Prolific Polish genre-bender Adam Majdecki-Janicki is back with another unique record, Bibulus / Noise Meditations. This eclectic collection of retro-futurist folk tracks has been melting our minds lately.
Adam (also known as A.J. Kaufmann) is known for blending folk, noise, and psychedelic rock to create his “Strange World” of sound. Adam’s music and poetry explore the fringes, from heavy riffs to space-out soundscapes, and his new record further proves that.
Bibulus / Noise Meditations contains elements of electronic and electro-acoustic music, as well as ambient and noise. But as Adam explains, the new album is, at its core, a free-improv folk album. The new solo music was released on July 20th and features Adam on vocals, acoustic guitar, synthesizer, organ, tapes, FX, and even flute. It was recorded at his Via Kosmiche home studio this year.
Bibulus consists of ten tracks that glide along the freak/outsider folk stream that Adam’s music is known for. The party starts with the extraterrestrial soundscape of “Oko / Eye / Auge,” a brief instrumental opener that introduces us to Adam’s strange world of sound.
“Down by Wieprza River” was interesting to me for several reasons. Musically, the song is another weird sonic adventure with hints of Indian sounds, like a George Harrison acid trip. What interested me more was the track title, which references a river in northwestern Poland, a tributary to the Baltic Sea. I looked up some information about the river as I listened to the song, and I imagined Adam sitting there and conjuring some of his strange sounds.
“Mixcoatl” is a much more relaxing ambient piece. While it feels otherworldly, like many tracks on the album, it also feels deeply grounded in nature because of the field recordings of birdsong. “Fantastickes” has what I detected as Adam’s synthesizer making eerie sounds, which made it feel like the backdrop of a tense horror movie scene or something from an Unsolved Mysteries episode.
Many other tracks on the record make for intensely interesting listening, such as “Słońce w Piwnicy.” It’s another song with an eerie ambient approach, gently gliding along with harsher noises scratching to the surface in the background. It was fascinating to see this ambient composer side of Adam, whom I’ve mainly known for his psychedelic rock. It shows how versatile of a musician and creator he is.
The record ends with a pair of tracks called “Meditations in Noise” and “Meditations in Noise II.” The first in this duo sounds like soundtrack music for an imaginary film. The static sounds are overlaid with a bizarre ambient soundscape that would fit perfectly in a cosmic horror flick. “Meditations in Noise II” pushes the envelope even further in the record’s longest track.
Bibulus / Noise Meditations is another excellent entry into Adam Majdecki-Janicki’s extensive discography, proving that there are few genres he can’t tackle. I would categorize this as ‘dark ambient’ music that could be a new soundtrack for your night terrors. Adam takes a page out of the film soundtrack book of Trent Reznor and creates the type of creepy noise mediations that take the horror of existence and turn it into something beautiful.
Check out Bibulus / Noise Meditations by Adam Majdecki-Janicki on Bandcamp here.
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