Photo by Piotr Lewandowski / Pop Up Music
As you may have noticed if you’ve been reading the Quietus over the course of this year, we’re rather partial to the debut album by Stara Rzeka, aka Polish musician Jakub ‘Kuba’ Ziołek, who also plays with Ed Wood and Innercity Ensemble. Titled Cień chmury nad ukrytym polem, it’s impossible to pigeonhole, drawing heavily from black metal, krautrock and folk forms without ever settling into one particular stylistic configuration. Or, as Quietus editor John Doran puts it, "This extraordinary album was written on an acoustic guitar but has obviously moved on significantly between conception and execution. While the album opens with the chiming of a 12 string, it slowly morphs into elektronische musik before sliding blissfully under layers of super heated sludge guitar and noise. By the time the ecstatic synths are met by necrotic black metal vocals, nothing about this album will surprise you."
Now Instant Classic, the same label that issued the Stara Rzeka album, are preparing to release another album from the prolific Ziołek. This one arrives under his Alameda 3 guise, is titled Późne królestwo, and finds him playing alongside fellow musicians Tomek Popowski and Mikołaj Zieliński (with additional parts by Wojtek Jachna and Tomek Pawlicki). We’re very pleased to be able to offer you the first listen to the album in its entirety, which you can listen to via the embed below.
Although a different beast than Stara Rzeka – venturing further into psychedelic rock territory than that project – Alameda 3’s Późne królestwo continues to explore similar musical territory, again spiraling from hypnotic, unraveling guitar-led grooves into passages of fierce, black metal-styled meltdown. "I like radical, material sounds… Even in ambient or acoustic music, I like sounds to be massive and extreme," said Ziołek in a recent interview with the Quietus, which you can read here.
That same sheer presence remains a key trait of Alameda 3, too. "The music I’m working on together with my colleagues is in a way a continuation of one single story," says Ziołek, in the text accompanying the new album’s release. "Of course there are different people playing, in different ways, but somehow we managed to keep the feeling of the music coherent. And this is the most important thing for me. Alameda’s album, contrary to [Stara Rzeka’s], was created more as a concept and describes the moment in which thought and existence (on a global level) may be destroyed. Lyotard’s question comes back: what happens to the humane when the sun goes out? This record is also deals with the subject of death, both on personal and universal levels."
Alameda 3’s Późne królestwo is released via Instant Classic on 15th September, on limited digipak CD and digital download formats. To find out more and to pre-order the album, click here to visit the Instant Classic Bandcamp.
Ziołek plays a rare show in London later this month as Stara Rzeka, as part of Unsound Festival’s London edition, which also features a host of other great Polish artists and runs from 26th-29th September. He plays at Cafe Oto on 29th September alongside BNNT, Innode and Nic Bullen. For more information and tickets, click here.
