Old voices, a soft pulse, melodies with slightly worn edges. There is something in Pejzaż’s music of a flat whose windows have stood open all afternoon. The sun has already left, but when you touch the windowsill, you can still feel it beneath your fingers. That is how I think of Ostatni Dzień Lata. And how I would like to remember this summer as it ends.
Pejzaż is Bartosz Kruczyński. His Ostatni Dzień Lata was released in 2018 by The Very Polish Cut Outs. The title track lasts nine minutes and twenty-two seconds. Plenty of time to stop glancing at the clock. Very little time to say goodbye to something you still want to hold on to.
Kruczyński builds this music from fragments of older recordings. The title track brings together, among others, Jedno rozstanie by Liliana Urbańska and Parę pytań by Andrzej Dąbrowski. Even their titles, One Parting and A Few Questions, fall into a familiar sequence. Something happens. Then we spend a long time trying to understand what. The voices come from another time, but their questions find today’s address without difficulty. Sample sources.
In this collage form, I recognise the way I remember. Sometimes all that remains of a month is the inflection of a single sentence. Of a long conversation, a detail that seemed unimportant at the time. Everything around it fades, while that fragment stubbornly keeps its colour. You can recall almost all of it. Even the temperature of the air.
Today is 22 September. I try to gather up my summer, and something keeps slipping through my hands. Good things mingle with difficult ones. Sometimes only a few hours separated them. It is hard to give a summer like that a single mark. Besides, I feel less and less like turning my life into a place where there is always another exam to pass.
I am grateful for the good. For closeness that made it easier to breathe. For laughter that arrived unprepared. For someone’s presence, and for finding things to look forward to again. For music I immediately wanted to send to someone. That impulse still moves me. A few minutes of sound turn out to be too good to keep to yourself.
I am grateful for the bad things too, although I linger over that sentence much longer. There are still things I do not understand. Things I cannot forgive or get over. They return at the worst moments and can fill the whole room. I cannot yet speak about them in a steady voice. Some of them I do not want to speak about at all.
Gratitude appears somewhere alongside them. In beginning to recognise my limits before my strength runs out. In paying closer attention to people around whom I do not have to rehearse every sentence. In finding the courage, sometimes, to leave a question without yet another attempt at an answer. Everything teaches me something. I paid more for some of that knowledge than I wanted to.
There are lessons after which you sit in an empty classroom for a long time. The bell has already rung. Someone is talking outside, a bus is pulling away somewhere, an ordinary afternoon carries on. And you are still staring at the same spot. Only after a while do you notice that you are hungry. That it has turned chilly. That you would like to hear a familiar voice.
That is when music like Pejzaż’s helps me. Its rhythm gives my thoughts something to do, and the returning fragments let me stay with something familiar for a while. The very act of choosing something from an old recording that can still resonate always moves me. Someone’s voice finds its way between other sounds. It keeps its age, its colour, its tremor. In new company, we begin to hear something else in it.
I would like to treat my own memory with the same care. To keep the good moments together with what I truly felt then. Later pain so easily takes everything over, writes itself into every photograph, claims a place at every table. Yet that laughter happened. That relief did too. There were days when I truly wanted evening to arrive a little later.
I am keeping them. Without revising the endings or adding promises. I want to remember that I could feel joy. That I still can. Even if, a moment later, something returns that I still cannot handle.
For me, Ostatni Dzień Lata holds those feelings in a single recording. Warmth and weight. The desire to stay, and the awareness of time passing. Today I let it last all nine minutes and twenty-two seconds. There is still so much I cannot name.
Soon I will have to close the window. For a moment, I rest my hand on the windowsill.
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