Grzegorz Marcińczak*: Hi. I’m so excited we’re about to talk. Not only because it’s the first time I’ve been doing an interview but, first and foremost, because we haven’t been in touch for some thirty years or so!
Artur R. Sztukalski: Hi, I’m tingling with excitement a bit, too. If I searched my boxes with souvenirs and bric-a-brac, I’d be sure to find that amazing, hand-written catalogue of yours listing all those amazing records which used to fire my imagination so much. I might likely come across a few letters from you there, too.
How did you get to have that catalogue?
If I still have it, it’s not the original but a xerox copy. As far as I can remember, it was sent to me by a certain individual of the city of Opole, a bit of a butterfly. We met back in 1990 at The Young Gods gig in Wrocław. That gig was fun. It prompted me, or the band did, actually, to start dreaming of buying a sampler.
I recall that back when we used to tape trade you made some dubs of Throbbing Gristle gigs on cassettes for me. While I personally know the story behind them, could you share with the readers how you got to have them? The story seems to have been pivotal for you, especially considering your involvement in this music.
That’s true. That episode does mean a lot and to me it is more of a consequence rather than the cause of a certain series of events in my life. It all goes back to 1973 when my parents separated. To make things worse – or better, depends how you look at it – soon later my father was offered a job on the staff of the Polish embassy in London. He took it, of course, and I would get to see him for a bit longer only once a year, usually during the summer holidays, for three weeks when I would visit him there. Many readers of this interview, especially those well remembering life in the communist Poland, might find it baffling but I didn’t enjoy those trips to visit my father. The ‘legendary’ world of the so-called West, its riches, and liberties didn’t interest me at all. To be able to see my dad was the only reason I went there. Even making a few English friends my age from my dad’s neighbourhood didn’t change my attitude of indifference to the foreign culture. Having visited Dad there on a regular basis since 1974, I saw punks for the first time, whose appearance and conduct seemed scary to me back then. I got to know some of them a bit better by hanging out with an English boy I mentioned earlier. The way he looked in 1977, when I came to London for the summer holiday, came as a complete surprise to me. Sadly, in late 1978 Dad died suddenly and Mum and I had to go to London to take care of the formalities and collect his body to be buried here in Poland. While there, having bumped into that punk friend, Brian, he insisted I came along to a gig, which was to be held in a basement of a church close to the house where Dad had lived. To this day I don’t know why I said yes. I was distraught by Dad’s passing. I’d never been to a concert in my life. What’s more, until then music hadn’t really meant to me much. I only knew the pop music or classic rock that was widely available in the Polish mass media. And yet I said yes… I don’t know. Perhaps subconsciously I wanted a distraction, if only a momentary one, from what I’d been going through? Anyway, Brian and I went to that disused church, or actually its basement converted into a bar and a small gig venue. At the entrance, next to the poster advertising the gig, there were some weird leaflets showing a person hanging themselves. It was only later that I was to learn that was well-known artwork by Throbbing Gristle. I’d never seen anything like that in public… Such explicit promotion of suicide. Inside, there were quite a few people, and the place was full of cigarette smoke… And that stifling, claustrophobic, brick cellar vibe. I felt out of place and hopeless. The kick-off dragging on, I was even about to leave. Eventually, the first act came on stage. It was Throbbing Gristle. Their music enchanted me from the very first sounds. I was rooted to the spot, hypnotized by that energy, expression, the charisma of the musicians. I’d never heard anything like that before. It was a truly amazing experience; one I could only compare to some kind of spiritual illumination. Afterwards, I found a merchandise stall bar and it was there where I bought two cassettes by Throbbing Gristle. Some time later Brian sent me dubs of two other cassettes by them and some releases by other artists. That’s how I got to have the releases I dubbed for you back then.
You must be one of the few Polish people, if not the only one, who saw Throbbing Gristle live during their canonical period. Do you remember the other bands playing that night?
I do but they didn’t make such a tremendous impression on me. I watched them perform with great interest, though. They were Metabolist, Robert Rental, and Cabaret Voltaire. I’d never heard of any of them before, of course. What’s more, I wouldn’t get to hear any of their releases until the 1990s, or even the 2000s, except perhaps for Cabaret Voltaire. Recollecting those concerts was the only way for me to experience their music for many years.
It was those memorable gigs of Throbbing Gristle and others that prompted you to make music?
Yes, but it took some time. Also, back then I didn’t see myself as an artist. That gig, apart from delivering experiences I’d been previously unfamiliar with, in a way drew my attention to the phenomenon of sound, its plasticity, physicality, unpredictability, and to perception of the world around me. A few months after that gig Brian mailed me a photocopy of an article about industrial music, which had references to musique concrète. These terms, completely new to me, made me curious enough to learn some more, this time in Polish literature. Bear it in mind that at the time the Internet hadn’t even been dreamed of. The reading room of the school library provided no more than a hard copy encyclopaedia or a dictionary to be used on the premises only. As you may guess, I couldn’t learn anything about industrial music there but musique concrète was indeed mentioned in some general terms. Somehow, I managed to reach expert musicologist literature, thanks to which I realized the existence of experimental music or avant-garde music. An extremely informative title was “Mały informator muzyki XX wieku” [20th Century Music Primer] by Bogusław Schaeffer. It was from that book that I learned how experimental music was made, and that the primary tool for making it was a tape recorder. Luckily, I already owned one. A few years earlier my excellent school grades had been rewarded with it by my father at the end of the school year. It was a Polish [reel-to-reel] Unitra ZK-146, which until then I’d only used to record single songs off the radio. I had no idea that thanks to its four tracks you could record sounds from four separate sources!
What else, apart from the tape recorder, did you use to make music with?
At the very beginning, school summer holidays of 1979, having passed my school-leaving exams and university entrance exams, I only used that reel-to-reel tape recorder, learning what it could do, what could be done with sound using the four tracks. I used a Polish stereo radio receiver Amator, too. Like I said earlier, which can’t be more emphasized, back then I didn’t even think of making music as such, of making copies on cassettes, which were very hard to get by, by the way. And if a shop did actually sell them, they were horribly expensive and the stock was low – you could forget about buying them by the dozen. I didn’t have a cassette recorder to make copies with in the first place. Besides, who would have listened to them? Mum or the sister a few years my junior? School mates or friends from uni, who were into Boney M or, at best, Pink Floyd? All I wanted to do is experiment with noises, overlap and splice tracks or play with tape direction or speed. I was fascinated by deconstruction in itself, by how deformation resulted in a specific sound, usually a noise, which actually was not ordinary or obvious. While at uni, I made a friend playing the guitar with an amateur band. On learning I fiddled with sound effects, he offered to lend me a primitive, home-made echo tape unit of his. I had no idea that was a thing, that it could produce such interesting sound distortion. In the early 1980 I began experimenting with that echo tape, usually at weekends, when I came back to the family home. Soon after I managed to buy, quite cheaply, a Czechoslovakian Echolana with a minor defect. Apparently, all it needed was replacement of a piece of the drive mechanism but I didn’t mind. On the contrary, I was quite happy as the tape speed was reduced, which distortedly extended the looped echo of a sound. So, I had a reel-to-reel recorder with a poor condenser microphone, a radio receiver and two tape echo units. Plus, my mum’s turntable, a Polish Daniel – I used that, too.
In “Tryptyk Tczewski” [Tczew Triptych] I made out a siren and some factory noises. Did you use field recording?
I did. Not always made by myself. The train sounds were sampled from an old American vinyl record with that type of sounds, which I picked up at a flea market in Gdańsk. Most of them I made myself, sometimes in bizarre circumstances. Like when I hauled the reel-to-reel recorder in its huge and heavy case to Gdańsk by bus and carried it into my uni building to make field recordings of the sounds from the street and a building being reconstructed through an open window.
That three-part recording actually relies on samples from hit songs by three Polish pop artists: Anna Jantar, Happy End, and Czerwone Gitary. Why this particular idea to top off your first sound experiments with? How do you find your earliest experiments when thinking back to that time?
They would keep banging those songs on the radio. On the one hand, I was sick and tired of them and just felt like butchering them. But on the other hand, they did have a certain valuable hidden quality to them, which I wanted to bring up through deformation. I was curious to find out how pop music would withstand sound manipulation or confrontation with all that noise I was going incorporate into its texture. Working on it was extremely exhausting. The first part of the triptych took me four months to record. Only at weekends, mind, but I would literally never leave my room. Making the other parts didn’t take less than that, really. There are about a dozen versions of each part and I couldn’t find any of them entirely satisfying. All that measuring out the tape section with a ruler for the PLAY or REC button to be pressed on; all that continuous syncing of overlapped effects, multiple tracks; and all the neverending calibration of the echo, reverbs for the whole thing to be kind of consistent. A drag it was, really. It wasn’t until over 10 years later, when I decided to make my first, and last, demo tape, that I revisited those tapes and could bring myself to give them another listen to choose the best version. Looking back at it now, I can’t help feeling more forgiving and genuinely nostalgic. I can even see something artistically valuable in those recordings, which, after all, were merely intended as a manual and technological challenge. They have aged quite well. What’s more, with time, the creator’s perception of those recordings has evolved, against his own wish, making him see them as more of a music work rather than more or less ambitious playing and experimenting with sound. That bizarre transformation alone is fascinating to me, as I learned first-hand how effective it is. I believe it to be a proof that an act of creation may change an individual, or at least their perception of what they do and what they experience in their life.
As you have just mentioned, the live performance from Throbbing Gristle sparked your interest in industrial music, prompting you to learn more about it. Were you able to make time for listening to music when you were so engrossed in those early experiments of yours?
Of course I was hungry for this music but life back then was what it was. Plus, as you know, my town, Tczew was no Warsaw or Gdańsk. But even in Gdańsk, where I would soon move to study at university, no releases of this kind of music were to be found. Initially, I relied solely on those two cassettes I’d bought earlier on, which I immediately copied on my reel-to-reel with some help of a friend. Brian was of much help, too. He sent me over that article on industrial I’d mentioned earlier and some cassettes with Throbbing Gristle stuff and some punk, which I never played and can’t even recall what bands they were. At first, with nothing to lean on but that English article on industrial music and the history of avant-garde music I was slowly exploring from the Polish sources, I associated these two phenomena with each other. Little did I realise that one existed on the substrate of popular music while the other happened in the academic circles. You simply had no access to avant-garde music, be it the academic type or the rock type, or at least I wasn’t able to find access to it. In consequence, everything I read revolved nowhere else but in my imagination around what I’d heard live back at that gig in London and the reel dubs from those cassettes. I believe the state of my imagination at that time is “Tryptyk Tczewski”, which could be treated as a bizarre interpretation of industrial music which I happened to hear at a time, combined with theoretical reflections on the specifics of musique concrète and its impact on music avant-garde. It all began to change for me slowly sometime in the mid 1980s, when I’d done my degree. New information just had to come my way. Of course, I’d read something somewhere, I’d got to hear something played or said on the radio but that was all still mere scraps, which couldn’t make much difference. It wasn’t until 1986 that I first got to meet a Polish person who had some understanding of what industrial music was. This only shows how insignificant a genre it was in Poland at that time.
Why did you not continue your acquaintance with Brian, who could have provided more of this music for you to explore on a current basis?
Brian apparently overdosed drugs some time in 1982 or 1983. I lost contact with him practically right after he’d sent me those tapes and the article. The gig he so urged me to see was the last time I saw him. Later, for obvious reasons, I stopped going to London and I only found out by his death, accidentally, in the late 1990s.
Did you continue with sound experiments following “Tryptyk Tczewski”?
I did but with a decreasing intensity. I was spending more and more time studying, not mention first relationships with women, which took up all my free time. Besides, I simply didn’t think of myself as an artist and couldn’t feel anything like artistic inspiration or a calling to fulfill a mission of some sort. It also seems I didn’t want to repeat myself using the same sound treatment techniques. My electronic setup was pretty poor, plus I hadn’t heard much stuff and my knowledge of the nature of sound was superficial. The martial law enforced in Poland in the early 1980s and the political confusion surrounding and following it had some impact, too. Anyway, not much of that experimentation of mine survived and I don’t think it worth of publication.
As far as I know you got in touch with Rafał Kochan, desperate to get hold of anybody behind the Olsztyn music project from the 1980s called Fuse 07. It turned out you were associated with them. Could you tell me something about it?
That’s right. One day I came across a post on a Facebook group dedicated to the Olsztyn punk scene in the 1980s. I was shocked that, after so many years, anybody knew of and remembered a group which was ephemeral with little public presence. Anyway, after graduation, I got a job in Olsztyn. I practically went off experimenting with sound at the time. I was more of a music recipient rather than a maker. I would travel the length and breadth of Poland to gigs or record markets. Every little disposable income I’d spent on those travels and various releases. It was all horrendously expensive here back then, especially vinyl records, so I couldn’t afford more than two LPs a month at best, and quite worn ones at that. The Olsztyn record market was held at the Urania Hall and it was there, around 1987, where I met Krzysiek Molenda and Darek Paciorek. They were young punks playing in some garage bands. They were open to going outside the punk box, though. It was thanks to them that I learned about the activities of Henryk Palczewski, as well as of the Totart group. Actually, all three of us travelled to Gdańsk to a festival organized by that performer group, where I got to hear Wahehe, McMarian or Praffdata for the first time. The former band especially made an overwhelming impression on me, and my two companions, too. It was overwhelming enough to prompt them into starting a band inspired by that Kraków group. That’s how Fuse 07 came about. At first, they tried it as a two-piece but when an opportunity to play a gig at a local punk festival came along, they came up with an idea of my joining them on a tape recorder. In the early 1988 we had quite a few rehearsals at Darek Paciorek’s place, which were recorded, and copies of which were later sent to organisers of various music festivals, including the [legendary] Jarocin punk festival, as well as to Henryk Palczewski. Alas, ruefully unsuccessfully. The project never got invited to play live or to release any material through a label. Only an excerpt from the demo we sent to Palczewski, a little under 10 minutes long, found its way onto a cassette compilation Polish Road released in 1989 by a French label. Without our consent, by the way. While I was prepared for that kind of lack of feedback, that is indifference, those two young, ambitious young men took that quite hard. Quite soon I began sensing they were disheartened by the whole thing, which led them to quit making music. They gave up too soon, I think – they had a really interesting potential. In my estimation, what we recorded and selected to be put on the demo was interesting and worth publishing, which was proved by its appearance on the French compilation. If they’d known sooner that their music got published, and in the West to boot, they might have pursued their music passions…. There isn’t much left to do about it now but speculate. One way or the other, a newly started project soon died of natural causes. As far as I know, after graduating from university in the early 1990s, Darek emigrated to Canada and hasn’t been heard from since. Krzysiek moved out of Olsztyn, settled down and started a family somewhere in Silesia, and hasn’t been heard from since, either.
Do you have any recordings of the rehearsals you did with them or the demo cassette of Fuse 07?
No. Darek was the only person who had all the recordings we made. When I sensed there was a question mark over the future of the project and asked him for a copy of the demo tape, he kept making excuses or just made empty promises. I gave up in the end, thinking it was a waste of time. All I had left was the reel-to-reel tapes I used in those rehearsals.
Nevertheless, you resumed making music solo in the early 1990s. What made you give it another try?
First of all, it was the recurrence of my fascination with industrial music. Except this time I’d heard much more stuff. Plus, I guess it was my maturing artist self who’d once got seduced by the sin of hubris. In 1989 I bought a copy of the “Dry Lungs” compilation album at a record market in Warsaw’s club Hybrydy, which got me completely fascinated. I’d play it day in day out, week in week out until it wouldn’t play at all. The grooves got so worn the stylus kept skipping. Most of the tracks on it were exactly what I’d always intended to make but never had the right tools to bring to life. So, I started acquiring new gear to experiment with sound on. First, a friend based in Germany helped me buy a Boss BX-600 mixer. It was such a huge outlay that practically I couldn’t afford a single record or cassette for another year. I ran up massive debts. The fall of communism meant you were free to travel abroad. Of course, visas were required, which hindered that, but thanks to my good knowledge of French and English I got a well-paid job in a well-known French company which had opened its first Polish branches. Soon later I bought an AKAI S1000 sampler I’d long dreamed about, on hire purchase. Making music became easy and pleasant. Before that actually happened, though, learning that instrument had taken months and frayed nerves.
The new chapter was rung in with a Latin name for your project. Frankly speaking, I’ve never associated this language with industrial music, even less so with its radical and dehumanized form you put on your demo tape. Where did that come from?
Well, the ‘dehumanised form’ is a bit of an exaggeration. I think it was quite the other way round. I wanted this industrial sound world to have a humanistic dimension. Anyway, I’ve never subscribed to avant-garde artists’ aiming at total dissociation from the past. By the way, I’ve recently spent hours disputing this online with Rafał Kochan. The avant-garde developed within the Western civilisation. Not in Africa, Asia or either America. It sprouted in Europe. This ought to be taken into consideration, I think, and you ought to bear in mind what archetypal “free” man and “rebel” man were promoted back in ancient Greece and Rome. I picked that name to make two statements: one about which side of the fence I’m on, and at the same time, about my not aiming at turning the world upside down.
Which side are you on, then? Were / Are you one of the attackers or the defenders?
On the side of those attacking, of course, but unlike my orthodox brothers-in-arms, like Rafał, I would take prisoners.
I must admit that when I first listened to your demo tape (my copy being no. 3, how many were there in total, by the way?) I found it I was totally crushed by its industrial heaviness of the sound and the overwhelming and hovering sorrowful atmospherics. I wasn’t ready for that kind of experience. For it was like one step too far, even though I’d been familiar with some radical artists, like Merzbow. My current perception of it, especially side A with your more recent work as Ars Sonitus, is completely different. How do you find those recordings now, with hindsight?
The Ars Sonitus tracks for Side A of the cassette were not picked at random. I wanted the listener to hear my work from that period as it was 99 per cent of what I’d aimed to achieve and been able to achieve at the time. The archival tracks from 1980 ended up on that release only because I had no other current material to put on it and I didn’t want to leave Side B blank. 30 years since I’m still satisfied with those tracks. Of course, I could have made more of an effort and made more copies of the demo and sent them to labels, magazines, and distributors. For a number of reasons I didn’t, though. Admittedly, I didn’t have the knowledge at that time, i.e. I didn’t know any addresses or didn’t know of anybody I could have sent the tape to. In any case, international shipping was expensive, not to mention the prices of new, good quality blank cassettes. All of that put me off dotting the proverbial “i”. Moreover, I may not have been mentally prepared for that. I was so focused on myself and fulfilling my own needs and ambitions that having completed the set, less than 30 minutes long, which I was and still am proud of, I didn’t care much about widespread promotion of my work. That’s why I made so few copies of the demo to be given away only to the people close to me or whom I knew to be into music like that. In Poland it was four or five copies and in France two.
As far as I know, a forthcoming compilation CD album on the Impulsy Stetoskopu label entitled “The Last Dossier” will include a track “Dyskretny Urok Komunizmu”[The Discreet Charm of Communism] by Ars Sonitus. Quite a controversial title, especially as it has an excerpt from an archival recording of Lenin’s speech as a brace over the industrial banging. A provocation?
Absolutely not. I come from a family where both my father and my mum were members of PZPR [acronym for the Polish name of the Polish United Workers’ Party, the communist party ruling Poland between 1948 and 1989]. While at university I was a member of ZSMP [acronym for the PZPR’s youth faction] and wittingly joined the party just before graduation. I’m not ashamed of that. I’m far from glorifying that system but I can’t see any reason why it should be seen as an extremely oppressive system destroying an individual and their basic rights. That track, and others on the demo tape created under the name of Ars Sonitus, were to a large extent a manifestation of the industrialization of the Soviet state in the inter-war period. A paraphrase of the title of Luis Buñuel’s famous film was not accidental either. That link was going to be additionally underlined by a sample of Rosa Ponselle’s vocal from an opera by Verdi to be intertwined with Lenin’s speech.
What happened in your life following making that demo tape?
Before I answer, I must point out that it was recorded at two locations, actually. In Olsztyn, where I resided at the time, and in Dieppe, where I regularly travelled on business and stayed for a week or two. It wasn’t a time to remember. Had it not been for my excitement at owning a sampler, which I carried with me back and forth, I might have gone crazy. Frequent travelling to France and spending increasingly more time there led to my meeting my future wife. In 1995 our first child was born. Soon I was granted French citizenship and in the late 1990s I went to live permanently in France.
Being a family man must have slowed down your music making activities?
Absolutely. But things weren’t as bad as they might seem to have been. In my view, every artist must remember to vent their pressure to create and to celebrate the release of another work, which will give them a sense of perspective about their own self and what they do. The pressure may come from a financial drive and banal materialism or from some complexes and frustrated ambitions. Whatever its source, at the end of the day it’s the music that suffers, and its potential audience, even if the artist may not seem to find it to be the case. For me personally, it was life and quirks of it that brought about this attitude, which I fully understood and appreciated only recently. However, I consider it a serendipity, thanks to which I have avoided the rat race and getting sucked into a quagmire of ubiquitous abundance.
Are you genuinely averse to sharing your work on the current basis on platforms like Soundcloud or Bandcamp?
While I’m strongly in favour of Marxist concept of the necessity of establishing new social relations within the political or economic contexts, I do believe that true art, i.e. the art that is powerful enough to hold a human up in their thoughtless pursuit of elusive happiness, should exist outside the society as it has always been, is, and will be elitist by nature. To paraphrase a Polish Nobel Prize winner, ‘music is not for idiots’, and therefore there is no need for the man in the street to have unlimited access to it. At the same time that doesn’t mean my aim is to create for the sake of creating, which is proved by my tracks to be included on the CD to be released on Rafał’s label. For me, creating music is most of all an intimate process completed to make a product intended for an attention-seeking exhibition of curiosities. The rest is mere decorum of the moment and space.
So, you keep experimenting with sound, faithful to your fascinations from the young age?
I do. However, there isn’t much of my original gear setup left apart from the Echolana, which is living on borrowed time and is more of a museum exhibit, really. Some gear has been acquired over the years, of course, but my main instrument has remained the AKAI sampler.
Are you following industrial or experimental music, from Poland or otherwise, at all? Do you have any favourites?
There’s a bit of a problem here, unfortunately, as I simply don’t have time for this. Also, I don’t feel as compelled to do so as I was 30 or 40 years ago. At a time, I sold off a substantial majority of my collection due to my frequent moving house. I practically never listen to music at home. Only through streaming when I’m travelling. Apart from an occasional curiosity impulse, I’m not interested in what’s currently played in the genre. In the early 2000s I went to quite a few French festivals of electronic experimental music by educated academic composers. The Polish scene has somewhat eluded me over all those years. I don’t even know where to read about it online to learn what is there to listen to. I do know now that Rafał has reanimated the Polish industrial music from the 1980s on his label. I learned about it from him though, as we got in touch recently.
Are there any plans to release your old works or the more recent ones?
No definite plans but Rafał is keen to release the other tracks from the cassette demo or the later tracks in one form or another. I’m not a fan of mash-up releases combining random tracks. But who knows? I might go soft with time and give in again…
Which I wish yourself, Rafał, the listeners and myself! Thanks a lot for this very interesting conversation. All the best!
Thank you too and until the next time. Hopefully not in another 30 years!
*Grzegorz Marcińczak – one of the most active collectors and promoters of avant-garde rock music and industrial music in Polish tape traders between 1988 and 2001. In 1996-1998 he ran his own independent music show on Radio Jowisz in Jelenia Góra.
Photo: Artur R. Sztukalski in his home studio, Olsztyn, Poland, 1989 (negative of the photo courtesy of Alicja Sztukalska)
The Catcher in the Noise 
