- Melancholy dance floor moments and gorgeous ambient.
- You might have first heard of Earth Trax under his original alias, The Phantom. Or maybe his given name, Bartosz Kruczynski, which he uses for gorgeous ambient music. Or Pejzaz, where he cuts up Polish records from his vast collection. Or as part of Ptaki, another sample-based project he did with fellow Warsaw resident Jaromir Kaminski. You get the idea—dude makes a lot of music. And a lot of it is very good. Earth Trax is the project that really made us swoon, with a soft-focus, sunset-hued meld of techno, breakbeat, progressive house and trance.
On wonderful records like LP1, melancholy is the operative word, but Kruczynski isn't exactly a sadsack. It's more complex than that, nailing the tears-on-the-dance-floor vibe with the part that most people forget: it's still club music. That's why tracks like "Dream Pop," which kicks off this mix, are so successful—they're heavy but never weighed down by emotion, with a skip in their step and a robust low-end to go with the sighing vocals.
Kruczynski's RA Podcast is something of an excavation of this sound, using his own tracks and those of like-minded producers to sketch out a style that's equal parts rousing and pensive, midtempo but still propulsive. Over two and a half hours he lets these tracks breathe and leisurely mixes them together, almost like an old-school progressive house double mix CD but in the more vibrant, varied clothes of today.
What have you been up to recently?
I released a new album earlier this year called The Sensual World, and I was touring all summer, so I'm taking a little break, reading books, watching films (a couple of ones I liked this year: Close, Men, Matter Out Of Place) and making new music.
How and where was the mix recorded, and can you tell us the idea behind the mix?
It was recorded in Warsaw using 2 Pioneer CDJ-350s and a DJM-400, then spliced together from about five or six different takes. The tracks used are mostly from Bandcamp, and there are a couple of vinyl and CD rips in there too.
I kind of wanted to place my original music in context. The mix is very bittersweet (which is pretty much the essence of my music as Earth Trax) and there are a lot of album tracks and B-sides in there—a big part of my interest in dance music.
You have a few different names for making music under—how do you decide which music goes under which name?
Yeah, it’s quite complicated... but in general Earth Trax is for club and electronic hybrids, all the ambient stuff is under my real name, while all the Pejzaz releases are stitched together from thousands of records I sampled over the years and not really following any particular genres (and very much fueled by my relationship with The Very Polish Cut-Outs label).
Your project Pejzaz deals with re-edits and samples of Polish music. Is your heritage important to you and do you feel like the world needs to know more about Polish music?
I wouldn’t say it’s about heritage for me. It’s more about the surroundings, these records were just easily accessible, so it was natural. But yeah—the surroundings definitely shaped my outlook (being sandwiched between Western Europe and Eastern Europe). If you watch the recent Adam Curtis Traumazone documentary (or read Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time) you’ll get a glimpse of that, since a lot of these processes were (and still are) present in Poland too. By the way—there’s one track in the mix that works pretty great in this context, but in a twisted, nonsense way: a Skinny Puppy track sampling a Polish priest from a Michael Cimino film.
What are some names, historical or recent, that you think people outside the country need to know?
I like Zaumne, Antonina Nowacka, Brutaz releases (and RRRKRTA is one of my favourite DJs and a source of Bexa Lala’s track in the mix—very grateful for the tip here!), Piotr Kurek, Sen Jakuba and blank (who’s a great adventurous DJ.
As for more "historical" names (although some are still active), I’m a big fan of Krzysztof Scieranski, who is an amazing fusion/ambient (think of Suso Saiz) bass player, or the ambient-techno works of Tectura and 8 Ohms.
What's one social or political cause you want the world to pay more attention to?
Ukraine.
What are you looking forward to in the near future?
I’m looking forward to my album on a label I admire a lot, Lapsus, which should be out in early 2023. I’m also working on a compilation of some of my ambient-ish works under my real name.
TracklistEarth Trax - Dream Pop (Club Mix) [Shall Not Fade]
Imugem Orihasam - Gleam From Distant Gate [Nsyde]
Roland Klinkenberg - No Kid [Sim]
Bhasmantam - Bhasmantan [Pin Up]
Zie3i - Coffeinnum [Brutaz]
Human Instinct - Human Instinct (Bajram Instinct) [Stay Tuned]
Bhasmantam - Aspide (Star Version) [Pin Up]
Mono Junk - Sweet Bassline [Trope]
RAC - Hub [Warp]
Martinique - 303 Friends [Acid Orange]
Andreas Gehm - Heaven & Hell [I Love Acid]
Scanner - Moskau Disko [BineMusic]
Esem - Redskin [deFocus]
Angela Flame - Electricity [AsianDynasty]
Kenji Ogura - Cyber Tech (X-Form Remix) [Tracid Traxxx]
DJ Gert & Funny F - Fanny's Trip (Extended Version) [Underground Files]
James Bernard - UWC05 [A Strangely Isolated Place]
Massimo Vivona - Airtght [Headzone]
Bexa Lala - Rapid Eye Movement [-]
Hybryds - Envy [Transmigration]
gloworm - 2 [-]
Abyss X - Love Altercation [DMOTH]
Phil Western - Hampi [Map Music]
Black Tears - Fears For Desires [Veleno Viola]
Annechoic - lb [Brokntoys]
Sense - Practice-Makes-Perfect [-]
Zulawy - Alluvial Flows [Monotype]
arvisaen - diana's what [-]
Paul Lansky - Notjustmoreidlechatter [Neuma]
Air Liquide - Sextalk [Harvest]
Skinny Puppy - Draining Faces [Nettwerk]
Zaumne - Candlelit [BAS.Kolektyw]
J.S.Zeiter - The Code [MCMLXV]
Akis - The Powers of Pi [Into The Light]
Mike Parker - Blue Equals Black [Geophone]
Evolve Now - Ethereum [Instinct Ambient]
Earth Trax - The Great Blue Hole [Lapsus]