Your name:
Dancing Deadlips.
Where are you from?
Kraków, Poland.
How would you describe yourself?
Surreal. I mean the music, not me.
Who are your main influences musically?
Far too many to mention all of them here, but –
just to give you a general idea - there are classics that I never get tired of,
like Blut Aus Nord, Black Sabbath, Lydia Lunch (as for me - the best female
performer on the planet), Fela Kuti, Sun Ra and other free jazz heroes,
lesser-known psychedelic and prog-rock bands from 1960-80s - like May Blitz,
Fear Itself, Clark Hutchinson, Captain Beyond. On the other hand, there are
many bands and musicians that I listen to almost obsessively and I wouldn’t say
that they are an influence for me – this is a totally different thing, it’s
like they exist in my parallel reality, I mean musically, because they play
exactly the kind of music that I would like to play, if I could have a
possibility to be an extraordinary guitar player, or a drummer or a saxophonist
and so on. I also draw and paint surreal stuff, so the great surrealists – such
as Zdzisław Beksiński, Salvador Dalí, H.R. Giger, Yves Tanguy - have a
vast influence on me, too.
What do you hope to achieve in music?
I don’t think there is anything more valuable to
achieve in music than the music itself - being able to make it and to
collaborate with wonderful people, knowing these people, it’s really a
blessing. Of course I am not that stupid to think that things like success,
great reviews and other positive feedback don’t matter at all, of course they
do, especially if you want to survive as an independent artist – it’s just that
you have to know what are your priorities and don’t let yourself get lost in
all those side issues.
What has been the highlight of your career so far,
and why?
I must have been five or six years old. One day I
found an old compact cassette in my house, a home-made mix of some songs and -
as an extremely nosy kid, looking for something interesting to discover all the
time – I dragged a cassette player from the garret, plugged it in and… you
could easily “translate” my amazement into the words: “Holy shit, what is
this?!”. It was a compilation of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and The Rolling
Stones – “Iron Man”, “Whole Lotta Love” and so on. I don’t know who brought along
that old cassette, that music was something new for me, because my family was
more into classic rock and roll or folk singers that time, and what I mostly
knew about music till that moment was that Doris Day, Johnny Cash and Elvis
Presley vinyls sound funny if you change the speed. So, that was the day I got
married to the music – and this is the highlight of my career (laugh).
And what’s the moment you want to forget?
Well, there was a time I set aside the music,
because I seriously considered being a scientist. I had been studying things
like ethnology, Tibetan Buddhism and philosophy for a couple of years, but I
dropped it all out a few months ago. Anyway, I don’t want to forget those years
spent at the university - it was certainly a worthwhile experience.
If you had to pick just one of your songs to
represent your music, what would it be and why?
I would pick “It Is Pure Jade”, just because this
is the direction I’d like to focus on – more into heavy riffs and
dark stuff. Raw and rough sounds, sometimes even out of time and off-key – I
like the disturbing effect it gives, it’s like the way the life goes on:
distortion, the moments when you’re so lacking in perfection. I’d like to
collaborate with a djent band, or technical or experimental metal band someday.
I love that kind of stuff - a totally hypnotizing sonic destruction for your
ears - but I can’t play it by myself for sure... or maybe I can, but I don’t know
about it yet, that remains an option (laugh).
Where can we listen to it?
Where can we find out more about your music?
Anything else you’d like to say about your
band/music that I forgot to ask?
Yes, I’d like to say: thank you for your time! Just
a word about the near future - in the Summer the black metal Cień will finally
release the new LP, I was making ambient/soundscape samples for this release
and I’m also drawing surreal graphics for this album right now. In the Autumn
we’re going to release the album with my ambient friend Potworów, we already
have most of the material recorded, kind of a dark, dreamy and jazzy thing. In
the meantime, some new tracks will appear from the collaboration with Peter
Flanagan of Renovatio41 and the other collab with Vozrozhdeniya.
Your name: 
