Artur Mackowiak & Grzegorz Pleszynski - A Sound Of The Wooden Fish (Wet Music, 2014) ***

 By Stef

It's always nice to get to know unknown musicians, as with this duo of Artur Mackowiak on guitar, synth and electronics, and Grzegorz Pleszynski on plastic tube trumpet and voice. They are joined on the first track by Jerzy Mazzoll on clarinet, who is a musician we do know in the meantime.

It's a short CD, fourty-four minutes in total, offering us rock-influenced arpeggio guitar with distant plastic tube trumpet sounds (and mixed in clarinet sounds on the first track). It's atmospheric music, floating effortlessly forward, repetitive and easy, once in a while some drama is added with heavy beats.

Mackowiak's approach is somewhat in the style of Loren Mazzacane Connors, dark sound sculptures on electric guitar with slight changes in the overall texture, with the single tone plastic tube trumpet howling over it, sometimes beautifully, but nothing that will wake you up from the contemplative listening this music requires, and that is maybe the downside of their approach, namely that few risks are taken, and what is true for sports is also true for music : you cannot win if you are afraid to take the risk to loose.

Yet it will be interesting to hear how their concept matures.

Listen and download on Bandcamp.