Noise in the Key of Life

A conversation with the spoken word poet and sound artist Lukasz Polowczyk

One of my most-played albums of the year was Noise in the Key of Life.

It’s a 25-minute electroacoustic collage that I’ve deeply fallen in love with after its creator, the sound artist Lukasz Polowczyk, sent it to me over email.

In the 2000s, then going by the artist moniker RQM, Lukasz was part of a cluster of electronic music projects growing out of Berlin’s club culture. Brought up around New York’s underground hip-hop and spoken word scene, he always felt a bit like an alien in the world of dance music though.

After a burnout, he took a brief break from music, ultimately discovering a new, almost naive way of reapproaching it – aimlessly recording small, raw snippets of life, editing and iterating them, adding analogue live instruments and creating pieces that sit comfortably between experimental ambient and free jazz. 

Lukasz also resumed his practice as a lyricist and vocalist, writing in a stream-of-consciousness style inspired by lived experience under the artist moniker aint about me.

His newest project, Pink Warm Belly Of A Dying Sun, is a collaboration with the enigmatic producer Prairie. It’s a rebellious statement from two analog minds against a world of digital doom, the algorithmic apocalypse, and late-stage consumer capitalism.

The talk below touches on Lukasz’ exciting life story – an adolescence between Warsaw and New York City, a move to Berlin and an immersion in the city’s vibrant club music scene, a burnout and a re-emergence.

Lukasz Polowcyzk

You were born in Poland, but spent a lot of your time growing up in New York City – what’s your story?

I was born in Sosnowiec, in Silesia, outside of Katowice. My father was a Polish diplomat. When I was four, we moved to Warsaw. Three years later, we moved to New York, and then I shuttled between them.

The Socialist project [in Warsaw] was about mixing everybody. My next door neighbor was an electrician, there were construction workers, school teachers, professional soldiers – people from all walks of life and all social strata. There were some sketchy characters a couple flights down from us. Somebody ran an illegal bootleg alcohol operation in another project house close by. My neighbor babysat me. I think growing up like this left a big stamp on my consciousness, the fact that I don't discriminate. People are just people, they just come from different places and have different stories.

We moved to New York in ‘82, when I was seven. At school, kids were breakdancing, with the windbreakers and the flashy clothes and whatnot. We couldn't afford it all because my father’s paycheck was different from folks in the US. My dad was making $600 and some change a month, my mother $300. To be fair, our apartment, all the utilities, the phone, they were paid for. But still, we weren’t exactly big ballin’.

I lived in New York from ‘82 to ‘86 and then went back to Warsaw for three years. Hip-hop wasn’t a thing there just yet. Kids were listening to Depeche Mode, Modern Talking, Italo Disco, metal and punk rock. I went into this heavy tape-collecting and trading phase, following the trajectory of extreme guitar music from Metallica to Slayer to Kreator to Napalm Death. Looking back, that’s when I fell in love with textural sound. I listened to Napalm Death’s Peel Sessions recently. If you turn down the volume, it just sounds like experimental music, an exploration of texture.

After another three or four years, we moved back to New York. In high school, I started playing in bands. One of them was a hardcore band; the other one was a naive hip-hop project, sort of a Native Tongues spin-off, with a dear friend of mine who is no longer with us.

So you became part of the hip-hop scene in New York?

When that Lyricist Lounge era started in the mid-1990s, hip-hop really became mine. I was too young to be out and about when the first wave hit. This time I was out and about doing my thing, and well aware of the fact that I was witnessing the birth of a scene. This was a reboot for hip-hop, a new cycle: the new school, the new underground.

I got to see Company Flow play on shitty-ass sound systems, and El-P [of Company Flow and later Run The Jewels] spitting through headphones because there was no mic. I got to see the Juggaknots. I saw Mos Def [alias Yasiin Bey], when he only had one single out, at Rock Steady Park [on the Upper West Side of Manhattan] with around 20 people in attendance. That must have been in ‘97 or about there. There was an energy around the movement, and the whole thing was in direct opposition to the bling era which was at that point eating the remnants soul out of the first wave.

The late 1990s, early 2000s were also the golden era for spoken word. It was almost like a subgenre of hip-hop at that point – it was feeding on it, the standards of production were pretty high. And Saul Williams opened a particular path for me in how he correlated hip-hop with spirituality. The movement peaked with Def Poetry Jam, that show on HBO. And then the whole thing just sort of went underground. It never crossed over.

When I moved here [to Berlin] in the early 2000s, over time, I started to feel divorced from New York and this living, breathing hip-hop culture. I just couldn’t claim it anymore. I felt like I was living in a house that I didn't build, and I couldn't occupy that space anymore – the keys didn’t fit. And with that feeling of disconnect a process of self-liberation started that ultimately led me to a point where I realized that I am an alien, and that my experience, sum-total, is unique.

I love Metallica and Napalm Death as much as I love Mos Def and Aphex Twin and Alice Coltrane. I love experimental music, but I don't like the academic aspect that comes along with it, this high-brow shit. In that context, I'm that weird punk that shows up to the party. I’m a Polak-New Yorker, I’m a New Yorker in Poland, and now I’m living in Berlin.

Lukasz Polowczyk

In Berlin, you started recording and releasing music and playing shows under the moniker RQM. How do you remember that time?

When I moved here, I fell into the electronic club scene. It wasn't my intention, but I met some people, we clicked, we smoked weed together, doors opened, we recorded and then went on tour together. The firestarter was a project called Al Haca Soundsystem, and then I was a part of this other project with the producer Robot Koch [The Tape vs. RQM]. We signed to Kitty Yo in 2004, and released an album the year after.

We had our moment, but that was pre-social media. There’s virtually no documentation of what we did, except for some hardcopy magazines, but all the producers were watching what we were doing and, eventually, you could certainly hear our fingerprint in other people's music. We bridged gaps between hip-hop, spoken word, dancehall and electronic music. We had this nice little scene, with Modeselektor, Jahcoozi, Al Haca, and a bunch of other folks flying the bass music flag. 

My stylistic inspirations were MCs like The RZA, Killah Priest and Busta Rhymes, who didn’t exactly rhyme on the beat, but sort of weaved their words around it. Working with producers from the world of club music was difficult, because club music was all about grid and functionality, repetition – the objective: to keep people moving. I found myself in situations on stage where I would be doing things rhythmically that the crowd couldn't relate to, because I was disrupting their relationship to the grid.

As opposed to just adding another percussive element, I was flying like John Coltrane, coming in and out of the grid, circling around it. I couldn’t articulate what I was doing, I didn’t fully understand yet, it was all feel and intuition, so there was a moment where I felt out of sync – I thought something was wrong with me, musically speaking.

Many years later, I read this book about how drummers like Elvin Jones and Rasheed Ali liberated jazz in the 1960s and accelerated its development. Their multi-dimensional drumming freed up the rest of the band, because it allowed the musicians to move in half-time, double-time, or somewhere in between, creating multiple pockets of interlocking rhythm. So in the next chapter of my evolution I started making beatless spoken word stuff intentionally, just to feel the freedom of not being tethered to a clock, following my own bodily rhythm, controlling my own time.

Later, I discovered Milford Graves, whose concept of drumming is like: If you're steady on the beat, too repetitive, taking the human heart as a point of reference, you're sick, because the human heart is never steady. It’s always swinging – speeding up, slowing down. Discovering this gave me a spiritual comfort and validation in regards to what I was doing. And now, since I know the framework, what I’m trying to do is go even deeper into this weird universe of mine, and explore it some more. It’s challenging for most people, but other aliens get it, you know? 

At the end of the 2000s, I had a burnout; the lifestyle caught up with me. But at the time I didn’t understand what was happening to me because there was no terminology for that. The culture didn't embrace the whole mental health situation just yet. I hit this creative, spiritual wall that I couldn't surmount. Ironically, this came after we did our biggest show, opening up for Missy Elliott in Malaysia, which was sort of a dream, and a great show too. It just felt like I've scaled the mountain – only to realize that it’s not what I thought it would be, and that living the way I had was just not sustainable. I was suffering, riddled with anxiety, depressed. But that crack, that rupture in my life was the path that eventually led me back to meditation. 

I landed at a similar point in my early 30s when I discovered mindfulness meditation and Zen Buddhism. That was the spark for my book Zen Style. Did meditation lead you back to a creative practice as well?

Yeah, having a proper meditation practice eventually led to the creation of Noise in the Key of Life. I was meditating a lot at the time, just listening to the world around me, recording things, and then editing and iterating them without any purpose, really. I was just following the process, feeding my obsessions. Suddenly I had thousands of little recordings and sound experiments. It felt like a return to music, but it came from falling in love with life again – it was an organic process. 

I bought a Zoom recorder and I just took it with me everywhere I went, to the playground with my daughter, or out to the park. I was recording all the time. Eventually, I imported some of these recordings into Ableton, and accidentally turned on a plug-in someone had given me. It distorted this field recording in a funny way. I stuck to this process for two or three years, accruing thousands of little recordings. At one point I asked a friend of mine to play saxophone on top of some of them, spontaneously, in one take. He was calling out a random number, and pulled up the recording associated with it. Then I did something similar with another friend who’s a drummer.

In the end, I chose the best bits and sequenced the whole thing like a proper record, paying attention to flow and the distribution of tension, and the weight and duration of silence. I spent so many hours on it, just listening and perfecting the sequencing. The whole project from beginning to completion took like four, five years, and this deep catalog of recordings, hours worth of it, was condensed down to roughly 25 minutes. 

I wanted to ask you about the music that inspires you to write poetry, which can go from beatless ambient to free jazz.

I’m inspired by Arthur Jafa, the visual artist who was Spike Lee's cinematographer. He made this intense YouTube video collage that got shown at Art Basel, titled “love is the message, the message is death”. People loved it, but he was just following his personal obsessions, having no intention outside of making something that he liked. He talks a lot about quantum entanglement in African-American arts. One time he did an experiment with jazz artists where he had them playing in boxes without hearing each other. When they played the thing back, it still made sense musically.

I write in a stream of consciousness style. I hear the music and I react to it. It's like a freestyle, but I’m writing. I like disjointed scenes. The greatest movies are the ones that have a bit of mystery, that cut off at a certain point and don’t reveal everything right away.

I collect words, I look at pictures, I transcribe what I see. On the new project, Pink Warm Belly Of A Dying Sun, that shark on the first track, that's the Damien Hirst piece from ‘92 [“The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”]. That made a huge impression on me back when it debuted. I thought, these guys are fucking punks. I had it on my mind for a long time and then forgot all about it, until this track where I found myself writing from the point of view of the shark in that tank – it was the time for that idea to come through.

I find it super fascinating, the fact that you can write without thinking, and it transports meaning. For the first aint about me, a lot of it was written to drones, and some of it was even written acapella. I was literally working on my office shit, and I'd be taking a break to write this thing – I’d turn on the mic, record it, go back to writing emails. Sometimes I would knock out three tracks in a day.

The new project is a reminder to experience the analogue world instead of losing yourself in digital spheres. Would you say you’re more of an analogue person?

Everything is amazing, except the internet. (laughs) I get up early every day so I get to see the sun rise. It's incredible, and there's nothing that any designer or painter could do to top that or even get close. That shit is self-generating, and it’s different every day. This is the best work of art ever. Just look at these flowers and these grapes. It was a single pellet that blew up into these colors and forms. 

Life is amazing, but they try to sell you on the online simulacra. You can consume all these art blogs, but  it’s nothing like standing in front of the real painting, and certainly not like making a painting. If you’re a foodie, how about spending more time in your kitchen and cooking instead of being on Instagram? Go to a farm and pick vegetables, that's where the real experience is. I don't want to do yoga in front of a screen, or meditate with an app on my phone. Pornography is nothing compared to a warm human body next to you.

I get sick when I'm on the laptop for too long. I just get this weird, bogged down feeling. Your body warns you before your mind catches on. It’s essentially saying, well, enough of this. You know, the internet is a great tool for communication, but we're constantly being told to spend more time there, while I actually want to spend more time here.

Selected discography

• aint about me – aint about me (LP) (2020)

• Noise in the Key of Life – Noise in the Key of Life (suite) (2022)

• aint about me – XLR8R Podcast 807 (mix) (2023)

• aint about me / Jan Wagner – indigo sine wave (EP) (2023)

• Pink Warm Belly Of A Dying Sun – Pink Warm Belly Of A Dying Sun (EP) (2024)