No Filler Music Podcast - Sidetrack: Polish Jazz Sampled - The Music of Skalpel

Episode Date: September 15, 2018

On this week's Sidetrack we dive into the sampled Polish jazz tunes of Poland's own Marcin Cichy and Igor Pudło, known collectively as Skalpel. These guys are masters of their craft and create beautifully dark & moody, cinematic nu-jazz, sampling only from old Polish jazz records from the 60s and 70s. We listen to a couple of these old records, along with two songs of Skalpel's from their 2004 self-titled and 2005's "Konfusion". For more info, check out our show notes: https://www.nofillerpodcast.com/episode/album-review-amon-tobin-bricolage#sidetrack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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skill level, you can learn how to install new single pole switches as well as standard duplex and GFCI outlets. Register for free at Home Depot.com slash workshops. The Home Depot, how doers get more done. Hello, everyone. I'd like to take you on an imaginary trip when I tell you this story, pretend you can see everything happening in your mind. Ready? One. One. Two, three. And welcome to No Filler, the music podcast dedicated to sharing the often overlooked hidden gyms

that fill the space between the singles on our favorite records. This is our sidetrack episode for the week. Last week we covered Aymn Tobin and his kick-ass jazz fuel down tempo sampled tunes. Today we are covering

the Polish duo scalpel. And they're equally awesome jazz sample tunes. My name is Quentin. I've got my brother Travis with me as always.

And dude, it happened, man. We're covering scalpel, dude. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later. Yeah, we're going through and hitting all the the the big names in our musical journeys, you know. Yeah, dude.

I feel like we need to cover one of their albums as a full-length episode at some point. I mean, we got three clips lined up today, dude. This is going to be, we're diving deeper than most sidetrack episodes. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and we're actually, I'm covering some songs of theirs from their self-titled and from confusion. So there are two major releases.

So this is another one of those bands that we discovered together when I was living with you back in 2008, 2009. This is when we first got into down-tempo music. And, man, there's just something about scalpel, dude. I feel like we've talked about this a lot with our other day. down-tipo episodes, specifically with Tosca and then with last week's episode on Aymond Tobin. These guys are equally good at just, like, creating this mood, you know? Like, scalpel music just puts you in this headspace. It's kind of similar to Aymond Tobin, you know, in that, like, it kind of conjures up these

images of like these cityscapes at night, you know? Yeah, for scalpel at least, they seem to rely more on those old jazz records and just sort of sticking with those samples instead of adding, you know, too many sampled or electronic modified, you know, baseline, stuff like that. They don't really do much to the sampled instrument, you know, which is, you know, Tobin will take an ad. you know, two drum beats together and make them one, you know, super fast, dynamic drumbeat, you know, versus it seems like scalpel, it's more about taking these jazz samples and just making them one song, but not necessarily doing too much to manipulate those samples, you know. Yeah. No, so, so that is what, you know, if you look into these guys.

So it's two dudes. Scalpel consists of, and I'm going to butcher these names, dude. Marsen Sichi. God, I just know that's wrong. And Igor Pudlow, there's like a weird slash in that L. I've never seen that before. That's all right, man. Yeah, they're both from Poland.

And apparently they met back in like 98, 97, 98. I gore or Igor was working in a record store and the other guy, Marston, was a customer there. And he says, Igor says he didn't buy any music, but he talked with me about music. And we would share ideas and found that we had similar ideas about music. So they made in a record store basically. That's awesome. Now I'm pulling this from... I wonder what section of the record store they were in.

Right. What section was he flipping through. So I'm pulling this from an interview that they did. There's a website called Cat on the Wall. And they're pulling this from whatever. So they're pulling this from an archive. So I'm not exactly sure when this interview was. But it must have been around 2000 or so.

And yeah. So again, these guys. are from Poland and they set out to create music that centers around sampled clips from Polish jazz records. Polish jazz specifically from the 60s and the 70s. And they were going for a more ambient and cinematic sound. And I feel like they pull it off wonderfully, dude. Especially in their two albums, They're two older albums. They're self-titled, which is called Scalbel, of course, came out in 2004. And then their second full-length album, which is called Confusion, that came out just a little over a year later in 2005.

So for this sidetrack, what I want to do is play a couple clips from some of those old Polish jazz records. So if you look into these guys at all on the internet, it's not going to take you too long to find this picture of them where I'm not sure which one it is, but one of them is holding up two LPs, a couple Polish jazz records that, my guess is they've sampled from these two albums because he's holding them up.

And one of them is by Christoph Komita, and he has an album that came out in 1966 called Astigmatic, which a lot of people refer to as one of the best jazz albums of all time. At least one of the best albums ever made in Europe. So let's play a clip of that. So again, like these are albums that these guys are pulling from, you know, and sampling. And their music consists purely of samples. They don't bring in musicians to record.

They don't bring in vocalists to add to add words, you know, to add lyrics. Everything that you hear from them is sampled, which I think is really cool. Do we know if that's true on their later stuff? Because they've come out with a record recently. I'm not sure about that, dude. Because, again, I'm pulling from this interview of theirs that I feel like probably came out in the early 2000s. Okay.

But they say specifically here, We don't invite musicians to work with us. We are producers. We work at our homes, making music on computers. He says, it sounds live because the samples are from live musicians. And we only take samples from Polish records. Okay. So here is the title track from Christoph Komita's 1966 album As Digmatic.

This is the first track that you hear on that record. and then I've got another clip from another Polish jazz artist to play for you. So anyways, here is track one from Christoph Komita's album As Digmatic. What are your thoughts, dude? There are some interesting things going on, for sure. It wasn't a straightforward job. I mean, you know, that is some straight up, like, avant-garde experimental shit. Yeah, right, right.

But the reason I wanted to play that is because, like, with that kind of jazz, like, I feel like that is just filled with little bits and pieces that as a producer, you could just pull and sample quite easily, you know? Right. Especially if you're trying to get like an isolated drum track or something like that, like a little, you know, three or four second clip that you could loop and make a drumbeat out of it. of like it kind of makes sense that scalpel could pull from these albums and make really cool music from it um so i wanted to play one more clip from an old polish jazz record again this is another album that um and we'll we'll post this image up in our show notes for this episode but one of the members of Scalpel is holding up these two records

The other one is from Zsbz, okay, this is going to be terrible. Zbignu Namislauski That sounds good. Thank you. This is his quartet and this is from one of the records in a Polish jazz

series that I looked into I couldn't really find too much about this series but it is a quote milestone series for the history of Polish jazz. And it started in 1964, there were 76 volumes in this series, which is fucking cool. It's a lot of good jazz. And this is on volume six.

And this guy has apparently best known for appearing on Christoph Komita's album Astigmatic. So he's a jazz alto saxophonist. He appears in that album that we just played a clip from. This is his own quartet, and this is a clip from Polish Jazz Volume 6. This is track three on the record. It's called Strasna Franca, or translated to English Francis the Terror. Yeah, so I can, I mean, having listened to so much scalpel, I can definitely hear and pick up on that saxophone sound.

Yeah. Being, I mean, that, whoever that saxophone player, is that the, is that the, is that the,

that's the guy. Okay, yeah, you can definitely hear that style come up on these scalpel songs. So let's, let's hear a scalpel song, man. Yeah, dude,

let's hear a scalpel song. But I just want to say real quick, like another reason I wanted to share these, these tunes, because, like, for the most, part, Polish jazz in the 60s and 70s was all like this, you know, super experimental, um, avant-garde, like not exactly that easy to listen to, right? Like, I mean, you got to have a,

you got to have a love for jazz and a love for, for music, really, to get into this kind of stuff. So with that said, let's hear what these two guys can do with this kind of stuff. Right. Yeah. No, that's good. Um, yeah. So, so, so the song, that I picked, and this was a really tough choice, dude, really tough to choose a song for today, because they're self-titled and their album confusion, almost from start to finish on each of these records, every single song is just awesome. And these albums, for sure, are worth listening to from start to finish. You know, you really want to get in that headspace. definitely worth listening to.

But I chose track 2 on their self-titled, which came out in 2004 for a few reasons. They have a lot of cool spoken word clips in this song, and just a lot of really cool, interesting things happened in this one. So again, this is track 2 off their self-titled album from 2004. This song is called Not Too Bad. Bits and pieces and patches mixed together, kind of in a mixed homogenized way. They expect quite a lot of noise.

Probably they were going to play some Polish records. That shouldn't be too bad. And dance all night if they want to. All right, so that was actually the whole song, dude. I mean, I will say that I'm not really a fan of sampled vocals. done in that way. Okay. There are a lot of scuple songs that don't do that.

Dude, okay, question for you, bro. Yeah. You cool with playing one more song just on the fly here? Yeah, because I think we could showcase them a little bit better than that. Let's listen to... How about Asphodel? How about I pick the song? Go for it, dude.

Okay. Because I had a song, a particular song in mind that I wanted to play. Now this one's a little bit slower. But it's off, again, it's off their self-titled. Actually, you know what? Let's go for something off of confusion, which is their second. Well, dude, I had one of your favorite tracks off that album, Flying Officer. I had that lined up for our outro, but hey, dude, let's just fucking play it right now. Oh, I didn't realize that was the outro. Yeah, dude, let's do it. All right. It's a pretty good, it's a lengthy clip. But hell, man.

Well, I'll figure out something else to do for the outro. All right. So let's play that. Let's do it. So this is track two off of their album that came on one year after they're self-titled. The album is called Confusion. It's spelled with a K because they're fucking cool like that. Again, this is track two off that album.

It is called Flying Officer. More like it, Q. Yeah, dude. How do they pull it off? How do they do it, dude? Like, specifically the drum beats, man. For me, that's what does it when I'm listening to a scalpel song. It's like, dude, these sound like organic drum beats that are playing along perfectly with the rest of the samples that they're using.

Well, yeah. I mean, I guess all you got to do is line up the tempo, right? Sure. But man, it's like, it's really hard to tell like, okay, like how much of each sample are we hearing and how much is layered on top of each other, you know what I mean? Like that really cool like organ or whatever at the end there. Right. Was that part of the drumbeat sample or were those two separate songs? Same with that really kick-ass, like what is that?

What was that saxophone? Oh, yeah. Yeah, the saxophone solo is one desert for me with that song. Yeah. They're so good at that. So that's it for today, huh? That's our little sidetrack on Scalpel. I do still feel like we need to cover these guys even more, man,

because there is so much great music from them. I feel like from these two albums specifically, I feel like we could do a full hour on easily. So that's Scalpel. And that's our sidetrack for our Amund Tobin episode. Next week, we are covering the German experimental rock band. Can, which were prevalent from the late 60s through the 80s. And they're actually, I don't think they're active anymore,

but they've been dropping records throughout the 80s and 90s. These guys are fucking great, dude I'm really stoked to get into them with you because I know you haven't really gotten into them heavily. I think we're going to cover Tago Mago, which is Nama theirs that came out in 71. These guys are in the

Crout Rock genre because they're from Germany. But, man, these guys are something else, dude. They were way ahead of their time. I'm really excited to get in. do it with you. As always, hop onto our website, no-filler podcast.com. There you can find our show notes for each episode where we kind of dive a little bit deeper. You can always, you can follow links to all the articles and interviews, all the sources that we pulled from. We've got links to

YouTube videos and, you know, clips from concerts and all that fun stuff. You can find the track list for each episode on there. You can actually stream our episodes directly from that website with our SoundCloud player. You can always find us on iTunes, pretty much any podcast streaming app we should be on there. And again, that's going to do it for us today. this is our take on scalpel um and yeah our outro song is going to be from a band called jagged jazzist which um consists of shit man a handful dude let's see like according to wikipedia there are currently nine members in this band so this is a legitimate jazz band um

These guys are fucking dope, dude. They're from Norway. This is an album of theirs called The Sticks. I think, I want to say track two, Day is a pretty cool song. Yeah, there's Day and then another day. Yeah, let's play Day, dude, for our outro. So, all right, that's going to do it for us today. My name is Quentin.

My name is Travis. And we'll talk at you next week. Build the skills that get your home projects done right. That's why we offer. free and interactive online DIY workshops. During the live streams, our knowledgeable associates help you tackle your DIY projects no matter your age or skill level. You can learn how to install new single pole switches, as well as standard duplex and GFCI outlets.

Register for free at homedepo.com slash workshops. The Home Depot, how doers get more done.