Brzmi w Trzcinie #8: Wojciech Rusin, Bassvictim, Aleksandra Słyż, Hugayz, blue steel
Kickstarting our coverage of 2025 in Polish music
Brzmi w Trzcinie starts 2025 with a bold mix of Polish talent, featuring the mystical compositions of Wojciech Rusin, Bassvictim’s electro-punk drive, and Aleksandra Słyż’s meditative work for a custom modular synthesizer. We also explore Hugayz’s egg-punk hijinks and the post-vaporwave world-building of blue steel. Let’s dive in.
Wojciech Rusin, Honey for the Ants (AD 93)
London-based composer and visual artist Wojciech Rusin presents the final chapter of his trilogy of albums “informed by mystical and gnostic texts, celebrating the weird, unhinged and occasionally beautiful.” While the previous entries (2019’s The Funnel and 2022’s critically lauded Syphon) applied a polished, digital, fourth-world approach to early renaissance choir music—also boasting tracks that sounded like medieval monks on autotune—Honey for the Ants shifts its focus toward contemporary composition. Wistful strings and minimal piano movements bring the music to the here and now, but over the course of each track these near-pastoral idylls turn outlandish and unsettling yet again. Rusin, a long-time creator of bespoke 3D-printed woodwinds, introduces these unconventional instruments in surprising moments, heightening the sense of the uncanny. While not necessarily a grand finale to the “alchemic trilogy,” Honey for the Ants is its moonlit coda: a measured resolution to Syphon’s dramatic climax and a glimpse into the fresh themes and ideas that Rusin seems poised to explore next.—Patryk Mrozek
Bassvictim, Basspunk 2 (self-released)
While only tangentially of the “indie-sleaze revival” moment, Bassvictim’s music often sounds just as fun as what the wild party photos of the mid-aughts suggest going out in that era must’ve been like. The duo of Polish-born Maria Manow and Colorado-bred Henry Clayton’s second album, casually self-released at the end of January, brings forth more perky electroclash and eurodance hybrids that jiggle atop wobbly basslines, somehow more punk than anything else. It’s all there in the name, I guess. Compared to its forerunner, Basspunk 2 offers fewer bangers but more range. “Forever Salty” and opener “Alice,” which lifts its vocal melody from “L’Amour Toujours,” are earworms for sure, but it’s slow-burning tracks like L.A. that show an unexpected new side to the duo’s music: unhurried, bittersweet, and surprisingly brittle. Bassvictim are feeling out the boundaries of their comfort zone, and it’ll be exciting to see how they push past them.—Patryk Mrozek
Aleksandra Słyż, Tonarium Live (Superpang)
As a composer in the electro-acoustic tradition and a sound engineer, Aleksandra Słyż has dedicated her work to navigating the threshold between the synthetic and the organic. Her latest offering was improvised and recorded during an arts residency at Katowice’s Academy of Fine Arts, where deep inside the cutting-edge Tauron Lab lives the tonarium: a proprietary instrument that uses a digital mixer to interface between two analog modular synthesizers by Random Source and Bugbrand. Słyż makes this beast-like setup come to life in two striking pieces: one that traces an ever-evolving but oft-disrupted chordal drone, heavy with overtones, and a second one that embraces repetition and decay. Both showcase not only the tonarium’s weighty, resonant timbre but also Słyż’s remarkable ability to extract expressive nuance from its highly reactive circuitry. Her stated goal was to immerse listeners in a unified sonic space—and with the sheer physicality of this instrument, she just might have pulled them under..—Patryk Mrozek
Hugayz, minglez and jinglez (glamactik rekordz)
This brief EP comes from what is likely Poland’s only egg punk act—a Kraków trio helmed by local underground mainstay Maciej Nowacki. A lo-fi, garage-adjacent offshoot of modern punk–heavy on genre satire and Devo worshipping–egg punk emerged in the 2010s, marked by frantic tempos, jumpy chord progressions, distorted guitar riffs and gleefully plastic synthesizer hooks. Some of its key players lean into a playful softness, setting them apart from the rockers to their mods: chain punks. That sort of vibe is largely missing from minglez and jinglez though, whose songs are jagged and mechanical, pounding forward with an industrial rigidity, while the sleazy, metal-adjacent vocals push the sound into darker territory. It’s egg punk, sure—but one that veers dangerously close to a hyperpop-infused spin on Songs About Fucking (and lyrics about video games don’t help much).—Patryk Mrozek
blue steel, Age of Bloom (BFF Music)
Curated by web-native polymath Julek Ploski, BFF Music carries the torch of 2010s post-internet music into the dystopian present, both advancing the genre’s evolution and further complicating—if not perverting—its facetious brand of nostalgic techno-utopianism. The label’s latest release comes from Warsaw-based producer Bartek Szymczak, co-creator of the like-minded imprint 00effort. blue steel seems to take world-building rather seriously: from the analog vertebrae of its skeletal drum machines, MIDI woodwinds and retro synth pads, to song titles that name-check familiar gameplay mechanics and RPG tropes, Age of Bloom recreates the whimsical journeying of its cover in a way that doesn’t just sound like a video game, but nearly becomes one. Only catch? You have to play with your eyes closed.—Patryk Mrozek