[Reviewed by: Iaha Crax]
Memories are never irreversibly lost, though the mind plays games and forces us to believe something we struggle to recover would be dead and buried. On this narrow path toward completion the simple treasures are being ignored for those abstract and shallow artifices that apparently challenge and provoke a higher understanding by ego.
Myths and folk tales should be recovered in such an undemanding manner as to re-enact a child’s effortless hint at mysteries by taking life as it is, a savage indulging play. “Oddech” follows an epic story of a wanderer that ends his life in a well, the outcome of his quest for a meaning that would have raise him above himself. Should this folk tale be taken as a tragedy or a poetic culmination of the wanderer circling back to the womb, as Ulysses return to Ithaca? You may follow his journey against an elegant display of soft percussion sustaining a beautiful narrative atmospheric construction. STUDNIA builds a musical sanctuary where an eerie world of sounds opens up to depict a spectral realm of enchantment and shadowy inner reflections.
The album by STUDNIA better translates by these lines from the greek poet Cavafy: “Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey. / Without her you wouldn’t have set out./ She has nothing left to give you now.” The softness and sense of equilibrium renders the music tranquil and detached. It is mere an observer to the wanderer’s journey, collecting musical images form his passage throughout life and transforming them into expressive well-crafted and framed pictures. “Oddech” album took time to develop and record and the music speaks for that in a clear and well blended story-telling that is both musically attractive and vividly suggestive.
“Oddech” is the first album put out by this duo from Poland, they took care to present the CD with an overwhelming artwork, pictures created by 33 Thirsty Tree and photographed by Tudorita Gherase that turn the blank severity of the image into a parallel soliloquy. Another gifted artist, Mateusz Ciszczon, from the LUGSHAR project came out with the final design. This is also the first release by LOŻA, we have to keep in mind this label.
Studnia – Oddech
LOŻA Oficyna
CD/Digital 2020
Santa Sangre 