The combination of Satie’s genteel simplicity and Bionulor’s gentle surrealism, complemented by Kowalczyk’s illustrations, transports me to a midway point in time, where Bruno Schulz wanders down the Street of Crocodiles humming one of these tunes.
For his third album, young Polish “sound recycler” Sebastian Banaszczyk enters into a dialogue with Erik Satie, peeping through a small keyhole in time back well over one hundred years to forge a connection between a man in a small Parisian room and another one in a small Polish town, Częstochowa (though originally from nearby Świdnica, its old town as rendered by illustrator Martyna Kowalczyk gracing the cover of Erik). Bionulor uses no instruments himself but rather very deliberately selects a particular, very brief section from modern musical and narrative history and “processes” it (on his computer, I’ll wildly guess).
Banaszczyk puts Satie’s Gymnopédies, those three, “dolourous” miniatures unfailingly mentioned as precursors to Eno’s ambient music, under the microscope and closely examines their very cells. The loops he tweaks, dubs and granulates are by turns dreamy, nostalgic, chilling and warming. Often an Eldorado for composers and critics of lesser imagination, Erik is true to the spirit of Satie’s intention rather than being mere pastiche. Satie meant them to float through the salon colouring the air between lapses in the conversation, and Bionulor’s fifteen variations succeed and fail in precisely the way Satie’s originals do—they are too interesting not to draw your undivided attention.
The combination of Satie’s genteel simplicity and Bionulor’s gentle surrealism, complemented by Kowalczyk’s illustrations, transports me to a midway point in time, where Bruno Schulz wanders down the Street of Crocodiles humming one of these tunes.
Erik is available on Requiem.
