Charlie took charge for the 5th episode of our podcast, and by taking charge, we mean infusing her hour long recording with a dose of powerful electronica: emb, electro, industrial and some italo as a cherry on top. For the occasion, Jędrzej Kowalczyk of Jasna 1 had a chat with the artist about her sound and her Krakow-based activities.
As we can hear in the podcast your music style can be characterized by ebm, synthwave and dirty electro. On the other hand you're really into italo disco, your live debut at Jasna was in my opinion mainly influenced by italo. How do you plan to develop your live acts, can we expect more dark stuff?
I think I am very flexible with my style, maybe it comes from being a promoter for many years and trying to play a suitable warm up for the headliner. Definitely one thing the mentioned styles have in common are the synth arpeggiators, which appear of course in Italo disco. Since my live debut was set for K.O.D. party with Franz Scala, it was clear for me to prepare an Italo one. However, I would like to perform more live sets in the future and show more varieties of it.
You are co-director of the project "Elementarz dla mieszkańców miast" (Handbook for City Dwellers) being honored this year as the most original and influential art initiative in town. What is the main idea behind the project and what we can expect from it in the near future?
When we founded the place with Arkadiusz Poltorak in 2016 our main idea was to connect the art with the music world and to basically have a meeting place where friends of friends can approach each other. Since the space's conception we aim to enable local artists to make independent artistic statements whether it concerns an exhibition or a presentation of live music. Our name comes from Bertolt Brecht’s series of poems, Aus dem Lesebuch für Städtebewohner. Keeping up with Brecht, we encourage socially conscious and aesthetically challenging production in visual arts, electronic music and beyond.
The rest happened by itself, Martyna Nowicka joined as the second art curator and other local forces are part of the place. Now we would like to legalize it as a "Kunstverein". From the award we have won, we invited Marysia Lewandowska to lead workshops about "adaptation" and bonded strongly with the participants. It showed us how important, especially after lockdown, it is to meet with people with a common context and help each other to work out strategies.
Which also led to the project "Venues from the Future" we are participating at, together with 6 other similar places around Europe, financed by the European Commission. Our goal is to produce a toolkit for surviving the times of crisis and show the importance of community spaces and their direct impact on locals, which often isn't provided enough by big institutions. I hope 2022 will be mainly about new friendships and networks, which also refers to the Gravity project :)
You've already released really great music on labels like Mechatronica or Warsaw based Dom Trojga. Can you tell us something about your forthcoming releases?
Thank you Jędrzej. I am happy you like it :) So far I have been taking part only in compilations, so I am very excited about my next release, which will be my solo 7" on a new London based label called Ferry Lane Records. As pressing plants are overloaded and Brexit actually have happened, it might take a bit longer as predicted, but hopefully it will be released by the end of this year/beginning of next year.
