Review

Bartosz Kruczynski

Dreams & Whispers

Balmat • 2024

Ambient music has the great advantage of being incredibly easy to listen to. There are no intrusive melodies, no harsh frequencies, no insistent rhythms, just a constitutive softness of contours, whether it’s suggested percussive patterns, sound sequences that seem ready to take flight but remain grounded, or the proverbial cloud-like textures that can work in the background but, if handled with the necessary skill, can also be followed with floating attention with great reward.

Polish producer Bartosz Kruczynski, who is also active as a club musician with the Earth Trax project, has chosen an ambient approach for his debut on the Balmat label, one that explores these various nuances. One side of the album offers »Dreams«, the other »Whispers«. It’s not that they’re categorically different things; perhaps there’s a bit more pattern in the dreams, while the whispers prefer to play with textures. They all make pleasant miniatures. And they make excellent companions to the unconscious. At least they’re excellent for dreaming, as a personal experiment has shown.