Disclaimer: If I’m wrong on Ossian, please let me be wrong spectacularly. Usually, I do my due diligence and keep some note or bookmark some site when I discover a particular history that could help me write about an artist in the future, whenever I get back to covering them for FOND/SOUND. In this case, I’m waiving my rights to plead the fifth. I’m stating that I remember reading, in some particularly dark corner of the web, that Polish neo-folk group Ossian appeared one day in the studio of their label with a tape recording full of screams and chants. When asked by their producer “what is this?” they made it clear this was Księga Chmur – Tom 1, their new album. Since I no longer can pinpoint this info, I hope that whether this is the product of my own fever dream imagination or whether the album itself simply gives off that appearance, the following is true…
Księga Chmur – Tom 1, which translates to “The Book of Clouds”, feels and sounds like the work of a group who figuratively no longer had the language to express what they wanted to get across. Ossian began as a way for members of Poland’s musical visionary Marek Grechuta’s backing band “Anawa” to expand on the little known folk music of their homeland. With time, Osjan as they were then originally known, would investigate and roll into their inspiration, music from Eastern European, African, and Indo-Asian music.
A disdain for rock music and overly complicated Jazz, allowed Ossian to dig much deeper into territory parallel-minded musicians like Florian Fricke’s Popol Vuh, Don Cherry’s Codona, or Ralph Towner’s Oregon sifted through. Through the leadership of bassist and multi-instrumentalist Jacek Ostaszewski, Ossian purposely avoided grounding themselves in any given genre or style. Early releases proved they had interesting ideas but perhaps lacked structure or a focus to really hone what they wanted to do. It was clear they wanted to use mostly acoustic, wind and percussion instruments. It was clear they wanted to use improvisation and free-tempo/time to approximate Ornette Coleman’s rudderless, musical muse. What wasn’t always clear was to what end they were playing for?
Maybe as a result of purpose or situation, in 1979, Jacek worked with violinist Zygmunt Kaczmarski, sitar-player Dimitrios Milo Kurtis, and percussionist Radosław Nowakowski to set themselves up to truly capture something special and relatable. This time around, the normally small 4 or 5 piece group ballooned to a 7 (and sometimes 8) piece group. Trading in much of their brass section for even more mallet percussion and a first for them, a vocal group to back them up, to bring them closer to a more amenable/melodic core than ever before. This time around, their music felt less like a meeting of different worlds, and more a communion of different musical eras…old, current, and future.
Księga Chmur – Tom 1 is entirely made up of one five-part music suite. I remember reading Ossian set up shop in a really cold, cavernous room, since this still being communist Poland, had to warm up the only way they could: by having everyone in attendance join in, during massive percussion improvisations. When those improvisations warmed up the group proper, then the vocalists would come in. The vocal group they’d dub “Aura” would refashion Carnatic influenced parts that then other non-classically-trained members would improvise, vocally, freely, over.
What you’re hearing open this album are those exact moments their human selves finally found a fiery, physical, human constitution willing to begin its ascend into the ethereal, completely Zen, instru-mental side. Much like Faust’s Faust Tapes or Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s Ecophony Gaia, each chapter of Księga Chmur – Tom 1 sounds like it’s forever soundtracking a vast new world that’s keeps being created by bridging a gap that the older world found in some base rock to renew/relive.
Droning, floating, mesmerizing, and deeply human, I do believe Ossian struck at something special — even if it’s quite simply indescribable. They reached for and touched something that makes everyone, us.