Photo: Ryszard Horowitz, cover of Z rozmyślań przy śniadaniu, 1997.
I remember one train journey exactly.
It was the summer of 2001. The holidays had just begun. I had finished primary school and, although still twelve, could feel clearly that something was ending while something else began. My thirteenth birthday would come only in September, but the summer already differed from all the others.
There was a Walkman in my pocket.
Inside it, a Myslovitz cassette: Z rozmyślań przy śniadaniu, or "From reflections over breakfast".
I was travelling to a summer camp, perhaps in Tylicz or maybe Žacléř in the Czech Republic. The exact destination has gone, but I remember the route.
The train smelled of metal, dust and old upholstery. I sat beside the window and watched the landscape move slowly across the glass: meadows, fields, forests and small stations where the train paused only briefly.
Myslovitz played in the headphones. The tape hissed slightly, as tapes did. Beneath it came the rhythmic sound of wheels on rails. Suddenly every part fitted, the images, the music and the monotony of travel.
It created a sense of idyll. Warm summer air, the July and August sun and music sounding like the score to an ordinary life.
The album that changed Myslovitz
Released on 6 October 1997, Z rozmyślań przy śniadaniu was the third Myslovitz album and the point at which the group truly found its language.
The line-up was Artur Rojek, Wojciech Powaga, Przemysław Myszor, Jacek Kuderski and Wojciech "Lala" Kuderski. Andrzej Smolik and Tomek Bonarowski also contributed, adding space to the music.
After two records, Myslovitz remained a strongly guitar-based and sometimes raw group, rooted in 1990s alternative rock. The third brought another quality. Sound became more spacious and melodic. Guitars remained important, but there was more air, subtlety and room for atmosphere.
It was a step towards the style that would explode a few years later on Miłość w czasach popkultury, "Love in the time of pop culture".
The cinematic imagination
The record's most unusual feature is the way it describes the world. The titles alone resemble pieces of a screenplay: Scenariusz dla moich sąsiadów, Filmowa miłość, Myszy i ludzie, Wielki błękit.
Myslovitz's music from this period has a cinematic quality. Tracks develop slowly like scenes, offering images, small situations and fragments of ordinary life.
This is closer to cinema than rock.
The band made no secret of film inspirations, citing European and American cinema from David Lynch to Cinema Paradiso. That sensibility permeates the album. Listening feels like watching stories of ordinary people, the heroes of daily life.
Artur Rojek and the poetry of ordinary days
Artur Rojek's words were always among the band's great strengths. They are neither grand nor needlessly complicated. Their power lies in the ability to stop time for a moment.
Rojek observes the world as though from a bus window or park bench. Small scenes, individual gestures and apparently insignificant images enter the songs.
Somebody rides a bicycle.
Somebody crosses the street.
Somebody throws a coin into a fountain.
Meaning suddenly appears inside these pieces of an ordinary day. The writing resembles a series of frames.
Z rozmyślań przy śniadaniu is an album of moments between events, when somebody sits at a table, looks through the window and begins to think.
The essential tracks
Scenariusz dla moich sąsiadów, "A screenplay for my neighbours", became one of the group's most recognisable songs. It reflects ironically on people eager to look into somebody else's life. The narrator offers a solution. If everyone wants to watch his daily existence, perhaps it should simply be projected onto a screen. This was a song about privacy written long before social media.
Zwykły dzień, "An ordinary day", describes small urban scenes, daily rituals and apparently irrelevant moments. It concerns routine but also imagination, the possibility that an ordinary day can become a story.
Myszy i ludzie, "Of mice and men", refers to John Steinbeck's novel. People attempt to exceed their limitations and dream of a better world. Musically, it is among the album's most hypnotic passages.
Filmowa miłość, "Cinematic love", is a brief atmospheric piece in which love becomes a screenplay, a story that ends but remains in memory like a film once watched.
Wielki błękit, "The big blue", is one of the record's most spacious compositions, inspired by sea, sky and the immensity within which a person becomes very small.
Between underground and popularity
At the end of the 1990s, Myslovitz occupied two worlds. It was an alternative band, while Sony Music began seeing the potential for something larger. A bigger budget brought wider promotion and greater pressure.
The musicians later remembered tensions over the sound and the group's direction. Paradoxically, the mixture of ambition and disagreement produced one of the most interesting Polish rock albums of its decade.
It sold around 50,000 copies and went gold. The enormous mainstream success was still to come, but a direction had been established.
The record's inheritance
Although Myslovitz reached its widest popularity through Miłość w czasach popkultury, this earlier album showed how Polish alternative music might sound. It proved guitar music could be melodic, reflective and filled with melancholy at once.
For many early 2000s bands, Myslovitz became a reference point. It demonstrated that mood, image and silence between sounds matter to rock as much as riffs. In a sense, the group helped create the language of Polish alternative music for a new century.
A record one returns to
For many listeners, Miłość w czasach popkultury remains the essential Myslovitz album. Yet Z rozmyślań przy śniadaniu is where all the elements began aligning.
It is a record of transition.
Between the band's youth and maturity.
Between guitar rebellion and melancholic reflection.
Between the housing estate and the cinema.
For me, it will always be the album of that summer.
The summer of 2001.
A cassette in a Walkman.
A train journey through green landscapes.
And sunlight so strong that it seemed it would never end.
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