“Wacław Zimpel and Kuba Ziołek, two of Poland's finest underground musicians, create an extraordinary space where jazz and folk collide.

Zimpel and Ziołek are two one-man music machines representing two core facets of modern experimentalism, Polish or otherwise. Zimpel’s solo work has married his interest in various traditional musics (from Laos, India and elsewhere) with the pointillistic work of 20th century American minimalists (particularly less well-known NYC clarinetist and gamelan obsessive Daniel Goode). He’s typically very prolific too: last year he debuted his improvising trio LAM on record, having released his solo opus Lines only a few months prior. Both 2016 projects featured overlapping organ repetitions akin to a Reichian economics of melody, using repeated melodic lines in rhythms that reconfigure and re-tessellate themselves like jiggling Koyaaanasqatsi snippets, all the while leaving fertile ground for Zimpel’s bruised clarinet moan to dance on overhead.

Ziołek’s guitar-born and far folkier soundworld is more contemplative, but sweeping repetition plays just as key a role as it does in Zimpel’s jazz minimalism. Ziołek’s Stara Rzeka project can at times resemble the longform folk songs of Roy Harper, extrapolated into teetering psychedelic epics with just as much fingerpickin’ virtuosity and mystical lyricism, and plenty of reverb, jangling percussion, and the odd divergent passage of noisy black metal squall.” – The Quietus