This release is (correctly) billed as the debut solo album from this Polish composer & multi-instrumentalist, but Markowska previously surfaced back in 2024 with a similarly fine EP (Thrills) and has recorded music for various art installations and soundtracks over the years. Given that this is a Miasmah release, the prevailing mood is often a bit of a dark and wintry one, but Markowska’s vision is otherwise quite distinct from most of her labelmates. While the main thread here can be roughly classified as “haunted Eastern European folk music,” Markowska’s darker “early music” inspirations are nicely balanced by ambient warmth, avant-garde techniques, and admirably exacting attention to the more subtle pleasures of texture and sound design.
The piece that first drew me to this album is admittedly a bit of an outlier, as “Train ride home” is a gorgeously rippling (if somber) zither reverie over a sensuous and increasingly prominent backdrop of bowed string drones. My favorite bit is the way the chiming notes of the central zither melody leave behind a lingering haze of ghostly harmonies, which is a cool trick that surfaces throughout the album in varying forms. Amusingly, part of me thinks “Train ride home” overstays its welcome a bit in devoting 7+ minutes to a single theme, but another part of me thinks that the sharpness of the zither attack, the subtle variations in the melody, and the glacially shifting harmonies of the lingering afterimages would be a killer start to a much longer durational piece.
Elsewhere, the following “Borderland” is the strongest of the more ambient pieces, as a looping, reverb-soaked piano melody unfolds over a beautifully shifting bed of languorous strings and an elusively pitched drone that sounds like a distressed and disintegrating tape loop about to give up the ghost. On the cheerier end of the spectrum, “Helix” is a wistful and lovely zither meditation bathed in warm ambiance, but most of the other highlights have a more elegiac vibe or one of corroded, hiss-soaked uneasiness. Apparently, these pieces span five years of recordings (2017-2022), which is a surprise given how beautifully they would function as a powerful and focused soundtrack for something like James Marsh’s macabre yet achingly beautiful and poetic Wisconsin Death Trip or one of Bill Morrison’s mesmerizing decomposed film fantasias.
