The music of Jacek Wanat, who records as Chore IA, has found a home on the Polish label Zoharum – this item Postscriptum (ZOHAR 301-2) has been issued jointly with Antenna Non Grata (ANG CD31-32/2023), and includes a bonus disc of earlier cassette material.
We all know this label loves a heavy dark drone, but Chore IA serves up that commodity with 18 gallons of extra dissonance – so palpable it’s like a dose of astringent lemon-juice ammonia injected in the brain. What’s more he mostly does it by acoustic means – we’d like to think he’s at his most fulfilled with a good wooden cello in his paws, although he also plays bass and guitar, and does allow for some sparing electronic ice-cream filter diapasons to his carefully-layered stronks. He makes timber resonate so strongly that the very fibres peel apart before him, and carpenters tremble at his approach. This really pays off on two ultra-long pieces, ‘They Say Nothing / Ils Sont Morts’ and ‘I Die / Respirateur’. The Nothing-Morts piece is especially alarming, highly conducive for a nightmarish walk in the concrete park of Hades’ outer precincts…here, some of his string-scraping anti-harmonic approaches put me in mind of Fred Frith in attack mode. It’s a long walk down a strange corridor where the moment of arrival is endlessly deferred, while “Mr Lizard” whispers in your ear.
The “respirateur” piece ladles in a side or two more percussion like so many brass nodules in the tanker, plus an intoning voice supplied by “Mr Errant Medico”, an imaginary character who inhabits this imaginary hospital where the life-support system is not supplying air to the dying patient, but instead pumping in some nasty form of hallucinogenic gas. Suckin’ in a good healthy dose of fretful imagination from this droning Pole, who is clearly skilled with studio craft as he chunks up his air-miles on the recording tape, one pass-mode at a time. He’s also remorseless, tightening the screws on his listeners with no let-up on the tension, foreboding, and nausea.
Top marks to the dispensing chemist from Hell so far, but there’s more…the bonus disc contains rare tracks from his 1995 cassette Neogolizmowa (plus some unreleased doubloons from same date), originally squeezed out on the Obuh label. Quite the contrast to disc one; in 1995, Wanat v1.0 was evidently more rough-edged, lo-fi, bitty, minimal and raggedy in his experimental crondlings, ingeniously making the most of his simple sounds as he scrapes and bashes, and uses his voice to bark or murmur mysterious statements, sometimes getting quite frantic and over-wrought in that department. Still just as insistent as the later work though, so I guess he was a man who having latched onto an original thought or an unusual vision (and he’s got a million of ‘em), he wouldn’t let go of it until he’d ground it all out in audio form. For some reason this guy’s work just exudes a powerful Eastern European vibe, like finding a lost movie starring Pola Negri. This cassette work of his likewise would not feel out of place alongside any given post-punk cassette band of the 1980s.
A real pleasure for me to discover the music of this tough-minded, singular creator, and his powerful medicine. Recommended. From 23rd October 2023.