Since my early years, I’ve been observing with the natural forms, colours, lights, and both near and distant perspectives. Gradually, frequent, sometimes multi-day trips into the outdoors also became an opportunity for listening (as well as touching and scenting). The palette of conscious sensations expanded.
Visual forms, and now the audiosphere—organic rustles, repetitions, melodies, noises, sonic planes—evoke in me ecstatic stirrings akin to longing and sorrow, interwoven with joy, emotion, and hope. A phenomenon, an impulse, a sign triggers a reaction and immediately afterwards, a need to respond.
Unlike many artists working with the medium of field recording, I do not withdraw or disappear to let nature deliver a monologue, as advocated by New Materialism philosophy. I prefer conversation, relationship, reciprocity, participation. My response is music in which there is space for both.
Some time ago, while sitting by a river, I heard a sonic arrangement composed of three notes of a chaffinch’s call, the irregular rhythm of percussive knocks from two tree trunks hitting each other in the wind, and the rising and falling background of rustling birch, oak, and pine leaves and needles.
I recreated this arrangement in the studio. A sound note recorded on my phone was converted into MIDI notes, used as triggers for instruments—piano, percussion, vocals—adhering to the melody and rhythm dictated by nature. I added piano chords, treating them as the aforementioned responses or comments, communicating emotion.
This is how ‘Fringilla’ came to be—the first of the pieces that make up the album “Idylla”. The following compositions were created using a similar approach: transposing audio notes into MIDI, though not always consistently—sometimes the human commentary takes the lead, but always with the intention of preserving the natural phenomena and engaging in dialogue with them.
Alongside the piano, voices take centre stage—vocal samples recorded with the invaluable 441 Hz Choir from Gdańsk, under the direction of Anna Borkowicz. The background layers consist of nature recordings stretched to extreme lengths in time.
“Idylla” is the last part of the nature-inspired triptych perhaps closest to both myself and nature. The triptych includes two earlier albums recorded for the London-based publisher, Touch: “Catalogue des Arbres” and “Gardenia”.
