Ciśnienie

This album is designed to be played loudly. Listen as loud as you can or as loud as you’re allowed.

Ciśnienie means “pressure” in Polish. More than just a name, it’s a statement of intent for the instrumental band from Katowice, active since the last decade and now recognizable for their relentless exploration of accumulation, contraction, and release of sonic energy. Operating between post-rock, noise-jazz, and progressive impulses, the group has long defined itself through live performance—and has deliberately avoided Spotify, making their music available on Bandcamp with a “name your price” approach.

Sculpting tension: where friction is the law and volume is the only way forward

The four tracks on their new live album "[Angry Noises]" work as variations on a single idea: tension as a malleable substance, shaped over time rather than released outright; compressed and reignited in successive cycles. There’s no pursuit of easy climaxes—what emerges is constant development, favoring friction over resolution. This unfolds through rhythmic complexity and recombinatory play: melodic sequences are constantly reworked, letting Ciśnienie push intensity ever higher without losing the identity of the themes themselves.

“My Childhood…” (the full title is far longer) opens with a 10/4 baritone sax ostinato that recalls early King Crimson, though it traces its roots to a segment of Stravinsky’s "Symphony of Psalms", folded and circulated anew. The piece grows by gradually adding instruments and harmonic tension, building its trajectory on the theme’s constant mutation: it shortens, contracts metrically, and becomes increasingly insistent. Occasional lapses in density only prepare the way for further surges, while fragments of Holst’s "Saturn" appear in quieter passages, suspended and dreamlike, as if the music briefly inhaled before closing in on itself.

“Gilotyna” follows the same principle but in a more confrontational form. Its eight minutes pivot around a hammering 9+7 motif, constructed from two nearly mirrored ascending lines—with a missing segment in the second that unsettles each cycle. Eventually, all instruments converge on a single, full-blast note, saturating the sound before sliding into noise. Echoes of darker avant-prog—Magma, Univers Zero, Art Zoyd—blend with the coercive, maximalist intensity of Swans. The violin-dominated finale doesn’t soften the sound but expands it: dense, boiling material stretches into a wider, almost cinematic space.

Harnessing timbre as a catalyst, and turning quiet into total combustion

The last two tracks are perfect illustrations of another central axis of the album: timbral force as an expressive tool, where every moment of release remains intertwined with increasing density and weight.
“Gówno” digs into a muddy, Melvins-like groove, underpinned by unsettling choral harmonies and a sharp, expressionist sax, evoking tangents to italian noise-jazz radicalists Zu. When the piano enters, bright and seemingly serene, it changes nothing: the pachydermic bass persists, the shadows never fully lift. And the ambiguous pause is quickly overrun by a jazzcore explosion.

The closing “Carthago Delenda Est” moves into overtly epic terrain, building a climax that recalls Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It is a “totalist” crescendo, in the sense described by composer Kyle Gann and practiced by Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham: the ecstatic repetition of minimalism collides with dissonance, rhythmic force, and timbral abrasiveness closer to heavy rock than the symphonic canon. The initial ostinato drives relentless accumulation, culminating in a mid-piece ecstatic release—a catharsis that doesn’t end but pushes the dynamic to a higher level of saturation. The openly noisy coda is what remains after inevitable collapse, a trail of energy that continues even once the structure has unraveled.

"[Angry Noises]" offers no easy footholds: duration becomes an instrument, accumulation a strategy, volume a prerequisite. Prog, jazz, post-rock, and contemporary art music are not merely revisited—they’re tested, forced to coexist in a precarious balance always on the edge of rupture. It’s a detonating record that seeks no shortcuts or reassurance, measuring itself entirely by the embrace of risk.

(English version created with AI-assisted translation)

31/12/2025