Bartosz Kruczynski

Dreams & Whispers

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• 01 Dream I
• 02 Dream II
• 03 Dream III
• 04 Dream IV
• 05 Dream V
• 06 Dream VI
• 07 Dream VII
• 08 Whisper I
• 09 Whisper II
• 10 Whisper III
• 11 Whisper IV
• 12 Whisper V
• 13 Whisper VI
• 14 Whisper VII

We've always been careful not to call Balmat an ambient label, because we like having the freedom to move, to drift, to morph. But with our 11th release, we turn our ears--proudly, blissfully--to a strain of ambient at its most timeless. The appropriately titled Dreams & Whispers comes from Warsaw's Bartosz Kruczynski, who has recorded under a number of guises, Earth Trax, as well as his own name. Over the years, he's touched upon deep house, breakbeats, acid, techno, electro, IDM, and more; often, the throughline running through a given album is simply the refusal to remain in any one place for long--well, that, and his unusually nuanced ear for harmony and texture. Those qualities come to the fore on Dreams & Whispers, which might be the most focused encapsulation of Kruczynski's atmospheric sensibilities to date.. Across 14 stripped-down tracks for shimmer and pulse, Kruczynski evokes overlapping styles in ambient--warm vibraphones, taut arps, massing strings, lonesome delay chains --but always with his own twist. Fitting the album's title, the album is loosely divided into two distinct moods: The A-side, "Dreams," is charged with subtle movement, rhythms spreading out like rings around skipped stones, while the B-side, "Whispers," plunges into a zone of shadows and hush. The two complementary moods flow into one another like the faces of a Moebius strip, yielding an album that's intuitively shaped and rich in emotion. -- Balmat is a label with a cloudy outline. Jointly shepherded by Albert Salinas and Philip Sherburne, two friends living in Cardedeu, Catalonia, and on the Balearic island of Menorca, Balmat grew out of Lapsus Radio, a weekly show born almost ten years ago. Balmat's mission is simple: to foster new ideas, expand upon personal obsessions, and put enveloping sounds out into the world. "Balmat" means "empty" or "void" in Catalan. But quite apart from any negative connotations, we prefer to think of it in terms of possibility: a space waiting to be filled.