Jacaszek - Treny

Miasmah, 2008

Another addition to the list of successful, beautiful electro-acoustic approaches to the Divine that I have come to love at my core, with no genre-investigating strings attached, along with Xela's The Divine and Akira Rabelais' seminal Spellewauerynsherde. Baroque chamber surrealism, the sound is somewhat like a less splintered Fjordne if he had just lost a loved one, or a version of Miasmah labelmates Elegi with microbeats and Hildegard Von Bingen chorales over it. After the second track I was sold, I consider this one of the most beautiful albums of the past couple years, and cannot wait to hear his experiment in field recording of Gothic cathedrals in 2009's Pentral.

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p.s. wondering what the word Treny meant in Polish, a quick wiki brought up that the term means Laments, they were threnodies (verses of mourning), written to a lost daughter by renaissance poet, Jan Kochanowski (essentially the Polish Shakespeare):

Lament 1

All Heraclitus' tears, all threnodies
And plaintive dirges of Simonides,
All keens and slow airs in the world, all griefs,
Wrung hands, wet eyes, laments and epitaphs,
All, all assemble, come from every quarter,
Help me to mourn my small girl, my dear daughter,
Whom cruel Death tore up with such wild force
Out of my life, it left me no recourse.
So the snake, when he finds a hidden nest
Of fledgling nightingales, rears and strikes fast
Repeatedly, while the poor mother bird
Tries to distract him with a fierce, absurd
Fluttering — but in vain! the venomous tongue
Darts, and she must retreat on ruffled wing.
"You weep in vain," my friends will say. But then,
What is not in vain, by God, in lives of men?
All is in vain! We play at blindman's buff
Until hard edges break into our path.
Man's life is error. Where, then, is relief?
In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief?