An archive story / First-person account
A mattress instead of a door
This was the first time Petter and I decided to try to find a way of playing together without a guitar.
One of the problems was purely practical. With Henry, it's relatively easy to record a guitar amplifier using a microphone close to the speaker. A saxophone is quite another matter when the drummer is playing loudly in a cramped room. We wanted clean, separate channels that I could work with afterwards, without the sound of my drums spilling into Petter's microphone.
So we simply put Petter in another room in the house.
There wasn't even a door. We covered the opening with a mattress to try to isolate the sound.
We turned off the speakers in the room and used in-ear monitors instead, so we could still hear each other.
Petter was also learning how to use the Boss RC-505. Parts of the session were spent with him figuring out the equipment, recording something, trying it out and changing things. Meanwhile, I simply kept playing.
I'd been listening a lot to Brian Blade's drumming on Kenny Garrett's Wayne's Thang. His playing has an openness and lightness that I find extraordinary. I was trying to make my own version of that.
It's far beyond my ability, but I think something of the spirit is there.
Petter played saxophone, and we got a really beautiful tone out of it. Perhaps I mixed it a little too loudly in places.
Then, a little way into the recording, he began experimenting with his voice.
Petter isn't a singer. None of us are trained musicians, really. We're full-blooded amateurs. But he can sing remarkably well.
He recorded a short vocal phrase, made a loop of it and started playing it back while I continued drumming.
To my ears, the way he sang sounded remarkably like Bowie's wordless, phonetic singing on Warszawa, from Low. Not because he was deliberately reproducing Bowie, but because something about the sound and the syllables took me there.
Why Warsaw?
When Petter and I talked about the recording afterwards, he said it reminded him of Radiohead and OK Computer.
I haven't listened to that album.
What I heard instead was David Bowie's Warszawa, which I think is the best piece Bowie ever made.
So the title became a combination of those two associations: Radiohead and Warszawa.
But there was another reason for choosing Warsaw.
The music is quite melancholic, and I had an image of the city in my head.
For years I've been fascinated by an intellectual connection between Warsaw, Lviv and Vienna, particularly around the turn of the twentieth century. I came across it when reading about Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
I don't remember the details very well, and I honestly couldn't name a philosopher from Warsaw.
But those cities have stayed together in my imagination. Perhaps it's the history, the philosophy or simply the idea of Central Europe as a place where so many different intellectual and artistic traditions met.
Somehow, Warsaw belonged to the music I was hearing.
Writing on a blackboard
When I made the video, I started thinking about literary works that have meant a great deal to me.
I wanted writing to appear by itself on a blackboard, as though someone were writing in chalk, but without the chalk or the hand being visible.
I tried making it with AI.
It worked for a while, but the AI couldn't seem to understand that the chalk itself wasn't supposed to appear in the picture. I kept experimenting.
I also often slow down my video material. Partly because it lets me make more use of whatever footage I've managed to create, and partly because the slower movement can make it feel more cinematic.
Aesthetically, I don't think this video is a masterpiece. But I find the texts interesting.
I included material associated with several writers whose work has mattered to me.
E. E. Cummings' my sweet old etcetera is an extraordinary anti-war poem, with its broken language and peculiar typography.
William S. Burroughs' cut-up ideas offered another way of thinking about words, almost as something that exists independently of the person using them.
Then there's Ernesto Sábato's El túnel, with its terrible image of human isolation, and René Char's Le Marteau sans maître, which belongs to a very different, surrealist literary world.
I also wanted something of H. P. Lovecraft's cosmic darkness. His writing is fascinating partly because human beings can seem so completely insignificant within it.
And, of course, there was Bowie.
These texts weren't chosen to explain what Petter and I had played. I was putting together things that occupied my imagination while working on the video.
Listening back
I think Petter came to like Radio Warsaw after a while.
And, much to my delight, he said he thought the drumming was good.