Stone Music by Andrzej Karałow

In 2019, or just a little while before, with plans to release Andrzej Karałow's first duo album with analogue and modular synthesiser player Jerzy Przezdziecki's, we not only made plans for further collaboration, but also talked about our inspirations. It turned out that I had not caught such an understanding with any other artists for a long time, and although for Przeździecki the inspiration was early industrial and for pianist Karałow minimal music and the sonoristic tradition of classical music, this seemingly difficult to reconcile world of industrial filth and, on the other hand, fidelity to the avant-garde tradition of the 1960s and 1970s, reminded me of an event when, in the 1980s, I discovered, while still immersed in post-industrial and avant-garde rock (Cassiber), an extraordinary album by Zygmunt Krauze: "New Piano Sounds".
That album was released in the early 1970s, but listened to a dozen years later it shook me and made me feel that nothing was the same as before.
The complexity, the uncompromising nature of that music, but also the creative self-awareness of its interpreter was something I was then rather familiar with from the world of musicians such as Chris Cutler, Fred Frith or Irene Schweizer or on the other hands darkness of Dome or Zoviet France.
It wasn't until many years later, watching the television program "Silence and Sound", of which Krauze was the author, that I was able to put together in my head, the styles, concepts and ideas of the music of Krauze's composer contemporaries, and listening to this magical vinyl again became something extremely inspiring.
Another couple of decades later, around 2020, I asked Andrzej Karałow if he would make an album referring to that great work.
Why him? Well, in spite of the many great pianists, no one combines different musical worlds as comprehensively as Andrzej Karałow. And no one among the pianists I know, given his pedagogical background, his dedication to his teaching work and the ease with which he talks about different composers and what their work means to him, (which is always a sign of self-awareness, but then again, it made me think of the popularising work of Zygmunt Krauze). Finally, the fact that, despite his very young age (b.1991), he has developed his own idiom (to cite his duo recordings with Jerzy Przeździecki), in which one can see certain links with the thinking of composers such as precisely Tomasz Sikorski or Zygmunt Krauze. These links, however, do not consist in imitating the compositional techniques of these artists and their own aesthetics. What they have in common is a penchant for electronic experiments of a somewhat lo-fi, morbid and catacombic nature, so present in the joyful work of experimentalists from the 1950s or 1960s or the extremely appealing frenetic minimal music. Later, as it turned out in our conversations, this musical phenomenon and adoration of Zygmunt Krauze's work left a deep and lasting mark on the performance aesthetics of this young pianist.
Thus, in a sense, all of Andrzej Karałow's performance activity, both solo and in duo with Jerzy Przeździecki, is a development of the ideas Krauze put forward on his album "New Piano Sounds".