Paraa

Faxada is the nom de plume of Polish experimental electronic composer and recording artist Przemek Wojtaszek. Their new full-length album Paraa was released September 21st, 2018 on Darling Recordings.

It's fair to call Faxada's music overwhelming. Beautiful melodies, inspired rhythms, and punishing noise are presented in equal measure, with dramatic tonal and emotional shifts during and between tracks. It's engrossing, fearless work, experimental in the best sense: pushing boundaries in the pursuit of something new. On songs like "Imp" and "This All Could Be More Obvious", Faxada takes a daring approach to the mixing process, filling the low end frequencies with unorthodox sounds. They sample their own material on "(VII)" and toy with stereo channels on "Unsticked" and "(V, VI)".

Perhaps most importantly, though, Faxada has largely abandoned the plunderphonics of their debut album 'Cohost' in favor of music inspired by electroacoustic compositions. Przemek describes their new work on 'Paraa' as "heavily influenced by videogame sound design, triggering specific actions and thoughts on a composed timeline."

You can certainly hear such thoughtful attention to detail. Listening to the album is like time traveling through an entire story you can't quite put your finger on. Individual songs fade in and out of the view, undulating into one another, then disappearing completely into the haze of silence or noise. But, through it all, the album feels coherent and complete.