On his new album their internal diapasons for the Łódź-based label Pointless Geometry the composer Miłosz Kędra roots his sound in synthetically processed pipe organ, having crafted his own emulator after scouring churches and parish houses in the Greater Poland area for spare parts.
Diapasons or principals are the backbone of the pipe organ, producing its characteristic sound in contrast to flutes and strings, which are mimicked respectively by the widest and narrowest of the flue pipes, and reed pipes with their vibrating brass strips which from the clarinet and saxophone to the oboe and bassoon or even the bagpipe tend inevitably as if by a process of nominative determinism to resemble reed instruments.
Kędra’s knack as a composer and instrument builder puts him in a league with say the late great Fluxus artist and downtown pioneer Yoshi Wada or more recently FUJ||||||||||TA whose hand-built pipe organ is comprised of eleven pipes and a fuigo box bellows of the type which was traditionally used in Japanese swordsmithing and Sholto Dobie, the Vilnius-based artisan who attached an air pump to a series of reeded and metal pipes culled from organs, bagpipes and the Laotian khene for his album 23, which was another of 2024’s standout records.
The nine tracks of their internal diapasons share a sinuosity and certain tentativeness with 23 while in general there is no shortage of great contemporary pipe organ music, from Sarah Davachi to Kali Malone to the organist Kit Downes who together with the legendary Bill Frisell and Andrew Cyrille on Breaking the Shell made for an unconventional jazz trio, but Miłosz Kędra’s offering on their internal diapasons manages to sound distinctive and unique without ever feeling hermetic.
Take the harrowing scene from Mulholland Drive where a blackened and matted figure appears in the alleyway behind Winkie’s diner, but recast the dread and portent and the fainting fit and reimagine the whole as a somehow warming and pacifying experience, not a catastrophe but a slender epiphany or some other kind of small revelation. You might get something like ‘airborne’, the second track on their internal diapasons, which sounds like the creaking open of a door as some effulgent goop slides in, or like the half submerged or sooty or ink-splotched soundtrack to a Studio Ghibli movie.
‘for how long were you silenced?’ is more eerie and ‘ouroboros’ is as circular as the title suggests, while later tracks are more patient and methodical as Kędra tempers his explorations. The long piece ‘our wilting flowers bent the same way’ is at times even teary-eyed and tender, as Kędra concocts a soothing balm out of his organ synthesis, and ‘scythe-veiled’ sounds like ocean murmurings in the shadow of a busy port, before their internal diapasons concludes with the humming glow of ‘thinning rattle’.
The record’s liner notes by Filip Szałasek provide a few suggestive phrases and references, as he defines the word ‘audiomancy’ as ‘the conjuring of lost sounds’ and links both to Kędra’s aura and process. He recalls the Polish composer and ‘combined sounds’ theorist Witold Szalonek and his search for the ‘unexplained properties of wind instruments in classical music’ and quotes Jean-Paul Sartre by way of the French author and philosopher Didier Eribon, whose influential book Returning to Reims is a memoir in the sense of retracing one’s steps, a treatise on class and a journey of self-discovery.
