First there was SoundCloud. Not a rack of second-hand singles, not a Tonpress catalogue, not the year 1980. A blue bar moved across the screen, and from the speakers came a track that did not sound as though it had been unearthed. It sounded as though it had been waiting for me.
I found The Very Polish Cut Outs through people I knew in what was then the very young online world of the Polish music industry. News of intriguing projects still travelled between people, rather than between carefully selected fields of an algorithm. Someone knew someone, someone sent a link, and beneath SoundCloud’s blue waveform an entrance opened into Polish music that nobody had yet thought to call classic.
I did not know the original version of Transport Band’s A może by…. It turned out to be the best possible beginning.
I was not listening to a relic after restoration. I was not comparing the nobility of an old version with the convenience of a new one. Jazxing (a production duo from Gdańsk) handed me the track as music of the present, without a display case, a date or the smell of an archive. Only later did I learn that beneath the edit’s seven and a half minutes lay a single released thirty-four years earlier.
A bassline with time to spare
The first thing that gets me is its lazy funk. The bass does not lead the track by the hand. It rocks it with a movement of the hips, then lets it drift half a step away. The drums keep things moving without haste, the guitar leaves short, dry incisions, and the whole track moves forward with the confidence of someone who no longer needs to prove they will reach their destination.
This is dance music that gives no orders. It does not raise its voice, quicken the breath or count down the seconds to the chorus. Instead of dragging you onto the dance floor, it slowly turns whatever space you happen to occupy into one. A room, a car, a beach, late afternoon, a fragment of the city. Everything begins to move at the same pace.
Roman Pazur Wojciechowski (vocals) does not try to overpower the rhythm. His voice has a soulful roughness, yet it sits in the recording with ease, almost carelessly, with a hint of a smile hidden beneath every phrase. Even when the melody rises, control never disappears. He knows how much he could reveal, and that is why he reveals less.
Jazxing did not paint modernity onto Transport Band. Jakub Sautycz and Mateusz Filipiuk cut and looped the material so that what had once fitted into just over three minutes could breathe for seven and a half. They prolonged the pleasure, freed the rhythm from the timetable of a pop song and left more room between gestures. They did not change the direction of travel. They widened the road.
1980, without the display case
Transport Band formed in Wrocław in 1979. Alongside Wojciechowski were Romuald Frey (guitar), Włodzimierz Krakus (bass guitar), Jerzy Kaczmarek (keyboards) and Jacek Ratajczyk (drums). The group existed only briefly, recording six tracks for Polish Radio. Two of them appeared on a Tonpress single, with A może by… on one side and Obłęd on the other.
There is something indecently Polish about this short history. A group with a sound of its own, an excellent singer and a funk pulse appears for a moment, leaves behind a small disc and a few radio recordings, then dissolves amid line-up changes and successive names. It does not fail spectacularly. It simply disappears quietly enough to be discovered years later.
Grzegorz Walczak’s lyrics do not tell a story in the usual order. They offer images of a walk through the world, the wind invited over for the evening, rearranged signposts, a deserted station and a signalman who could do with something stronger. Instead of declarations, we are given a succession of possibilities. Each begins with an innocent question and briefly opens a door onto a life lived a little differently.
The rhythm does precisely the same thing. It does not promise a revolution. It merely shifts the accent. It does not tell us to abandon the road we have followed so far. It simply checks what might happen if the signs were moved. Transport Band’s funk is neither tense nor demonstrative. It carries the softness of late summer, when the day is still long but the light has already begun to betray its ending.
What surprises most is how little Jazxing needed to add. All the makings of the future club version were already there in the original. The bass already knew how to work beneath the skin. The guitar left exactly the right gaps. The drums carried that distinctive gait, relaxed but never accidental. The edit did not rescue a weak song. It allowed a good one to last as long as it should.
The Polish past goes out at night
The Very Polish Cut Outs began in 2010 with a simple suspicion: that far more rhythm was hidden in music recorded during the Polish People’s Republic than the official histories of Polish song cared to remember. Maciej Zambon (DJ, producer and founder of the label), together with a circle of friendly producers, began extracting funk, soul, disco, electronics, psychedelia and every place where genres had become indecently familiar with one another.
This was not about restoring monuments. Old recordings were cut, extended and placed under club lights so they could act upon the body again. SoundCloud became the back room of this peculiar archaeology. Music lifted from Polish singles began circulating in the sets of people who knew neither its language nor its original context, yet recognised the groove without hesitation.
Jazxing’s edit appeared on The Very Polish Cut Outs profile on 10 June 2014. That autumn it found its way onto the label’s third vinyl sampler. Foreign record shops later described it as slow Balearic gold and hypnotic beach house, because catalogue language needs compartments. Yet the most interesting thing about A może by… is precisely the way it slips out of every one of them.
There is funk here, but it is too dreamy to flex its muscles. There is soft rock that has forgotten the discipline of the chorus. Reggae hides in the placement of the accents, soul lives in Wojciechowski’s voice, and the club element did not arrive with a drum machine. It was discovered in the playing of a live band. Jazxing did not dress the Polish year 1980 up as Ibiza. They simply noticed that a piece of Ibiza had been lying somewhere beneath Wrocław all along.
Blue, white, grey and orange
Years later, A może by… returns to me on a beach. I lie still, looking at the blue of the sky, the white and grey of slowly moving clouds and the orange of the sun. The sea lays down a soundtrack of its own beneath the recording. The rush of water approaches, withdraws and returns, as if it had understood the principle of a good loop longer than club music itself.
The bass gets a little sand beneath every step, the drums lose their boundary in the steady movement of the waves, and Wojciechowski’s voice drifts towards the sky. The two orders belong together because neither tries to hurry anything. Jazxing loops old funk. The sea loops itself. Music all around, clouds overhead. Nothing more is needed.
Lying down becomes a way of listening. The body falls silent, the eyes are free to wander, and the rhythm calmly carries time from one side of the track to the other. No story demands a conclusion. What remains is a moment arranged a little differently, exactly like an old single after its encounter with an edit.
The Very Polish Cut Outs gave Transport Band’s recording a second life. Now the recording returns the favour. It preserves the blue of the sky, the orange of the sun, the white and grey of the clouds, the salt in the air and the sound of water laid beneath lazy funk. The song survived thanks to the edit, and an August afternoon will survive thanks to the song.
Everything in A może by… arrives a little later. Recognition of the original, its club life, my discovery, and now the meaning the recording has acquired once again. None of it can be hurried, because this music has always known only its own tempo.
The bass takes another lazy step. The signposts are already standing a little differently.
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