Mucha na Dziko

Hi everyone,

Mucha Na Dziko here. You may know me, or maybe remember me as a fairly active user from a couple years back, or perhaps you don't. Let me introduce myself again anyway:

At the moment I'm nearly 24 years old, and have been making music since I was 16. My dream ever since I first touched an instrument was to become a songwriter and one-man studio band, so instead of sitting down with my bass, guitar or trumpet and learning for hours on how to properly play them, I tried right from the start to write songs and record them. First on my garage band iPhone app, then on garage band on a newly acquired computer, and then finally a little bit more professionally in Ableton Live and Apple Logic. I was releasing my songs (good or bad) on Soundcloud for a few years now, never gaining much of a following, but enough to keep me going and be happy with my output.

I never thought of Soundcloud as something very serious. More like a private library of all the things I've done up until that point, waiting until I will have skill enough to start releasing music on "serious" streaming platforms and CDs or Vinyl. And, well, that day has finally come. Just this month I released two singles and my first full-length album.

I'm extremely proud of all these tracks and – for the first time in my life – they're gaining a little bit of notoriety on Soundcloud (the algorithm seems to like me, as 80% of views come from Soundcloud recommending my music through "related tracks" and others), as well was on Spotify – though in this case it's mostly thanks to my friends and my parents listening on repeat and sending to their friends. I suppose everybody needs to go through this stage at some point.

Well, I thought a nice idea would be to have a place in the internet where I could share some insights about the creative process, updates on how things are going with released material and the one to come, thoughts on the music I make or the one that inspired me to create, etc etc with people interested in the vast and various world of music. And what better place for that than good old MusicBanter?


Photograph by my patrtener in love, crime and art – Damagenius

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Mucha na Dziko

A Message To Love

"A Message To Love" is the first album I have recorded and officially released. I worked on it for a little bit over a year, with varying amounts of involvement over time, mostly waiting until my fragile ego will allow me to finally choose the right collection of songs and then smooth out the rough edges. And, well, here it is.




True to my longtime dream of becoming a one-man studio band, I wrote, recorded, mixed and performed all of the instrumental and vocal parts myself. The only exception being the track "She's a Contradiction", where I had my longtime friend – the ambient musician and multi-instrumentalist Szelest – play the drums. Other than that, all the electric and acoustic guitars, basses, various percussion instruments, sitars, trumpets, violins, mandolines, ukuleles, lead and backing vocals were performed by me.

In the grand tradition of "concept albums", I too wanted this to be one, and I suppose it did work out fairly right (though I'm not so sure it's clear to listeners who never heard me babbling about it). Throughout the 11 songs I invite the listener to the world of a fictional and unnamed couple, to hear from first, second and third perspective narrations the beginning, flourishing and end of their relationship. The finishing touch was added by the Chinese graphic artist and photographer Damagenius who provided me with the cover photograph.

The concept wasn't a clear thing from the start, so the songs – at least in my head – always have a double entendre. I wrote them with one thing in mind, but they serve another purpose in this story. Or they don't serve any purpose in the story, and I included them simply because they sound ****ing cool to me and fit the style I was going for.

Allow me to quickly go though them (as is their purpose in the story):

1. A Bedtime Story – The title says it all. The speaker invites us to tell us a story and we meet our protagonist. He is a human male, and goes on walks with his beagle.

2. Lonely Boy – During a day as any other our protagonist meets a girl he falls in love with. She reciprocates the feeling, and now they're not lonely anymore.

3. Smoke Screen – First instrumental track. Interpret it as them being happy I suppose.

4. She's a Contradiction – Ah, love, what a complicated matter. Inner thoughts of a boy lost knee deep in the feeling.

5. What a Shame – Well, what can you do when you can't even remember the name of the girl you're about to meet. You can act smart and try to figure it out during the meeting, or you can follow in the footsteps of our main character and just guess. Predictably, she leaves him then and there.

6. Where's the Wine? – A trip down the anxieties and psychosis of being alone and utterly disliking that state.

7. Until Dawn – The second instrumental track, what's the point of drowning your sorrows in alcohol, if you don't stay up all night.

8. Miss You – The usual state of pretentious and overreactive feeling of missing somebody.

9. Helping Hand – Third person perspective monologue to the protagonist about how all that's happened he brought upon himself. You always have friends to turn back to though.

10. Red Ears – Third instrumental track. No idea why I put it at #10, but here it is. I just like the composition, and thought it's a good idea to have a cute little break between the psychedelic rock of "Helping Hand" and folk-rock stomp of "Southern Skies".

11. Southern Skies – However bad life may seem, there's always the warm sun and kind climate of the south to turn to. Serves as the closing statement of the story and as a general philosophy idea – don't worry, be happy, go bronze yourself on the beach

As I said, most of these songs however were not written with the album in mind. I basically made a compilation of my creations that I thought fitted each other best stylistically and then realized that actually if I put them in the right order, there is a tale to be deduced from them. The original ideas for them (if there ever was any original idea) were as follows:

1. What a Shame – By far the oldest composition here. I wrote it way back in 2019 or 2020, and only recorded it with acoustic guitar and vocals. The lyrics were supposed to be humoristic, but so far nobody laughed when listening, so I guess I failed. I always liked the melody and the chord changes, so now when thinking about the album I decided to rerecord the whole thing with a brand-new arrangement.

2. Red Ears – I wrote it two or three months ago inspired by my love's poem for me. She's Chinese, but she found someone on the internet to help her translate her words to Polish (my native language) before giving it to me. It was a short and cute little thing about finding a creature with red ears underneath the quilt and not being able to stop herself from biting them.

3. Southern Skies – Written and recorded about a year ago when I was in the town of Sète, in the south of France. I had a lot of things on my mind before coming there, but then the sleepy seaside town put my mind at ease. I recorded just the acoustic and vocals on my phone and then finished it when I was back the next month back in Paris.

4. Lonely Boy – First song I wrote after meeting my current girlfriend. I was a very lonely boy living just outside of Paris and first met with her in a park. She's not a lonely girl, quite the opposite, but, well, the lyrics are what they are. I had no clue what other instruments to add to the arrangement, and then I realized that it's because I just like the song the way it is. I only added the electric guitar at the end for a little excitement for the listener during the long fade-out.

5. Both Where's the Wine? and Until Dawn were my graduation projects during the first year of my sound engineering school. I thought they. sound ****ing cool, so here they are.

6. Miss You – Written and recorded about a month ago when my love went for holidays and I missed her, and needed some pathos.

The rest of the tracks were just impulses of the moment, when a riff, melody or chord progression struck me and I just sat there for the whole evening or two trying to figure out what would sound best with that and what with what. Usually the instrumental parts come first, and when the whole thing is nearly done I'd be listening to it plenty of times humming under my breath until I find the right thing to sing. The lyrics are often improvised or found in my collection of notebooks I constantly fill out with thoughts, drawings and little poem parts ever since I started high school. As you can imagine, there's quite a lot of them, and I don't remember even 10% of all the nonsense I wrote in them, so they're a really great source of inspiration.

Well, long story short, I'm happy this project is finally done. Making a fulll album of songs I'm satisfied with has been my dream since I started playing music and writing songs way back in 2016, and now that an official release is in place, I can – with my conscience clear and clean – go and produce next ones, which I'm sure will follow shortly.

It's now live on all streaming services and available for purchase on Bandcamp.
Kisses, and see you when I write something about the singles or the upcoming stuff

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Mucha na Dziko

SOUNDCLOUD – https://soundcloud.com/user-74863765...social_sharing

SPOTIFY – https://open.spotify.com/album/5osxb...T5WhQypAN5tfMg

BANDCAMP – https://bernardmile.bandcamp.com

YOUTUBE – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrX...AOehd5uR9lOJUg

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Mucha na Dziko

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Mucha na Dziko

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Mucha na Dziko

まだ！



"まだ !" is mamy second single, released about two weeks ago. It's a song nearly 5 years in the making, as I first wrote it somewhere between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020.

At the time I was absolutely enamored with Donovan (especially the "Mellow Yellow" album), and had just discovered the Japanese songwriter Shintaro Sakamoto. What started the track – and became the driving force of the groove – was the bassline. I loved it from the first second of playing it, and then jammed for hours on end, trying my best to sing in Japanese.

It's not Japanese of course, it's absolute nonsense gibberish. Vocalizations that were supposed to imitate the sound of the language.

I made a demo recording of it, that then stood for many years as the definitive version, because even though I tried to re-record it many times, and was able to make the backing track superior to the original, I could never, and I mean never replicate the vocal line in a satisfying way. I gave up at some point, and finally released an instrumental version made in 2022 on Spotify. It was my first actual release. I still dreamed of making a full, finished and polished thing though.

This year it was made possible. I found the lost original 2019 recording and isolated the vocals, syncing them later with the 2022 backing track. I slightly re-mixed the whole thing, cut some parts, and now I can say with pride that "まだ" is finally what it was always meant to be.

So, funnily enough, it's a product of three different periods in my life. My 19 year old voice, my 22 year old instrumental chops, and my 24 year old mix.

I sincerely hope you'll enjoy the ethno-psychedelic crazy groove of lunatic proportions.




SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/album/6vl6P...QjWMl7duCbNJ_Q

SOUNDCLOUD: https://soundcloud.com/user-748637654/sdxi7niihxxb

BANDCAMP: https://bernardmile.bandcamp.com/track/-

APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/fr/album/%E3...4?i=1753926006

YOUTUBE:

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Mucha na Dziko

Where Are You?



"Where Are You?" is the first single I released on streaming platforms. A song written four months ago, it's probably my favourite out of all I have written or tried to write in the past year.

It was inspired in the most part by me being alone for a week or two, when my girlfriend went for holidays with her friends, and I had to take care of myself by myself in the cold winter months. She's Chinese, just as most of her friends here, and she'll be going back to China by the time summer is over, so they would often go for week long trips to different European countries to make the best of the time they have here. Me and her would have this thing going on, where I would write a song for her every time she disappeared. This one was the second or third one of this sort.



I started the song with the main guitar riff, planning on making a polish new wave type rocker, but soon realized that it's taking a life of it's own, and the finished track would be very far off from the vibe I was going for initially. A darker, more moody one. The lead guitar parts came from me playing around with a stock amp simulation in Ableton Live, and after trying to change the tone sa couple of times, I decided there is no point, as the high-pitched, chorused and reverbed sound is the best one here.

I wrote and recorded the whole thing in the span of one evening, with the arrangement being done fairly quick, but the vocals being the tricky part.

I have a problem with writing lyrics, you see. I'm not much of a poet, and the things I write usually follow a similar pattern, but I try hard to break that. In this case I wrote two new verses, the two first ones, and then looked hard through all y notebooks in search of something cool, eerie, and with a little psychedelic taste, finally finding the "Hearing the steps of the sun" part.

With the whole song being based on one riff, the vocal part had to be unique and ear-catching enough to make the listener think there are verses, pre-choruses and choruses, when in fact the whole thing is just one groove. It succeeded pretty well if you ask me, one could be mistaken to think there are actually different arrangements, just because of the voices.

The chorus melody is 8 vocal parts recorded one after the other, with me changing voices from the middle range (4 voices), to singing the high harmony (2 voices), and finally recording the low one (2 again).

To be perfectly honest, I sort offend this song one of the most realized in my entire songwriting career. I love the dark and eerie feeling it gives off, and I hope you'll enjoy it too – whether when walking down the streets at night or just vibing at home.


SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/track/7jqVI...6e3dea80e74861

SOUNDCLOUD: https://soundcloud.com/user-748637654/where-are-you

BANDCAMP: https://bernardmile.bandcamp.com/track/where-are-you

YOUTUBE:

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Mucha na Dziko

A Message To Love ON VINYL

A little update about the album. I plan to press the record, along with the two singles on vinyl. The reason for this is twofold:

1. I want to put the physical release of it as merch on Bandcamp and other services of this sort. Digital releases are good and all, but sites like this thrive on selling merchandise. Having vinyl copies up for sale would greatly help me spread my wings and make my site more interesting for any potential audience in the future

2. Holding a vinyl disc with my music on it in my hands. I mean, this one explains itself, doesn't it? The absolute primitive cool of experiencing your music pressed onto the black and juicy vinyl is a dream of any musician at any stage of their career. So please please please please help me make it happen

In order to press the first 100 copies of the record, as well as printing the cover sleeve and accompanying booklet, I started a kickstarter campaign. I just launched it today. If you would be so kind to back me, I would be in the seventh heaven. 10 or 50 dollars is not that much to ask from one person, but for me to spend 800$ on pressing those vinyls would be a choice between eating for a month or not.

Anyway, here I provide the link to the campaign, and I hope you like the music enough to actually help me accomplish this beautiful dream.

KICKSTARTER PROJECT LINK: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...ve/description

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Mucha na Dziko

It's funny my drunken ramblings get tens or hundreds more views than my art

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Mucha na Dziko

https://soundcloud.com/user-74863765...social_sharing

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