Composer and synth wizard Wojciech Golczewski came onto my radar with his score for the haunting and understated We Are Still Here. His score for Ted Geoghegan’s slow burn ghost story was just what the film needed, and made the film’s emotional center that much more effective. From there I deep dived into Golczewski’s work. His Mondo/Death Waltz Originals debut Reality Check was a trip into analog space madness, as was his minimoog masterpiece End of Transmission and The Signal. And besides We Are Still Here, Wojciech Golczewski has written and recorded incredible scores for films like Beyond The Gates, Tonight She Comes, Hover, Mohawk, and 400 Days.
Wojciech Golczewski recently released a new full-length called The Priests of Hiroshima. I’ll talk more on that later, but for now we’ll talk about his new single, the exquisite relay:sat:black_sun.
The thing that Wojciech does in all of his music is add a definitive emotional center. There’s an organic and natural approach to his music that lends itself easily to getting lost in his compositions. End of Transmission for example, to my ears, feels as much like a classical work than a heavy synth album. It has more in common with Beethoven and Debussy than it does Schulze and Froese. That’s not to say it’s not a full-on electronic masterpiece; it’s just more than circuits, envelope filters, and floating in space.
On his newest single, relay:sat:black_sun, Wojciech Golczewski builds a grandiose two-part electronic piece with synths and electronic percussion. With “Black Sun P-01” and “Black Sun P-02”, each track bristles with buzzing circuits and grand melodic heights while still retaining a touch of that baroque quality Golczewski brings to all of his work.
While “Black Sun P-01” works up to a momentous crescendo and Jean-Michel Jarre-like emotional heft, “Black Sun P-02” builds slowly and meticulously. Part Hans Zimmer and part John Carpenter, it slinks and sways with both deep space dread and an understated melancholy. Both tracks work together to give us an over eight minute mini-suite that, in the words of Golczewski, is “a pulsating and organic body of sound, an instrumentation by machines, for machines and relayed by machines that are humming on the last battery cell further into the dark void.”
relay:sat:black_sun is another sonically rich, standout piece of electronic music from one of the absolute best composers working today.
relay:sat:black_sun is available now at Wojciech Golczewski’s Bandcamp page. Get it here.
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