We are happy to announce that:
Out now!
032 Paweł PAULUS MAZUR "1984-1989 Dźwięki Zebrane czyli Ultra Music Box (Arc_Hiv Positiv) No. 1"
6 x CD-R in metal box + 16 pages booklet
limited edition of 100 copies.
Price: 70 zł / 17 Eu
While Britain of the 1970s had her GENESIS P-ORRIDGE, his Polish counterpart in the following decade was Paweł "PAULUS" MAZUR – a total artist of multiple talents, ever evading pigeon-holing of his artistic self: a composer, instrumentalist, performance artist, painter, graphic artist, comic book maker and underground magazine editor, actor, film director, radio host, poet, and writer. Born in Lublin, having spent his childhood in Zamość and adolescence in Nałęczów, currently residing in Gdańsk, he couldn't have found himself in conditions more conducive to the development of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary artistic awareness. Or perhaps for something different altogether, namely impairing the innate ability to integrate with the surroundings, community, generally accepted aesthetic canons, language of expression, and culture.
In 1982, barely 14, he made his first musical experiments, involving single piano chords juxtaposed with dissonant sounds of the piano wire he struck and sparse collages he prepared with a tape recorder. In 1984 he went on to start his first official musical project, called ZKS (short for ZMECHANIZOWANE KRĘGI SZYJNE, Polish for Mechanised Cervical Vertebrae). His instrumentation at that time included percussion, noise generators, piano wires, and tape collages of field recordings. Over the next years he formed a number of short-lived projects: TRZY GODZINY (Three Hours), PAP (also abbreviation for Polish Press Agency), PO SCHODACH (Up/Down the Stairs), and KOŚCIOTRUP (Skeleton), in which he combined diverse stylings, ranging from avant-garde electronic music through the industrial avant-garde of rock music to cold wave and post-punk. The extant works proved well ahead of their time, especially those made solely with drum machines, sequencers and analogue synthesizers designed and constructed by Rafał KOTOWSKI and Piotr KALINOWSKI (the latter of McMARIAN). They seemed to anticipate the aesthetic trends that would later emerge within experimental techno, and which were popularised in the mid 1990s by the likes of PANASONIC (vel PAN SONIC). His artistic prime was between 1986 and 1989, when he was involved in TOTART, arguably the most seminal avant-garde art movement/collective of the post-war Poland. Inspired by the Dadaist and surrealist concept of 'liberated words,' he became a pioneer of ZLEW (Polish for 'sink'), a writing/declamation artistic formula consisting of automatic writing down or uttering of one's streams of thoughts, impressions, and emotions. Concerned with breaking social taboos, his poetry employed paradox, semantic contrast, and absurd sense of humour relying on clashes of solemn register with coarse jokes, colloquialisms, and even vulgarities. From 1986 to 1991 he and other members of TOTART (Zbigniew SAJNÓG and Paweł "KOŃJO" KONNAK) DDA project (short for DER DANZIGER ARSAMBL), where he operated noise generators, made sound collages and played the trumpet. In 1988 he made guest appearances with SZELEST SPADAJĄCYCH PAPIERKÓW, and with one its members, Krzysztof SIEMAK, he formed the NOVY LEVY PROLETARYAT duo in the same year. He also collaborated on an ad-hoc basis with the likes of Ryszard TYMON TYMAŃSKI and Jerzy MAZZOL. In the early 1990s he turned towards more accessible styles, completely abandoning experimental music and its function of counter-cultural artistic anarchy. In his own retrospective comments on that change, 'In the 1980s, surrounded by debasement, dreariness, you would make the avant-garde, the industrial [music]. You would make music in order to stay sane. All of a sudden I felt no more threat from the environment, and I feel that it is only the monotony of your own action that you could feel threatened by. I found myself a niche of urban folklore, with its eerie tacky beats and well-known tunes. I've always been fascinated by rhythm, the common denominator of all my work, so in no time I took to acid house, and later all the mutations of techno. Combining it with primitivism and the ludic quality of the widely known tunes I managed to create something I call homely, prankster techno [...]
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