ware, gloomy bell sounds arriving at the ears through what might be a dense haze of mustard gas, bleeting homing signals (remember the one Samuel Barber used in the middle movement of the Second Symphony), distorted meepy-wheepy noises, electronic interference, irate insect noises, teddy bear growls and exhalations of breath. It’s remarkable that these sounds, often pretty quiet, carry the resonance of real sounds and of early 20^th century science, metallurgy, factories, dreadnoughts and other machines of destruction. One can imagine this score working well with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

The booklet which is in Polish and English was written by the composer.
 
You will know whether these atmospheric and richly varied sound assemblages are for you. They do hold the ‘ear’ but I doubt I will come back to this disc at all often.
 

Rob Barnett