Studio electronic productions, preparing instruments, using and editing tapes – all those practices once broadened the perspectives of the art of sound. However, the “unreachable” sound combinations produced by Małe Instrumenty could also be considered as an attempt to overcome the “impossibility” in music. However, both cases are differently time-oriented. The Experimental Studio practitioners were mostly interested in using the newest technologies and exploring a sphere of sounds which do not exist in the music tradition. Within Małe Instrumenty, I mainly search for archaisms which provide the “real sound” with more space and opportunities of functioning.

Why is the album and the song entitled Kartacz (which literally means “a canister-shot”)? The military rhetorics has always influenced different ways various artistic areas were developing. Writing these words shortly before the 100th anniversary of the break of the World War I, I refer to a metaphor of a missile as a tool helping to shape the structure of a music composition. I also reach for acoustic peculiarities linked with the war and the collage of specific lines from Polish war films.

The choice of quotations from Tomasz Sikorski’s compositions is neither a matter of coincidence. His music has always been close to me: its experimental character, “Slavonic” spirit and philosophical orientation towards inevitability of time.

Paweł Romańczuk, December 2013