The Funnel by Wojciech Rusin
The Funnel is the debut album by composer, instrument builder and artist Wojciech Rusin.
Combining field recordings from Port Talbot Steelworks, self built electro acoustic instruments and vocals drawn from alchemical texts and renaissance polyphony, The Funnel is chamber-musique-concrète for the wondering troubadour of the 21st century.
"Passport to an OBSCENELY DYNAMIC, contemplative dimension - “The Funnel” is a set of ancient imaginations in a stranglehold of electronics and steel factory atmosfears, originally composed for Radiophrenia by Wojciech Rusin and now gloriously pressed and presented by Glasgow based Akashic Records.
Equipped with some adapted instruments and occultist readings (decent dose of RATHER GLOOMY Greek-Egyptian philosophy in there too) Rusin composes and engineers an unpredictably celestial moving picture for the ear - the auto-tuned intro “Paolo’s Dream” and the bellowing baritones of “Salvation” diffusing into a solemn soul-purging of post-pythagorean(?) electro-organums.
“Transmutation” sounds like a petri dish of duplicating cells, contorted beauty with strings soaring like some sorta solar wind, the internalised ecstasy fading into the ambient clatter and percussion of “Cyclops”. The brain really scrambles trying to find points of reference - so we’ll shoot from the hip and go for some ridiculous meeting point between Księżyc’s “Rabbit Eclipse” and the more contemporary work of Pierre Bastien.
Side B offers further consuming, haunted chamber music - “Sacrifice” sounds like some possessed, hologram’d high priest drowning in a sea of sub-bass and gristly electronics before rounding up this destabilising noggin-scrambler with the near ten minute Open Music enchantment “Jupiter”.
- Low Company
"..a hugely enjoyable wigout with the weirdest of bedfellows'
-THE WIRE
"One of our favorite releases in recent memory. Another sturdy slap in the face of relentless re-issue culture"
- Mark Harwood, Penultimate Press
Tracklist
| 1. | Paolo's Dream | 1:50 |
| 2. | Prima Materia | 2:56 |
| 3. | Salvation | 3:23 |
| 4. | First Encounter | 2:49 |
| 5. | Transmutation | 3:46 |
| 6. | Cyclops | 3:38 |
| 7. | Fox Glove | 1:35 |
| 8. | Dance | 2:50 |
| 9. | Sacrifice | 4:59 |
| 10. | Celestial Twins / Procession | 9:04 |
| 11. | Jupiter | 3:21 |
Credits
All music by Wojciech Rusin.
Additional vocals by Milo Brennan and Emmy Broughton.
Artwork and design and Print by Oliver Pitt.
Parts of The Funnel were originally commissioned by Barry Burns and Mark Vernon for Radiophrenia 2017.
℗ and © 2019 Akashic Records
License
All rights reserved.Recommendations
Wojciech Rusin is a Polish-born audio visual artist based in London. He draws inspiration from alchemical and gnostic texts, early renaissance choral music and Eastern European mythologies. He released Syphon LP on AD93 in 2022 and The Funnel LP on Akashic Records in April 2019. He designs and makes 3D-printed reed instruments, reworking ancient designs with contemporary 3D modelling technologies.