Interview with Dawid Kowalski - Purgist

Dawid Kowalski (born 1986 in Kielce, Poland) has been a sound artist and an active member of the Polish underground music community since the early 2000s. Over the years, he has been actively performing, organizing and co-organizing live music events, releasing music and documenting the scene via electronic and traditional media. 

As an art activist and promoter, Kowalski has started an online community for noise music afficionados currently available at harshnoise.org. Between 2006 and 2010, the site (then known as either harshnoise.pl or harshnoise.art.pl) contained a message board which was frequented by local experimental music enthusiasts and afficionados. That message board became a significant platform for communication between artists, promoters, organizers, label owners. The site became a significant factor in the rise of a new tide of underground experimental electronic music in Poland. In 2010, the forum ceased to exist and the site was transformed to an informal collective of music enthusiasts, artists and journalists with an online outlet in the form of an electronic magazine. 

Apart from managing harshnoise.org, Kowalski was also reviewing harsh noise albums, interviewing harsh noise musicians and writing articles for a number of magazines, including Special Interests (Finland), M/I (Poland), Skin Yard (Poland) and Hard Art (Poland). 

In addition to his journalistic endeavors, Kowalski was involved in putting on over 20 live music events, ranging from small, low-key shows to three-day multi-genre festivals. He organized one of the first series of live noise music events in Poland - Noise4Cash (2006-2010) and co-organizes a multi-genre festival Make Some Noise (2011-current). 

He was also a co-manager of the first Polish experimental music net-label Far From Showbiz (2005-2009). He also used to run a private home label called Somnolent Shelter Records (2008-2013). 

In 2005, Kowalski has started to perform live with his solo industrial noise act Sleep Sessions, and up until 2013 has released 13 records on local and international labels and performed live extensively in Poland. He has collaborated on stage with numerous experimental music artists (incl. Bartek Kalinka/XV Parowek, Sebastian Harmazy/Vigoc, Konrad Materek/Rez Epo, Bartosz Zaskorski, Jakub Glinski and others). He also did an experimental electroacoustic performance with Bartek Zamarek - a well-established graphic artist/illustrator. The performance involved amplified canvas and digital re-processing of resulting sounds. 

In 2010, Kowalski was involved in a creative collaboration with a rock music collective Madman Project during which he recorded distorted sound textures for their upcoming debut album scheduled for release in 2015. 

In 2013, he has started a new solo endeavor called PURGIST. Since then, he has played 40 live shows in Poland and abroad, including a mini-tour in Poland and a recent European tour alongside a well-established industrial noise act MAAAA (Russia/Poland) and an Australian act DEAFAULT. 

In 2014, Kowalski began an ongoing collaboration with Jakub Gliński - a painter in a similar vein to his prior collaboration with Zamarek. Together, they performed several live shows ranging at underground music venues as well as mainstream music festivals.

1. David, you have gone through different phases, periods of using different musical idioms in you creative process. How would you describe your own evolution?

I’d call it looking for home. In essence it’s about trying out different things and methods until you find something that you’re looking for. It remains to be seen if that thing is to be found at all.

2. It’s difficult not to dissociate the creative process in experimental music from the gear you are using. How the techniques and the equipment you are using has changed in the last couple of years? What scales did you shed? What bits have stayed?

If I remember correctly, I recorded and saved my first piece of electronic music when I was about 10 or 12. Somehow I managed to enter some random notes into a music tracker on a Commodore 64, with the sole intention of trying to make them trigger a particular state of mind I had one time as a child, when things were OK. I think that the greatest driving force for me was always trying to emulate a certain state of mind via sounds. The equipment I used was always secondary to what I was trying to achieve. Although for quite a while I have fallen into a trap of jumping on the harsh noise gear cult bandwagon. That made me lose track of the original intent of my creative work for the sake of falling into the genre-specific idiosyncrasies.
That has changed since, and I seem to have gone full circle – starting from software, going through an extended period of fetishizing analog equipment for the sake of staying ‘honest’ to values which weren’t even mine to begin with and now back again into a hybrid, digital-analog domain.

3. When I am thinking of your latest release I can’t help to think and feel that apart from the usual intellectual pursuit of different forms to express, there’s an aspect that digs deep in some sort of self-analysis, introspective plunge into the limbo of feelings and sentiments. What emotions drive you to progress within and without?

There is a large chunk of me which remains tacit and I keep failing to somehow express it otherwise than through music. That is perhaps due to the fact that music is a highly abstract message and can be difficult to decode, which adds a layer of secrecy and security to the artist-sender.

What’s interesting is that being involved in music in itself adds a layer of interesting things to process. For instance, one of the interesting things I observed when I started PURGIST was how many listeners are attached to their expectations of what a particular artist is supposed to do, and how difficult for us as human beings to get over our cognitive dissonance when things aren’t what we want them to be.

To be more specific, it’s easy to wear black jeans and a black t-shirt and go on stage with a piece of sheet metal with a contact microphone and a distortion pedal, spew a bunch of “subversive” copy-paste messages that have been rehashed in industrial music for the past 30 or 40 years, utilize only anger as the only driving force behind the creative process and call it a day. But have someone go up and test out something different from what is expected and people get angry, and I mean really angry. I’ve seen that happen to other artists and I’ve had that happen to me.

That issue also adds to the general feelings of inadequacy, lingering sense of failure and not fitting anywhere or being able to really get along with anyone which inform what I do.

The latest release titled “Image of a Woman” EP is obviously a coded message, it was inspired literally by an image of a woman that I saw online who turned out to be Paulina Adaszek (aka Adyszk), a Polish photographer/visual artist. I contacted her and the series of photos she did made it to the cover. The thing about the cover is that it encapsulates the entire message in a pretty clear manner. It’s an image of a beautiful, semi-naked woman, but the image is distorted in a manner that makes her look nightmarish. The recording of this EP (and the previous one – Fragile/Resilient EP) coincided with me learning a lot about borderline personality disorder and trying to process what I saw and went through. Enough said I suppose.

4. You have toured recently and I know you try to do so quite regularly. How much of the expectations you have are actually fulfilled? How much of a life’s lesson touring is to you?

Touring has taught me that my comfort zone is in fact much more flexible than I would ever expect. I have learned to survive only by napping on buses, stopped having issues with staying overnight at strange places and have learned to pack lightly.

There were no expectations when I started touring, so there is nothing to be fulfilled in the process. Other observations are all the generic lessons people draw from travelling a lot – people in most places are pretty much alike, but living in different conditions, etc.

I’m planning another tour in the States this year, hopefully it’ll come to fruition. Other than that, I won’t be playing live much or touring until I put out another full-length.

5. How your own activity affects your thinking of your view on what drives artists in pursuit of their own form of expression? What’s your view on the art critique? 

I believe that art critique is pretty much useless, albeit still sometimes fun to engage in. I have such a strong, personal connection with the music that I put out that having someone review it makes it feel almost as if a reviewer came in to my bedroom, watch me have sex and then post a review online. It just feels not okay. Not really because of any vulnerabilities, but because the music is intended for the listener, and its their opinion that matters. Third parties are not required in that act.

I don’t want to shit on reviewers and music journalists even more, since there are a couple out there who do a really good job, but in essence I feel that it’s a pretty egocentric and privileged stance to take. Thinking that your opinion on something matters.

To be honest, I still don’t feel like a full-fledged artist due to the feelings of inadequacy I have mentioned before. I just try hard to come up with something. The longer I do it (closing in on 15 years since my first live show…), the more respect I have for the artists I truly admire. I truly admire their knowledge, courage and talent. At the same time, I have such a harsh view on people who are obviously trying to fake something…

6. In harsh noise/power electronics/post-industrial area artists sometimes choose certain themes, topics to deal with? Would you say that you have that kind of theme or is it more personal, intimate?

To be honest, I don’t think that what I do fits into these categories anymore, even though the older I get the more I enjoy harsh noise and really old industrial music. There is definitely a theme to what I do, each release has a certain message to be decoded, some are personal, some are more general. The next full length is going to shift the focus from the interior to the exterior a little more.

7. What inspires you musically?

There is so much that inspires me musically that I’m having a hard time trying to describe it. First and foremost, there’s all the music that I love and that includes a variety of genres with electronic music in general being the most prominent. Of course, most of what I do has been influenced by harsh noise artists such as Chris Goudreau/SICKNESS, FACIALMESS and the Japanese greats such as Kazumoto Endo. But even before I discovered these artists, I have been heavily interested in the so-called IDM and Breakcore, particularly in the late 90s. Discovering artists such as Autechre, Richard Devine, Xanopticon and plenty of others really did something to my sensibilities and shaped what I appreciate sonically. It’s also difficult not to mention appreciating stellar craftmanship, which I respect even more as I grow older, as I understand how much time and effort it requires. You must be a complete idiot not to appreciate the hard work these people put into their creations, even if what they do is not your cup of tea.

Other than that, all of the musical ideas come from within, as cliché as that sounds.

8. Tell us something about your future plans

There’s plenty of future plans, but they all fall into one category: hoping to be able to endure, keep learning and get better at producing music.

Thank you

Purgist's bandcamp