MySpace Trawl – Bogdan Raczynski
December 20th, 2007 at 15:30 by Matthew Laidlow
Silent Night, Away In A Manger and Oh Come All Ye Faithful are the traditional songs that annoying children will sing to you if you are dumb enough to answer your door at any given frozen night about this time of year.
We don’t like these songs very much, they're not very energetic and quite frankly they're not worth giving any money to. But will carol singers sing on our door for free? Will they bollocks. Because we’re miserable old bastards and wish death and destruction over Christmas instead of peace, love and bird flu-free turkey, we thought we’d give you some very nontraditional Christmas music. There’s nothing like roasting chestnuts over a fire whilst listening to the relaxing beats and melodies of Polish Drum & Bass artist Bogdan Raczynski. Polish!
Yes, Bogdan Raczynski is from Poland and, unlike what most tabloid-readers will think, he actually works for a living and doesn’t just confuse you on building sites and buses when they’ve nicked your job.
Signed to Aphex Twin’s Rephlex record label, Bogdan is one of the artists who has continued to surprise, entertain and generally confuse us with his own mix of electronic and drum-heavy songs. From releasing records like Ibiza Anthems Volume 4 as a piss-take to the endless amounts of clubbing albums that clog up the compilation chart each year, Bogdan also takes part in very peculiar stage shows.
From dressing as a pink Power Ranger to playing sets less then a minute long, it’s certainly something to widen the eyes of the average indie kid.
The lyrics of his songs are often a mix of Polish, English and Japanese. In his youth, Bogdan moved to Japan where he was made homeless after dropping out of art school. He still made music off his trusty laptop and bummed around people's houses to survive. Just like we do actually.
His highly-screeched vocals are not the sort that you'd hear in some sort of Top 40 song anytime soon, but we don’t mind. A2 Untitled has a very catchy and childlike synth that seems to set the tone of the song for its course, but soon the 100mph drums kick in and all of a sudden you're transported to some sort of rapid-fire dance-off club where you have to move around like sort of fucking mental case in order to survive. We like.
Because this MySpace is a fan page and nothing official from the man himself, it may explain the very odd track that is amongst the four on offer. If you tell us which one, we will send you a chocolate from our advent calendar. Seriously, we are nice like that. As an alternative to nice Christmas songs full of mush and bollocks like this, put on some fun Drum and Bass to get the party started. Please note that Pink won’t be there though.
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