Doing something a little different this time round, I'm delighted to share with you an interview i did with a new friend across the sea and in a different line of music work.
ICFC: Hi Jarek, thank you for taking some time to chat with us, could you tell us a little bit about about yourself and soundrive?
Jarek: I'm just your typical case of someone who wanted to become a musician, but something went wrong and to somehow remain attached to music i looked at other ways i could be involved.
I have a condition called hypergraphia and because of this, I was always writing a bunch of useless things like titles of movies I've seen, this was pre-internet era so I had my own, handwritten IMDb).
Later on i decided to do something more productive with my compulsion to write and after many years of writing just for fun it became my job.
On the side i have been organizing gigs since 2007, worked with several venues, had my own
booking agency, but I definitely prefer to write.
I didn't create Soundrive or Soundrive Festival, but I found my home here.
We're looking mostly for lesser known bands and want to help people discover them and show the alternatives to the mainstream.
The most exciting part of it is that there are actually more and more people interested in that kind of music (regardless of genres), both at our website and at our festival.
ICFC: What made you want to work with music?
I just had to because of this damn hypergraphia. But to be honest I thought about quitting
many times. My first article was published in 2006 however, i only started to earn my living writing about music in 2014 and for those 8 years between I was working as a salesman for farm equipment in Ireland, installing fireproof doors, writing out mundane reports for
construction sites. sometimes I had to go undercover and secretly record things but i cannot say anything more on that subject or i would have to kill you.
Fortunately in the end it worked out well and right now I only write about stuff that I love which is not strictly music, also movies, comic books/manga and anime.
So the moral of this story is to never give up your dreams even if at some point You would need to build a god damn scraper for cow's crap.
ICFC: Do you have any favourite record labels just now or when you was younger?
Jarek: Ice Cream For Crow is my recent discovery and I love Your stuff - both the way it sounds and the way it looks. I was fortunate to buy the last copy of "Self Help For The Helpless Self" cassette with the great Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles art.
I have a quiet eclectic taste so among my favourite labels are:
Erased Tapes with experimental electronic and modern classical music
Edition Records with some great British jazz bands
Svart Records with all kind of crazy shit
Also some Polish labels like Antena Krzyku, which means Scream Antenna or Trzy Szóstki, which means Three Sixes.
Nowadays many bands prefer selfpublishing though, so a lot of my favorite albums have no label at all. When I was a teenager I was mostly into metal, especially black metal, so the small catalog of Deathlike Silence was like a religion to me.
Candlelight Records, Earache Records, Osmose Productions, Nuclear Blast, Season of the
Mist - those were some of my favourites also back then.
ICFC: I know you were recently in Scotland, did you notice much differences between the live music scene here and back home?
Jarek: Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to see any live shows during my week in Edinburgh unless we count some kind of a picnic in The Meadows where I heard a horrible cover band... But I guess that's a global thing for picnics. I had a typical family trip - my son and my wife are huge Harry Potter fans so we went to see all sorts of important places from
the franchise.
I discovered a great comic books shop called Deadhead Comics - they have
a lot of amazing smallpress stuff.
Of course I know Scotland's music scene as a fan. I'm also one of the curators of a jazz festival
in Gdansk, called "Jazz Jantar" and I had an opportunity to invite some great bands from
Scotland like Hidden Orchestra or Free Nelson Mandoomjazz, I like also Primal Scream,
Boards of Canda, The Jesus and Mary Chain, but who doesn't like them?... Also bands like
Young Fathers (I did first Polish interview with them when nobody knew their music here),
Oi Polloi, Chvrches, one-man metal project called Saor are some of my favorites. And I had a
crush on Shirley Manson when I was a teenager.
ICFC: Any funny stories of moments from past gigs/festivals?
There are so many, but most of them can get me into trouble... I had a good time with
Sepultura back in 2009 in Gdynia - they had some free time so we went to see the military
museum and we gave them some broad beans which are quite popular here in summer, but
they never ate them before. What they liked the most was a sign that says "droga wewnetrzna" which means "internal road" but turned out that "droga" means also "drugs" in
Portuguese. They took a bunch of photos with that sign. That's the safest story I can tell. But
got to admit i'm an introvert to an extreme extent and I tend to avoid people, so I rather prefer
to feed my hypergraphia than to party.
ICFC: Thank you so much for chatting with us Jarek, is there anything else you would like to add?
Jarek: Actually yes. I know that Poland for many people abroad seems somewhat stuck in the past, many think we have insane politicians in power, that we're hindering environment protection efforts of European Union, that there are many homophobes and racist's here!
Sadly that's all true, we also have many great people here that don't deserve to be
generalized. I'm sure all those demagogies will end some day and that there's a special place
in hell for Kaczynski, Trump and Johnson. Until then please check some of our finest
music artists like Zamilska, Stefan Wesolowski, Trupa Trupa, Nightrun87, Cultes des
Ghoules, Daniel Spaleniak, Deszcz, Entropia, Algorhythm, Fertile Hump, Jaaa!, Lonker See,
Pokusa, Syny, Hania Rani, Tomasz Mrenca, EABS, Lor or Blindead. Maybe they will make
You think that Poland is not so bad after all.
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