By:
Meeting By Chance | website | facebook | bandcamp |
The three albums by Polish jazz/electronic duo Skalpel are highlights of the Ninja Tune catalogue, and if their combination of classic downtempo hip-hop beats and samples of obscure (outside of Poland at least) Polish jazz records sounds less innovative now than it did ten years ago, it’s only because their influence has never gone away. 2014’s Transit was perhaps their most seamless album to date, a dense but mellow masterpiece of nu-jazz that wears its experimental elements so lightly that it’s easy to overlook how complex it is.
Meeting By Chance is one half of Skalpel (Marcin Cichy) and Inside Out picks up pretty much where Transit left off, being a very low key, moody and highly cinematic album of beautifully judged atmospheres and textures. That’s not to say there are no tunes; but the album slinks by so smoothly that it takes a few listens to get to its heart, rather than just wallowing in its embracing sense of allusive intimacy.
The drowsy warmth that emanates from Inside Out is imbued with a feeling of romantic longing and distant loss that which comes not only from the superbly orchestrated layers of music, but from the enigmatic vocals by three female singers, Ayuko, Mayuko and Magda, which feature throughout the album, mostly in fairly fragmentary form. Of the nine tracks only ‘Stay’ and ‘Better Now’ feel like ‘songs’ as opposed to mood pieces, but even there, although satisfying as music, the lyrics and meaning can mostly only be guessed at and the beautifully textured bass and near-tangible percussion are as much focal points of the album as the vocal parts.
The album’s inscrutable feel presumably stems from Marcin Cichy’s initial inspiration for the Meeting By Chance project. Photographer Duane Michals’ similarly-named 1970 photograph sequence ‘Chance Meeting’ is striking and highly intriguing, but ultimately unknowable, depicting as it does context-less images of two unnamed strangers passing in the street.
As with those photographs, repeated study of Inside Out can reveal more and more possibly significant detail, but nothing that really aids the understanding of the work as a whole. In the end, then, Inside Out is like the soundtrack to a recurring dream; it’s beautiful, familiar and slightly sad, an album to bask in and one that is most highly recommended to those who like Skalpel at their most subdued.
