Though largely forgotten now – even by members of the group themselves – my first band in Poland, the post-rock effort, the Frozen North had an exciting first year. Recording, radio, TV, wee festivals, TEDxWarsaw, and other bits and pieces.
An Art Gallery on Mars
In late 2014, before a malaise and eventual collapse the next year, we were invited by an organisation to create music for a project that planned to send an art gallery to Mars. The further in time I travel from that meeting, the more I think I may have hallucinated the whole thing.
To some degree, I took the creative lead, and heavily influenced by Krzysztof Penderecki, I took an avant-garde approach. Over time, the piece took shape, with the violins of the band providing the cacophonous spine, surrounded by scraped cymbals, bowed bass, and MAX MSP-processed guitar. We invited a choir of our friends to join us in our rehearsal room, and we recorded them reciting random and different pages of the Saturn V technical manual as I conducted – a first for me.
For reasons that are plentiful, the band suffered a crippling slow-down over the next year, and we largely disappeared, losing the momentum and good feeling we’d gained in our first. By the time we split, the piece was a distant memory and lay on my hard-drive for several years.
Foundations Festival
In late 2018, I traveled with a Rickenbacker, a laptop, and, for the first time, a singing voice, to perform at a small festival in Manchester in England. The organisers asked me to provide a video installation, and I fell upon the idea of something of a retrospective of the music I’d made so far. An hour of music featuring everything from Troika, through my solo modern-classical and ambient stuff, through the Frozen North, and the remixes I’d done for bands like VLMV and Worriedaboutsatan, and finishing with music from my solo power-pop, and (what would be come) Pop-up Books, indie-pop.
As I scoured through hard drives and folders, I came across the unmixed Logic Pro session of this avant-garde thing. Alongside Tomek Walczak, who gave me a couple of pointers, I spent some weeks dipping into it. I added some sounds, and I removed others (one member of the band doesn’t appear at all – other than in the “choir”, for no other reason than the audio just didn’t quite fit), and eventually I finished and mixed it down. Once done, I added some strange glitchy video created on my iPhone, named it Marain as an allusion to Iain M. Banks and the sci-fi origins of the piece, then I added it to the film, not expecting anyone other than the festival attendees to see it.
Marain: A Tribute of Sorts
When I heard that Penderecki had died, I decided to bring it back, as he was quite an influence on me. While the composition and mix are clearly derivative in their influence, they are deliberately so. I put it up on my Instagram, and people seemed to really enjoy it. It became a tribute of sorts. Since then, I’ve forgotten about Marain to some degree until last night I stumbled upon it and thought I should write a little about it.
Thank you to Aga, Kasia, Tomek, Filip, and Dave for the time spent in the Frozen North, and their work on this.
