JACASZEK - Pentral

Last year, the release of his album "Treny" on a high-profile label like Erik Skovdin's Miasmah drew well-deserved international attention to Polish artist Michal Jacaszek and his dark-ambient explorations, shot through with constant electronic manipulation and a well-balanced chamber-music framework.

The follow-up to that record – currently released only domestically by Gustaff – consists of ten tracks marked only with a number (though equipped with provisional working titles), packed into the little more than half an hour running time of "Pentral", an album with the dual distinction of having been made partly thanks to public funding from the Pomerania region, and of being an ambitious conceptual work, bearing a strong imprint of the places where Jacaszek gathered many of the sounds and field recordings featured here in his compositions. The intent behind "Pentral" is in fact to recreate in music the atmosphere of austere solemnity found inside a Gothic cathedral, through a multiplicity of electronic filtering and modulation but also through real sounds, mostly captured in three historic churches in the city of Gdansk.

The sounds captured on site include choirs and organs but also accidental noises which, processed and juxtaposed with loops and obscure electronic stratifications, fully realize Jacaszek's bleak ambient imagery, oscillating between sinister sounds and clangs and more subdued melodic filigrees, whose greater sense of space pairs with an even more pronounced minimalism compared to the previous album.

The constant sense of unease running through every track on "Pentral" is heightened by the distant vocalizations of "VI", "VIII" and "X", and above all by the two harrowing organ eruptions on "II" and "VI" (not by chance also titled "Loud01" and "Loud02"), which tear through the many tiny crackles and mysterious detonations that envelop the listening experience in otherwise muted shadows throughout the album. This latter aspect confirms what already worked well on "Treny", again offering electroacoustic textures that fade into dark ambient softness, though this time they are almost never adequately supported by compositional structures that are truly pared down to the bone; rather than opening up into identifiable melodic profiles, they instead serve as a backdrop to a dark-esoteric liturgy not so far removed from that of the latest Xela.

Largely successful on a conceptual level, "Pentral" certainly confirms Jacaszek as one of the names capable of delivering worthwhile work in the dark-ambient field; what the album lacks in order to match the richness and sonic cohesion of "Treny" is a more clearly defined harmonic architecture, one able to transcend the boundaries of its own musical frame of reference.

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20/03/2009