Music composed and performed by Rafał Kołacki
A quarter of a century ago, I spent my life engineering on the oil rigs in the North Sea. I preferred working night shifts, which is a calmer time, when only the necessary staff are around doing their regular job. Sitting for hours in a hermetic few cubic meters-sized unit with a dozen monitors informing about virtually every vital process on the rig, twelve hours on, twelve hours off, no Saturdays/Sundays/eves, three weeks in line cleans perfectly one's head and soul. I listened to a lot of music on shift, but otherwise the sounds of the rig and the sea made my daily soundtrack.
For sure, the vibration and noise of the rotating tool were a dominant sound – mechanistic, rhythmic, deep – they were all the time around, 24/7. In a rare moment with no drilling, the silence sounded pressing, almost dangerous – the silence in an operating rig means the tools’ crash or an even more dangerous accident (as an eruption of poisonous gas I was responsible for monitoring there, among other duties). With time, one learns to notice nuances in monotonous drilling tools’ vibrations, telling what happens with the diamond drilling head at a few kilometers depth. And then it was water, the sea...
Usually the same grey summer or winter, non-audible inside the unit, it was always near. When leaving the unit for sampling, checking the sensors, going on or off shift, you can see and hear the sea around – everywhere. Usually – whispering, sometimes – roaring.
This combination of permanent drilling tool vibration and the sea water sound stayed with me as the longest (to be precise – three years long) soundtrack in my life. After the first weeks on a rig, I never felt uncomfortable because of the sound, even more so with time, it taught me a thing or two about patience and eternity. Since those times, many different water-sounds related installations, one way or another recall me of the time (and atmosphere) of the offshore rigs, lost in the middle of nowhere, in fog...
Everyone, even with minimal interest in modern art, is familiar with popular art installations, combining visual objects(often video line) and original music(sound). Sound artist Rafał Kołacki is working in this field; his „Echo Grało“ album is dedicated to water and the echoes related to the water sounds. Don't be mistaken - „Echo Grało“ has no relations with once popular amorphous ambient esoteric albums, so beloved by yoga's pseudo-gurus and sellers of meditation courses. „Echo Grało“ isn't even a white noise album.
Rafał uses his collection of field recordings from such different places as Turkey, India, Morocco, Iran, and Poland, combining them with electronic sounds generated by hydrophones (special microphones, submerged in water) and connected with modular systems. The result is music consisting of random natural noises (and people's voices, crying children, etc.), deeply mixed with electronic loops and effects, where the water sound is near the listener all the time.
On the cover, there is a citation, taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book Three, about the „Echo, who is waiting for the sounds which her voice could return to the speaker“. One long, ever-changing piece varies from liquid and amorphous to rhythmic, almost dance-able, to dark industrial and back to ambient. In contrast to meditative, there is a lot of blood, nerve, and action in the album's only composition. The music itself can summon some water resources problems-related, environmental, and, in general, human existential associations when listening to.
Rafał presents „Echo Grało“ on (still continuing) intensive tour around Poland, playing the music live using four glass containers with submerged hydrophones, the modulators, and his field recordings library on stage. It should be a really interesting art installation, still, the recording is quite lively and works well without the live artist’s presence, or the video line too.
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