If Miłosz Kędra’s music evokes a sure ruined grandeur—crumbling Gothic facades, vine-snarled spires, centuries-old bricks floor to mud—these ideas will not be solely metaphorical. The Poznań composer performs an instrument that he designed himself, using steel and picket pipes scavenged from previous church organs throughout Higher Poland—some battered and bent, some leaning at odd angles. Sheets of paper stapled round their ideas seem like miniature sails; the bellows seems to be held along with duct tape. Kędra has in contrast the rhythm of the bellows to a heartbeat, however that is no bizarre mortal pulse: The instrument’s jagged structure resembles some fantastical robotic monster’s ribcage.
By taking the pipes out of their liturgical setting and Frankensteining them into such an odd new configuration, Kędra could be reminding us that church organs had been at all times meant to appear futuristic and superhuman—instruments to maintain the lots cowering earlier than God. His new album, their inner diapasons, demolishes such hierarchies, rendering the pipe organ’s basic thriller in unusually intimate phrases. Quite than looming imposingly above listeners, it meets them on their degree; instead of triumphant harmonies and mathematical perfection are detuned intervals and tender, pleading sighs. Early Christians typically constructed their church buildings atop pagan temples, obliterating all hint of the faiths that preceded them; Kędra’s album feels prefer it’s rewilding sacred floor, unleashing spirits that had been trapped for hundreds of years.
their inner diapasons begins with a whisper, air catching in opposition to steel edges. It’s a profoundly bodily sound, redolent of warmth and friction—midway between noise and music, tones struggling to take form from the hiss. The palette expands on “airborne,” the place tentative, wheezing bursts alternate with vivid, declarative chords. You may really feel the hassle of the air straining via the pipes; transferring in brief, jabbing strokes, the rhythm has the dogged pulse of a piece tune. In “principale,” a fistful of flickering drones rise and fall in pitch, microtonal vibrations rolling in waves because the notes rub in opposition to one another. The shirred textures counsel a touch of what could be digital manipulation, an impression that turns into stronger in “for a way lengthy had been you silenced?,” the place glitching chords lower out and in, and a spectral voice moans within the silvery haze.
It’s tempting to check Kędra’s album to Kali Malone’s organ music, with its uncommon tuning programs and eerie harmonies, however a more in-depth comparability could be Mica Levi’s Beneath the Pores and skin—like that soundtrack, Kędra’s album ceaselessly ideas into the realm of pure texture, virtually unnervingly extreme. “drzazgi”—“splinters” in Polish—is the album’s darkest monitor, buffeted by foghorn blasts, hooting owls, and what could be a sack of flour being dropped on a stone flooring.