Marcin Czubala in an article in the Guardian
Read the full article here: ‘New Europe: Poles dancing’ by Alexis Petridis
The clubs are packed, the crowd are young, and the music is deep and dubby. Alexis Petridis puts in an all-nighter in Warsaw, a city rapidly turning into techno paradise
Still, no one disagrees that the Polish techno scene is better than it was five years ago, when, as promoter and DJ Michal Brzozowski puts it, “Everyone was an indie kid and the clubs were playing shitty mainstream music”. I meet him at the studios of Roxy FM, where he hosts a nationally syndicated techno show on Saturday nights. “Right now,” he says, “a scene’s starting to slowly build up.”
Part of the reason may be down to technology and the internet, which have made it cheaper to make and buy music than ever before. In the past, the prohibitive price of vinyl, let alone DJ or studio equipment, placed them far beyond the reach of the average Polish teen. Now, he says, there are great local DJs at the clubs he promotes in Warsaw and a growing clique of producers gaining international recognition: Marcin Czubala, who records for Mobilee; Jacek Sienkiewicz, who runs Warsaw’s best-known techno label Recognition. There may even, he thinks, be a Warsaw sound, albeit one you might need ears finely attuned to techno to distinguish: “DJs here, they always played a bit deeper. They don’t really make rave anthems. They always go for a kind of melancholy sound.”