During the descent, you already sense the next peak on the horizon and, despite the despair at the bottom, you keep going until everything is over – eyes wide open and carry on or something like that, even when completely alone. Anyone who misses the feeling of community these days and longs for new moments of dissolution will find wistful accompanying music of anxious hope in Bartosz Kruczyński’s debut album. Wrapped in lush pads, the vital breakbeats on »LP1« invite you to indulge at least as much as to bob your head, with tears in your eyes, with burning sweat on your forehead. Fortunately, the mood is never really that clear-cut. In the guise of Earth Trax, the Polish producer has in recent years brought out gentle bipolar deep house of the kitsch-free variety via Dopeness Galore, Phonica or the Shall Not Fade subsidiary label Lost Palms, as well as others, and has proved to have great intuition for functional rhythmic textures, addictive loops but also sparingly employed vocals. Thus, he already had a whole series of similar EPs in the can before he derived »LP1« from them, which throws in acid and IDM in varying doses, but rarely leaves the house terrain Kruczyński is known for. In the almost ten-minute opener »I’m Not Afraid«, it becomes clear how well this structure works: here, crisp amen breaks wriggle over hazy warm pads that expand track by track as if it were a matter of course, until the track title becomes a comforting mantra between pan flute samples. Wanderlust resounds through this album, especially when euphoria and melancholy coincide. This is the case with »Copies of Copies« or the soaring »Your Fading Other«. »Pandora’s Box« and »Full Throttle«, on the other hand, ignite batteries of professionally sequenced laser arps, before »Adhocracy« and »Fade Away« with trance harmonies from 1995 dig for memories beyond the auricle – that one evening at the bathing lake, the smell of freshly cut grass, fleeting moments of mental peace. And again, and again syncopations in music and spirit, somewhere on the ridge between yesterday and today.
LP 1
