10:00 pm
Robotobibok—Nawyki Przyrody (2004)
The invisible man walks down an arrow-straight road beneath the steel supports of an elevated train track. After strolling past several blocks of abandoned industrial buildings he notices a small group of people milling around on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes outside the door of an old factory. He eavesdrops on their conversations for a moment as he examines the sign on the door. "SHOW TONIGHT", it says in rough, silkscreened letters. Slipping undetected through the entrance, he makes his way up a concrete ramp, past an old railing, and through an open doorway into a vast, wide-open space. In the middle of it a crowd has gathered in a circle to watch a performance art piece. As he approaches, he gets a clearer view. A cluster of glowing spheres of light in various colors hangs from the ceiling, illuminating the scene below them. On the floor, a woman clad only in galoshes and a Porky Pig mask writhes around, shredding a stuffed animal elephant with a steak knife. Standing above her in a circle, a group of five people in jumpsuits, wearing papier-mâché masks of various woodland animals—a deer, a chipmunk, a woodpecker, a bear and rabbit—clasp hands and dance in a circle. There is music playing around this quirky, humorous, jarring scene. The music is Robotobibok.
Formed in Wrocław, Poland in 1998, these guys played a unique style of music that, though rooted in the Polish yass tradition, drew heavily on free jazz, fusion, kraut rock, post punk, post rock and vintage electronica. The result was something unique and fun, hooky yet experimental, typically managing the astonishing feat of being both frenetic and relaxed at the same time. Despite only existing for ten years and having numerous lineup changes, they managed blaze a trail all their own across their three albums, creating a unique, hybrid form of jazz that, as far as I'm aware, is without peer.
All of their releases are good, but their last album,
Nawyki Przyrody (which means "Habits of Nature" according to Google Translate), is definitely the most refined and eclectic. The production is amazing—vintage yet modern, a textural fusion of the organic with the synthetic, with a diverse array of sounds that snap together like sonic Legos. Beyond the studio magic, it can't be denied that these guys know their way around their (multiple) instruments, and they certainly know how to write an engrossing and often catchy tune. Starting with the opening track "Kamaji", which features a rare vocal performance and essentially sounds like a jazzy take on Kraftwerk, this is the kind of album which defies all expectation. The cinematic synth-jazz of "Symfonia Zmysłów" and "54 Kw" sound like a crazy, metamorphosing soundtrack to a detective movie that exists in both the 60s and 80s. "Skipping A" and "Skipping C" are free jazz companion pieces that sound like they come directly from the 60s. "100000 Lat Gwarancji" sounds like Devo collaborating with Charlie Haden on an instrumental interpolation of 90s gangsta rap. "Zemsta Gniewosza" plays like post punk colliding with free jazz. "Tylko dla Zwierząt"—with its collage of analog bleeps, horn squirks, cat meows and monkey sounds—seems reminiscent of White Noise or Faust. And the album closes with the markedly different "Jurij"—a gorgeous post rock track with a heartrending guitar lead.
The older I get, the harder it seems to find albums that really blow me away and redefine the way I think about music in the way albums did when I was younger and had heard less. But this this is one of those albums. The combination of styles, and the way they're put together, is really like nothing else that I'm familiar with and I think it's quite a credit to these musicians that they're able to forge something almost poppy out of such a style.