Earth Trax - Closer Now

  • On his fourth LP as Earth Trax, prolific Warsaw-based producer Bartosz Kruczyński returns to what he does best: airy, melancholic Baltic beat.
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  • Bartosz Kruczyński is a master of bringing melancholy and nostalgia to the dance floor. As Pejzaż he digs for deep cuts from the history of Polish recorded music—including the pre-war era on Noce i Dnie to the more '90s-focused Blues and turns them into sepia tone disco hits. As The Phantom and under his own name, Kruczyński releases music that he calls Baltic beat: a Polish answer to Balearic music, brushed with melancholy, pale colors, emptiness and cold of the Baltic coast landscape. Earth Trax might be Kruczyński’s most dance-oriented moniker, but it's still imbued with his signature bittersweet brand of longing and sadness. Closer Now blends all of Kruczyński’s approaches into one coherent whole. He takes his love for nature from the original Baltic Beat albums, the dreamy disco of Pejzaż and Earth Trax's house sensibilities and combines them into new ideas. In contrast to last year's The Sensual World, filled with energetic bangers, here Kruczyński focuses more on oneiric atmosphere than high tempos. His beloved pads are less pronounced in the mix, giving way to ambient-inspired sound blurs and airy, sparse structures. High-pitched, celestial vocal samples open the title track and the record and sporadically appear throughout several tracks. Drenched in reverb, the vocals evoke a dreamlike state, even when Kruczyński rhythmically chops them up, as in "Understand." When he turns up the gets danceable on "Porcelain" (which owes much to classic Pantha du Prince) or "Lullaby," he never lets sadness out of sight. It's not explicit, and Earth Trax isn't about to make anyone cry, but it's there. Under every note, though, there's also a faint hope. With every subsequent track, the beat becomes less and less pronounced. This culminates in the closer "The Great Blue Hole," an ambient miniature that comes in at less than three minutes, ending the album's nocturnal journey with a delicate awakening. It's a hypnagogia made for clubs. Maybe it's a Polish thing, this bittersweet feeling of sadness and longing, nostalgia and hope. It's different from Portuguese saudade, Welsh hiraeth or Bosnian sevdah. Unlike those nations, we don't have a specific term for it, but Kruczyński's music embodies it more clearly than any words could.
  • Tracklist
      01. Closer Now 02. Understand 03. Porcelain 04. White Carnations 05. Lullaby 06. Bruises 07. Pied Piper 08. Today 09. Skin 10. The Great Blue Hole
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