(2022) Naphta - Zalosc  


Review:
Active in the Polish dance music scene since the late '00s, Paweł Klimczak has crossed over into more genres than most, starting out with dubstep and techno as Naphta. With his backing band the Shamans, he presented his own take on Afrobeat and jazz, while in the duo Gaijin Blues with Michał Szczepaniec, he explores a love of Japanese pop culture. But now, after more than a decade behind the decks, Klimczak is embarking on a journey to discover his roots. Starting with 2021's Dom Strawiło (The House Burned Down) EP, released on Kraków label Tańce, Klimczak turned away from foreign inspirations and focused on Polish village music. Its neglect in wider contemporary Polish culture can feel strange given that the majority of Poles have their roots in the countryside. The country's neighbors—Slovakia, Lithuania, Ukraine—are proud of their rural, lower class roots, while it seems Poles would rather forget about them. This paradox is easy to understand, however, when you consider that Polish serfs were once de facto slaves—coerced into hard agricultural work, beaten on a daily basis, whole families and even villages could be sold off or donated—of the szlachta, or local gentry. They only gained personal freedom in the 19th century and were not considered proper Poles until the end of that century. The culture of higher social classes was, and still is, considered better and more sophisticated. Only the szlachta carried on Polishness during the Partitions period, when the modern Polish nation was born. Lower-class culture became a footnote to a grand history and something one should be ashamed of. If someone with a peasant or worker background wanted to advance socially, they had to conceal their roots and internalize social mores of szlachta and, later on, the middle class. Żałość—Polish for grief—is Naphta's most personal record to date. It's both a call to rediscover one's roots and a manifesto of his own rootlessness. Born in Western Poland (called the Regained Territories in post-WWII communist propaganda) to a family of displaced persons from the former Eastern borderlands, Klimczak felt unsettled, disconnected from the past. That's why he chose to look for samples from all over Polan. Different regions stand side by side in his music. He samples fiddles, bagpipes, frame drums and vocals and joins them in new, surprising ways, as if he was attempting to create a new 21st century version of traditional music. This is a music with its foundation in the past but looking to the future, trying to answer the needs of contemporary urban culture. One of the rare moments when a serf could feel free were dance parties lasting all night. Folk bands would play trance-like, transgressive oberki and mazurkas for people to dance their troubles and traumas away to. Klimczak sees here a "strange parallel," to quote Victor Lieberman, an influential researcher on global history, with club music. Even though sonically radically different, these tracks serve the same purpose: to provide shelter, a safe space away from the brutal reality. For a short period, the rules are lifted. Naphta emphasizes this parallel by sampling archival recordings of village music, made by Andrzej Bieńkowski, a figure of Alan Lomax-like stature in Poland, and mixing them with drilling bass, dubstep tempos and techno intensity. In "Rozpust," where Naphta turns the intensity up to 11, you basically have to dance. Sometimes Załość reminds me of the reckless abandon of Nyege Nyege artists like Nihiloxica, stripping music down to the rhythm but still feeling dense and overwhelming, like on "Bruzdy w ziemi ryte." The rhythm is everything—life is, in its core, the vibration of matter. Still, this is dark, sometimes depressing music. Naphta grieves all those folk musicians who have died without deserved recognition, but never tries to romanticize this bygone era and culture either. In some interviews he gave after the release, Klimczak always noted that this was a world full of discrimination—class, gender, religious—though, ultimately, still the world Poles came from. It may be muddy, sometimes ugly, but these are our roots, he seems to be saying with the music. The album's highlights are the three tracks that feature Zosia Hołubowska, a vocalist trained in traditional white voice techniques (a bright, loud method of singing from Eastern Europe popularized in the west by the Les Mysteres des voix Bulgaires choir), who performs as Mala Herba. Her artistic persona is a whisperer, a witch and a rusalka—the Slavic counterpart to a nymph—and here she channels the impulses that governed pre-modern rural life, when the supernatural was an inherent part of daily life. Her voice is hypnotic and seductive, but it also evokes daydreaming and surreality. Żałość is a part of a broader movement across semi-peripheral societies, a rejection of the old hierarchies that put New York, London, Paris above Warsaw, Kampala, Kyiv or Tangier. It's a voice for multipolarity, regaining subjectivity and agency on its own terms. Naphta seeks inspiration in his own heritage and surroundings, but is also a keen observer of dance music world wide. Taking the elements of dubstep and drill, combining them with Polish village tradition he creates music that is both local and global. Żałość is proudly Slavic and Eastern European, but also urban and universal. — ra.co


   


Track List:
01 - Chodź tu do mnie feat. Mala Herba
02 - Pąk feat. Mala Herba
03 - Z pomienionym tańcowanie
04 - Bruzdy w ziemi ryte
05 - Rozpust
06 - Pieśń rusalna
07 - Kwiecik
08 - Żałość


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, electronic
Country: Kraków, Poland
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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