Lunatic Soul

Lunatic Soul is the side project – far from a minor one – through which Mariusz Duda has given a name and an independent shape to his most inward-looking side. Born in 2008, while Riverside were consolidating their identity within European prog, Lunatic Soul has presented itself from the start as a space of freedom: a place where Duda can step away from the rituals of being in a rock band, scale down the idea of performance, and put songwriting back at the centre as an emotional landscape rather than a showcase of instrumental chops. Tellingly, in official presentations Duda himself describes the entire discography as a coherent journey: “The Circle of Life and Death”, a unified narrative in which a lone traveller passes through the poles of life, death and rebirth.

The self-titled debut, released through Kscope, immediately lays down the coordinates: a nocturnal, atmospheric progressive rock, where ritual elements and a contemplative dimension carry just as much weight as the structures themselves. In the years that followed, the project has moved like a shape-shifting organism: it doesn't follow a straight evolutionary line, but alternates phases, tonalities and timbral densities, as though each album had to embody a different fragment of the same story. This cyclical idea – visual and conceptual alike – is an integral part of Lunatic Soul's identity, not a mere afterthought.

A decisive turning point comes with “Walking on a Flashlight Beam” (2014), often read as a pivotal moment: here Duda ramps up the electronic and rhythmic elements, making the sound more nervy, layered, and at times even more rock-oriented than the project's early atmospheres. It's one of the moments where Lunatic Soul most clearly reveals its nature as a laboratory: not an acoustic refuge, but a territory where the form can change drastically while still staying true to an underlying idea.

In the years that followed, the saga continued through chapters of recalibration and deeper exploration, leading to another highly recognisable milestone, “Through Shaded Woods”, also presented by Kscope itself as an album exploring the darker side of Slavic and Scandinavian folk, confirming the project's hybrid vocation: prog, ambient, folk and electronics as materials to be blended into a personal balance, without obeying any fixed grammar.

The circle closes (at least by stated intent) with “The World Under Unsun”, the project's eighth chapter and first double album: nearly ninety minutes and 14 tracks, released on 31 October 2025 and officially presented as the completion of the entire “Circle of Life and Death”. The choice of a long format, right in the middle of the streaming era, fits perfectly with Lunatic Soul's poetics: music conceived as a crossing, as narrative time, as ritual listening.

On the production and label side, the album is released internationally via Inside Out Music (with Mystic Production handling Poland), confirming the project's place within a high-profile prog circuit, while still maintaining an identity distinct from Riverside.

In short, Lunatic Soul is the space where Duda has been able to build a second musical autobiography, not as an alternative to Riverside but as a complement to it. Where the parent band tends to tell its stories through climaxes, Lunatic Soul often works through trance, repetition and layering, with a songwriting that puts the air between the sounds at its centre, treating slowness as a form of emotional precision. And it is precisely this coherence – combined with the ability to shed its skin without losing the narrative thread – that has turned the project from a simple side venture into a personal saga, now fully recognisable and complete.

(Cristiano Orlando)