Another curio from Polish label Bolt Records, Bialo (BR K006) by Asi Mina features the music and voice of Joanna Bronislawska; much of the work of Asi Mina since 2005 was released by the Polish experimental label Mik.Musik, but I get the feeling they were more of a band proposition in their earlier incarnation. What we have here is 12 short pieces, and at one level the album could be read as a mixture of spoken word and an unusual form of electropop performed with choppy synths, programmed drums, and barked-out lyrics; a sort of stripped-down avant-ish version of Hazel O’Connor, as it were.
I’m at a loss mainly because the songs are all sung in Polish, and the theme is also very Polish: it’s discussing ideas about the experimental post-war writer Miron Bialoszewski, who was a novelist, poet, dramatist, and actor. What appeals to Joanna about his work? “Deconstruction, fun, neologisms, rhythms, onomatopoeia,” she tells us. “Madness without any restrictions.” Bialo – a word which translates as “White” while also truncating the poet’s name – pays homage to Bialoszewski’s major contribution to literature, which according to one Californian professor “focuses on the mundane aspects of the everyday life, usually from an autobiographical perspective and using an overtly colloquial language”. So in telling her story about “one city, street, one block, apartment, window, staircase and head”, Joanna tells us, “when choosing texts I deliberately left the Names. I sang or told only those parts that it seems to me that affect us all.”
If it’s true that Bialoszewski was a “poet of linguistics”, I can understand why this project would appeal to Bolt Records. This is another Bolt Records release that may get somewhat lost in translation, and indeed refers to a culture that’s rooted in Polish traditions, but even so you should listen to a cut or two from this album; I admire Joanna’s wiry, no-nonsense approach to the construction of her songs, which (even if we can’t understand the words) seem to be almost made up there and then, because they have a very direct force, almost conversational in its approach.