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Pawel Szamburski + Aukso — Długo, Długo Nic, A Potem Wszystko
(Bandcamp Rope Worm RW5, 2025, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-06-09

Długo, Długo Nic, A Potem Wszystko Cover art

Clarinetist Pawel Szamburski is one of the regulars on the Polish improvisational music scene, Aukso is a chamber orchestra from the city of Tychy, and together they make this most engaging of musical creations. The seven tracks herein are mostly crossfaded (it was recorded live on June 10, 2023 at the Auksodrone festival), making the album seem a whole lot shorter than the 38 minutes that it really is. The opening cut, “Tafla,” comes up very slowly out of total silence, only the most gentle percussion can be heard for the first couple minutes, then the lonesome faint melody of a clarinet comes forward through the fog; finally around the third minute a well defined melody backed by a string section reaches out to the listener in the piece’s final minutes, fading effortlessly into “Fale,” the second of seven. Many of the pieces have something of a Middle-Eastern flavor, as if the melodies were inspired by Turkish or Bulgarian folk music. As we get further in, the orchestra (conducted by Marek Moś) becomes more involved in the sonic fabric of each of the pieces, beginning with “Wzburzenie.” There is a lot of emotion and beauty herein, almost like a collision of ambient, neo-classical, minimalist, world folk, and chamber sounds, with Szamburski’s ever-present clarinet leading the way on a path through the dark forest. The album title translated from Polish means “Nothing for a long time, and then everything” which seems very appropriate given the ever increasing power of the music as it careens through the seven parts of the piece; the listener may not even know when the transition is made from one movement to the next. The closing piece, “Pożegnanie,” is especially worthy of note given that it stretches out for fourteen minutes, the longest on the album, the first few minutes led by the strings; one won’t even hear a clarinet until well  over five minutes in, and it is in fact the most typically classical piece anywhere on the album. Dlugo, Dlugo Nic, A Potem Wszystko is something that definitely needs to be heard.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Pawel Szamburski

More info
http://ropeworm.bandcamp.com/album/d-ugo-d-ugo-nic-a-potem-wszystko

 

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