Fair’s Fair
In the mid-2010s, while I played in The Frozen North, the Polish music industry held several fairs in and around Warsaw. The weekly listings supplement Co Jest Grane 24, distributed with the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, organised the most famous event: a national music fair at the Palace of Culture and Science. Over time, some smaller independent music fairs began to spring up.
For a few years, Too Many Fireworks took out a stall at several of the fairs, including one of the more popular, held in the garden of the music bar, Eufemia. At the time, we had only a few physical releases remaining from the old days, and even fewer that Polish audiences would have recognised, so we used the opportunity less to sell records and more to introduce ourselves to the Polish market and build friendships — and boy, did we.
Mateusz
It was a beautiful, sunny August afternoon. A girl I was a little crazy about had visited our stall earlier, and it had subtly become clear she wasn’t into me at all. The stall was having a poor day, stuck – where we were – at the far end of the fair. I wanted to go home. One of the few visitors we had that afternoon was a quiet, bearded lad named Mateusz who had an album he wanted people to hear.
Mateusz Franczak was unknown to me at the time, which, given how much he’d been doing in music in Poland, was a little unforgivable. Still, this former saxophonist and talented improvisationalist, and maybe the kindest bloke in Polish music, had recorded his first solo album earlier that year in what he recently described to me as lonely nighttime recordings in the countryside, at a summer cottage overlooking a lake.
During our brief meeting at the fair, Mateusz handed me Long Story Short, a CD wrapped in a paper sleeve featuring a photograph of a zebra lit by flash against a beautiful sunset, and asked me to have a listen. I had recently parted ways with the first Polish band on Too Many Fireworks, a Lublin-based outfit, Plug&Play, and at the time, the only band making records for the label was my own, so I was open to new artists. Nevertheless, this chance meeting with Mateusz surprised me, and I had to shake myself out of the funk that my earlier romance-related disappointment had caused. I probably made some interested but, ultimately, non-commital noises about listening later with no real expectation that Mateusz would become a key fixture of Too Many Fireworks’ Polish adventure.
Long Story Short
Mateusz describes the album as ethereal and dreamy. I remember my first impression being how moving it was, soaked as it is in an ambient bath of reverb. I didn’t know it at the time, but retrospectively, Long Story Short was exactly the album I was looking for, for Too Many Fireworks. In Mateusz’s songs, there are shades of Bill Callahan, Will Oldham, and most importantly for me, David Pajo. Though there is no obvious melodic connection between Long Story Short and Papa M’s Live from a Shark Cage, Mateusz’s album opener, Lazing, put me in the same emotional room as I was when I first heard Drunken Spree.
Much later, I asked Mateusz how he recorded the album, and it was with an entirely minimalist set-up. He used only his favoured 1994 American Fender Stratocaster and a compact Roland GC-405 amplifier, which had previously only been used for practising at home, though it turned out to have a pretty interesting sound that worked for the record.
Present participles
The titles of the album are all one-word present participles. Some seem to be taken from lyrics, others from the mood of the song itself, and others still may be less literally connected to the music. As such, I wonder if the titles are related to the feelings of recording the record itself. When I asked Mateusz if there was something from the recording of the album that only he remembers, he told me there was an underlying sense of excitement and free-flowing improvisation. I do think this came through in my first listen.
Listening to the record now, I am struck by how beautiful it is in its darkness and the feeling of it being just out of reach. From Lazing‘s lilting melody to the squealing feedback on Moving, the record sways between delicate and fierce and it can get loud. In Crawling, there are strikes of distorted guitar that hit like a bell, among squalls of feedback that feel like a more consonant distant cousin of Gang of Four’s Love Like Anthrax.
Long Story Short was the first of several albums Mateusz would feature on for Too Many Fireworks. We released the record on CD and digital download on April 15th, 2016, and we gave it the catalogue number 2mf020. You can listen to the album here