Płonie could be called a concept album. The starting point for this concept is a multi-level journey of a lyrical ego, wandering somewhere through time, confronting its present with the past, as well as with a series of disordered memories and past feelings. It is also a journey through the contemporary fears: powerlessness, sadness, feeling of being lost in the abyss of great metropolises and a sense of insignificance against hypermodern cities, world or passing time. This emotional psychomachia of the past and the present is built into the narration of a journey (walking around aimlessly) through the streets-corridors of the city; a journey that leads to places that are completely real and common, but usually blank to us. All that are the titled “flames” that trigger emotions of the lyrical ego - destructive like a candle flame for a moth and slowly digesting him from the inside. The fire itself appears in the outro of the album, evoking a real fire of a apartment house in the neighbourhood of the band members' apartment at the time. It closes the whole narration, in which our past remains only a smoke from our memories, which can have its physical emanation in the form of smoke after the fire of the apartment we once abandoned. The fire that puts us to a second and final death by digesting our last blackened photographs and names written on a piece of paper, as in the beliefs of ancient Egypt.
The musical content of the journey is a mosaic of inspirations, where the sounds of dub music blend seamlessly with the aesthetics of progressive post-punk branches and krautrock trance rhythm, the sound of guitars inspired by the Polish New Wave (Maanam, early Lady Pank) and famous 80s’ drum machines. All connected by ambient-drone bridges, making everything consistent and an integrated whole. This has resulted in music that escapes simple rock patterns, fits into the definition of post-rock and, at the same time, creates matching lyrical content and homogeneous mood of melancholy and sadness, suspended in a timeless space of tangled memories.
credits
released June 4, 2021
Blokowisko - composition, production, mix, lyrics
Damian Wolski - acoustic guitar
Kacper Zieliński - bass guitar, production of the video
Klaudia Miłoszewska - recitation
Asia Michalska - cover art
Jan Ruchniewicz - photo session
Michał Kupicz - mastering
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