Lovely Polish city Krakow must be really inspiring as “Kallista” (meaning “very beautiful”) is maybe the third or fourth record which is somewhat related to one of the leading center of arts and culture in Poland. The involved artists, Kotra, Zavoloka and Dunaewsky69, got so stricken by its mysterious beauty during a visit in early 2012 that they tributed this record. According to their own words, Krakow is “an obscure area of inspiration and misunderstandings, old city of new art and technology, place of imminent comfort and lazy silence, convenient space for breeding bizarre and radical ideas”. Those ideas have been poured into 24 astonishing tracks, which they assembled with the support of some friends in Studio of Electroacoustic music of renowned Krakow Music Academy, whose support consisting of giving the possibility to the trio to have access to its wide collection of old analogue synthesizers, modular systems and sound processors (some of them belong to that collection since early 60’s) has been integrated by the precious collaboration of young Slovakian sound artist Jonas Gruska and two skilled Polish composers, Michal Pawelek, who helped Kotra, Zavoloka and Dunaewsky69 in grabbing some field recordings, and Marcin Strzelecki, who built some oscillators. Such a choral effort made this release really heterogenous from the structural viewpoint and even though it was equally trebeled by the three involved artists, each contribution renders different strategies of coalescence between modular pulses, uncut noise, sharpened sine waves and electric shocks without lacking of a certain sense of amalgamation. Mottled electronic scalding of abrasive tracks by Dunaewsky69 such as “Krolewska”, “Huta” or “Niesamowite” flow into the polymeric sonic pulsations, artificial vivid entities and unpredictable surreal inserts by Zavoloka (“Krak”, “Cichy-Btonia”, “Planty”) and more epic-oriented flares by Kotra (I particularly enjoyed Kotra’s “Emaus”, “Bunkier”, “Wyspianski 2000” and “Solvay”, whose saxophone sample comes from Ayane Yamanke) in a fascinating aggregate of sounds, which sound like squeezed from history and places of a city “that always sleep and always awake”. The psychotropic multicolored doilies Zavoloka adopted on the artwork wisely recap the collaborative spirit of this delicious hash that I cannot but recommend.
Original text is here: http://www.chaindlk.com/reviews/?id=7523