Mixtape adds up to two, twenty-minute merries-go-round (…) and though you’ll step off woozy, it’s melodic, it’s accessible, it spins at an angle but steady.
Mik Musik is not a label, it’s an art house in which music plays a major role, alongside design, web interactivities, humour, stone-throwing and flower-picking. Although an absolute treasure trove of words, sounds and images are freely available on site, it is the series of unique, limited edition cardboard boxes that catch a little extra attention. Inside Mangraove Mangrave’s self-titled, brown cardboard box are julienned strips of old paperback books (spines intact) in Polish and German, in Cyrillic script and something very old and musty about Sir Walter Scott. The record is a captivating series of aural murals. The package feels like an object the Eastern European avantgarde would have put out in the late nineteen-teens, if compact disc technology had been around.
Lugozi is the solo project of Łukasz Dziedzic, an audio-visual artist from Cieszyn. His “There’s a Strong Shadow Where There is Much Light” is a post-ironic pop music not dissimilar to the work of Estonian artist Maria Minerva, lyrics passionately wrung out in a voice at times oddly reminiscent of Neil Diamond’s earnest croon, at others the stentorian David Gahan. Cheap pop synthesizers are played with a special kind of dignity, a respect for the instrument rather than under-the-breath chuckle, against greasy, irresistible rhythm machines. In its peculiar way, it is both an acquired, undermining taste and as effortlessly consumed as top forty radio caught in a thirty-year time warp. His box, by the way, includes a lapel button and some colour photographs nestled atop the dimpled packing paper in which the black CDR comes wrapped.
Bangelilz’ box contains a hand-decorated jewel box and black CDR (or previously-loved cassette), stickers and some Styrofoam peanuts. Cleverly dubbed the “Future Vangelis” by someone, his name is actually Błażej Król and this is his first solo album. The “mix” contains his own music, which comes rumbling in like a gaudily-decorated Pakistani lorry and goes round and round in circles, picking up and dropping off bales of dub, flashes of electro, dashes of chanting crowds, cascades of kora, fly-buzz violin and catherine wheels of guitar. It’s a colourful display and an impressive one, too, to hear how Bangeliz transitions so effortlessly from carnival to funeral atmosphere, from fat, leaky pipes to filmy, skittish static.
Mixtape adds up to two, twenty-minute merries-go-round (with an inexplicable, slowed-down four-minute spoken word downer attached to the end of the disc version) and though you’ll step off woozy, it’s melodic, it’s accessible, it spins at an angle but steady.
Mixtape is available on Mik Musik. [Release page]
