Should I write something about myself? I don't know. But I think I have to... One to introduce myself and two to explain what I'm doing here and why. I'd like to start by writing that the state of my incurable addiction to music, as this is the main reason why we meet here, has lasted for more than half a century. And interestingly enough, I have just found myself at such a moment when more than 25 years of this adventure have fallen into the 20th century, and the other half is just into the 21st century. When I realised it this way, the idea for the form and content of this page immediately came to me - turn of the century, two worlds. Pearls of yesteryear and electrifying novelties. A little "retro", a little "futuro".

My fascination with music started with The Beatles, heard somewhere probably on the radio, around the mid-1970s. Very quickly I was introduced to the electronica of Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream and, of course, Kraftwerk... I am even an exemplary alumni of the “Abbey Bahn” - a kind of mix of The Beatles and Kraftwerk, two bands that showed that genre frameworks don't exist, and that rules, patterns and principles are there to be broken. When David Bowie joined these two, my musical taste was definitely decided. I could no longer become a punk, metal, hippie, popper or something like that, because the richness of diversity attracted me much further than the tightness of the genre framework. It has stayed that way for me to this day, and I listen to a really diverse range of music, never locating the experience in a narrow slice of it. I love new and intriguing things, but I don't think I'm lying if I say that I have the greatest fondness for the decade 1977-1986. This is when most things happened in my musical world. I might even venture to say that it was during these years that the most interesting things were recorded. Well, okay, with some exceptions. Unfortunately numerous ones. Well, okay... But I guess it would be more true to say that as many sensational records were recorded during that time as totally rubbish ones.

- Do you like 80s music? - someone asked me the other day.

- Of course I do! I like it a lot - I replied enthusiastically, although, as it soon turned out, unwittingly.

- Dude, well me too! Chery chery lady... Maria Magdalena... You're a woman, I'm a man... they were hits, weren't they?

- Oh, then I don't like it...

But in fact I love it. Just not that kind. I guess this is where my general dislike of pigeonholing, genre categorisation, etc. comes from, as apt as it is misguided. I frankly confess to being irritated by the term “eighties”. Terribly capacious, encompassing the finesse of new romanticism as well as the dull husk of Italo- and Eurodisco. But what to do... It was in the 1980s that my collection of recordings on cassettes and vinyl records took on almost enormous proportions. Working for nearly three years at the Academic Radio ‘Amigo’, in cyclical weekly broadcasts, I presented more than a hundred records filled with electronic music and its related genres, practically not reaching for those items that were presented on Polish Radio. It was, after all, the 1980s characterised by the mass use of instruments whose sounds I fell in love with without memory and to death. Synthesisers. I literally fell head over heels for them. So much so that when my contemporaries wore flannel, checked shirts, grabbed their guitars and began to wheeze into their microphones out of the pain of existence, I didn't understand it at all and ‘missed out’ intently. I was left with my synths like Andy McCluskey with OMD. Things got a bit more complicated in the 1990s...

The beginning of the 21st century brought me new fascinations, but also real opportunities to deal with the creative side of music. Between 2004 and 2010, I was the publisher, co-founder and co-owner of the independent label Rage In Eden (originally War Office Propaganda), which housed many artists from the industrial, dark ambient, neo-classical and other scenes. Between 2004 and 2014, in the musical project Rukkanor, I explored militaristic sound structures and the ritualistic depths of ambient, combining them, I think, quite successfully with oriental and sacred aesthetics, as evidenced by the extremely positive reception of the album “Deora”, which remains my greatest success to date, both musically and in terms of publishing, commercially. After years of silence due to life's turmoil, I returned to this sound-making (for I am not a trained musician) activity of mine. In the so-called meantime, I also became a self-proclaimed home-grown music publicist and journalist. I collaborated with Alternation.pl, the printed ‘Przesilenie (Solstice)’ and, most recently, Alternativepop.pl, from which all my texts were eventually removed in a mad act of some pathetic frustration on the part of the editor there, which today makes me laugh, but still amazes me. Since I always adhere to the principle ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ (in Polish we say something like 'there is no bad that doesn't come to good eventually', I ended up writing about music and publishing this material on my own terms. 

Did I thus turn ‘bad’ into ‘good’?

Judge for yourselves.

Robert Marciniak