Pink Warm Belly Of A Dying Sun
An interview with Lukasz Polowczyk aka AINT ABOUT ME.
Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.
Lukasz Polowczyk, the Polish sound artist, poet and educator also known as AINT ABOUT ME, has heard that when a thermobaric bomb explodes, the vacuum draws the breath out from your lungs, your flesh turns cold black on the inside, and the rains down, raw diamonds the size of coarse hail. He recounts this story in a sculpted mid-Atlantic accent over a sea of snarling electronic drones on ‘Glacier Gospel’, the third track on Pink Warm Belly Of A Dying Sun, the collaborative self-titled EP he recently created with the multi-instrumentalist and producer Marc Jacobs, aka PRAIRIE. As he recites near the song’s coda, “We don’t have much time if you look at the full trajectory of the vector, and we waste it on pretty much everything that matters the least.”
On ‘Moths’, Polowczyk talks about watching kids around the way spend the whole day cutting up tyres with sharpened screwdrivers and boxcutters, dragging drivers out of their fancy vehicles and beating them silly, while haunted melodies and sub-bass drenched in white noise rumbles beneath his voice. By the time the sun set, the kids had built a wall out of all this car carnage. A circle and a monument made out of black rubber in the middle, like a pyramid scraping the sky-belly. Then they set it all aflame to the tune of black smoke and started dancing in spirals, spinning like dervishes, moths magnetised by the warmth of a flame. Laughing like they lost their minds, howling. Somewhere between a memory and a premonition, ‘Moths’ feels like a journalistic report broadcast simultaneously from the past, the present and the near future.
As the EP concludes, Polowczyk revisits a day spent on New York’s Coney Island Beach. Speaking through a chopped-and-screwed filter over an affecting soundworld of washy drones, he recalls the memory - perhaps real, perhaps imagined, or maybe even the echo of a dream about a week when whales beached themselves en mass and graffiti artists used spraypaint to throw up the sort of pieces you usually see on the side of a subway train on their rotting carcasses while ruminating on the toxicity of the future.
Welcome to Pink Warm Belly Of A Dying Sun, Polowczyk and Jacobs’s harrowing and surprisingly meditative reflections on attempting to find beauty amidst the dystopia of our present moment. “In a sense, this work is about transmuting their dark energies and realities through some sort of alchemy that makes them aesthetically beautiful in some way,” Polowczyk explained. “But to be fair, that wasn’t the intent. I write in a stream of consciousness, so I didn’t even know what was going to come out. I’m still unpacking what’s on the recordings, but I see the whole thing as a way of dealing with this onslaught of negativity.”
Across the EP, Polowczyk depicts the teargas-dusted horrors of the 21st century in economical, unvarnished prose. Employing a process of reduction, he boils down a lifetime spent rapping into precise spoken word ruminations set against a backdrop of acid-rain corroded synthesis and ecstatic cosmic noise produced by Jacobs, with violin, cello and New York City train field recordings provided by Tobias Preisig, Simon Houghton, and Artur Adeszko respectively. If you were going to think of it in visual art terms, an easy comparison would be the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s 1937 oil painting ‘Guernica’, which depicts the horrors of war in an abstract, black-and-white cubist-surrealist style. “It’s a depiction of a bombing,” Polowczyk said. “It’s essentially just carnage, humans and animals torn apart, but it's still a gorgeous painting, right?”
In early September, I spoke with Polowczyk via Zoom from Berlin, where he has lived on and off since the early 2000s. Over an hour-long conversation, he took me time travelling back to New York in the ‘80 and ‘90s before fast-forwarding to Germany in the 2000s. As he related the broken mosaic of his life story to me through emotionally vulnerable and open-hearted sentiments, Polowczyk revealed himself as a thoughtful thinker who has spent decades pursuing energy and knowledge while shifting shape and form as an artist.
“I had this conversation with a friend of mine who lives in a village outside of Tokyo,” Polowczyk said as he reflected on the state of the world in 2024. “He said when he reads what's going on in the world, it's almost like reading a sci-fi novel because, in that village, everything is the way it has been for centuries.” Pausing briefly, he continued with an expanding series of thoughts. “I don't know what it was like to be in a free-roaming tribal unit back in the day, but if you think about it, we’re plugged in all day, every day, now. If I go away for a few days and don't read the headlines, I feel like I live in a perfect reality. I know I’m blessed to live in a fairly safe environment, but it’s worth thinking about the forces working on our consciousness.”
Born in Poland in the mid-1970s, Polowczyk moved to New York with his family in 1982 after his father accepted a diplomatic posting at the Mission to the United Nations. “There’s a funny thing with this, though,” he explained. “The first option put on the table was for us to move to India. That would have been a different experience, but with my spiritual formatting and inclination - being that I'm a Piscean breed - I think that would have landed as well, but the vehicle for my expression might have been different.”
Over the following four years, he got a streetside view as hip-hop blossomed out of a culture based around block parties and apartment building basement jams commanded by DJs and MCs into a transformative force on the verge of reshaping the music industry and global popular culture. “I'm talking about sitting by the radio making mixtapes and just hunting down these alien-sounding songs sprinkled throughout the pop playlist,” he remembered. “You had to wait for that Run D.M.C., Grandmaster Flash, or Whodini.”
Ostensibly, he was just a kid consuming something new without really understanding it, but in reality, it went deeper than that. “When you lived in New York then, you were surrounded by it,” he said. “The trains were all bombed with graffiti. Kids were dancing on the street and beatboxing in class at school. I was immersed in it.”
Decades later, when Polowczyk started analysing how encountering hip-hop in New York transformed him, he realised he could trace it back to ‘Five Minutes of Funk’ by Whodini. It’s an experience he now thinks of as his moment of spiritual transformation. “I distinctly remember hearing that on the radio,” Polowczyk said. “It hit me so hard. I felt these sensations and energies in my body that I'd never felt before or after. I read somebody describing a Siberian shaman undergoing an initiation. It was like being hit by a lightning bolt, dismembered, or having his molecules blown apart and sealed together again with light. That's what it felt like.”
Alongside the rise of hip-hop, Polowczyk has vivid memories of Michael Jackson dropping Thriller and moonwalking across television screens and Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rock-it’ turning his brain inside out. It was an era when pop culture moments were potent enough to stop the world in its tracks. “I don't think that's even possible nowadays,” he said. “Everybody and their moms tuned into the same channel. Seeing the same thing, you know?”
At the end of that golden four-year run in the Big Apple, Polowczyk and his family returned to Poland for several years before making the trip across the Atlantic again for a second stint in the ‘90s. “By the time I was in high school, we were in the golden age of hip-hop,” he enthused. “Every week, there was a new record, a new style. We watched the evolution of an art form reinvented on every record, but despite that, I was still just a consumer.”
Inspired by that moment, Polowczyk started a band with some friends. Thinking back, he described it as a mixture of proto-Native Tongues hip-hop and New York City Hardcore. “We were doing rap with guitar riffs before the whole Nu-Metal thing,” he said. “I grew up loving hip-hop, hardcore punk and metal, so it was a no-brainer. The energy was the same, and I could intuit that fusion would be a big thing.”
Once Polowczyk hit college, hip-hop's soundscape in New York had shifted to reflect the influence of Rawkus Records, underground independent rap, and the cypher's power. He remembered seeing Mos Def, Company Flow, Shabaam Sahdeeq, Sir Menelik and Talib Kweli rock small clubs across the city. “That was the first time I felt like I was growing up with a new wave,” he said. “I was tapped in, I understood it, and I was finally doing it.”
During those years, he remembered attending loft parties and art gallery openings where hip-hop lovers from far-flung locales, such as MTV Japan, would arrive to conduct video interviews with established icons like the Rocksteady Crew. At the same time, Polowczyk was reading UK and European music, fashion and culture magazines such as The Face, i-D and Lowdown Magazine, which exposed him to the futuristic sounds of jungle/drum & bass and gave him a window into how everyone across the Atlantic and beyond was refracting hip-hop through their lenses.
During the Rawkus Records era, Polowczyk dialled into the power of hip-hop as a tool to unplug from reality, plug into something bigger and let it flow through you as an improvised stream of consciousness. “That’s why I fell in love with hip-hop,” he said. “At its best, they’re masters of that. The first transmissions I tapped into were about flow and mastery of mind and body. All the emcees I value tap into that. You can feel the energy. On one hand, the flow isn’t really technical, but it’s also an energetic architecture. That’s why I love early Saul Williams. His early recordings are so potent with energy. He was modelling or remodelling with words. Whenever I went to a show, it was all about the energy.”
If you listen to the recordings Polowczyk has made with Jacobs as Pink Warm Belly Of A Dying Sun or the ambient and spoken word projects, he started recording as Ain’t About Me and Noise in the Key of Life in the early 2020s; you can hear this commitment to energetic architecture in the texture and tone of his voice. It’s a quality that carries over to conversations as well. “There are artifacts that I've accumulated from living in New York, but the way I speak is an expression of how I work with sound matter,” he said. “I sculpt the words when I speak them, which just sticks to my daily or everyday speech. I'm working on a certain sculptural effect, trying to chisel the syllables and reach a certain clarity of expression.”
In the early 2000s, Polowczyk found himself in Berlin, where he began recording as RQM as part of a scene of European producers and sound system crews, including Al Haca, Stereotyp, Robot Koch, Milanese, Siriusmo, and Jahczoozi—inspired by idiosyncratic American hip-hop producers like The Neptunes and Timbaland, dub music, Kruder & Dorfmeister and Berlin Techno. Together, they began recording hefty club tracks that emphasised sound design and production while sharing showbills and festival lineups with US and UK heavyweights like MIA, Missy Elliott, Stereo Mcs, Kool Keith, Peter Kruder (of Kruder & Dorfmeister) and El-P.
“That was my Forrest Gump moment,” Polowczyk laughed. “I just stepped into something. There was a wave rising. I just fell into it, and I think I served a purpose for these producers whose production, in some cases, would be pretty bare and minimum and maybe wouldn't have worked without vocals on top. So everybody pounced on me to contribute vocals because it just finished the tracks for them.”
As he had with his punk-rap band in the ‘90s, Polowczyk felt he had a clear vision of where popular music was going. “I could see what Timbaland was doing. You could fuse these futuristic sounds with hip-hop, and there was a potential vector in the development of music to pursue there. Looking back on it, that was my demo phase. I was learning what I could do with my voice. How to find my pocket on the strangest beats. I was experimenting. Learning how to tame song structure, write hooks, and find all the colours in my voice. I was figuring out what I had in my toolbox in public.”
Despite the excitement all of this generated, when Polowczyk really looked at things objectively, something wasn’t quite right. “When I came here, it was all about the artifice,” he said. “The things you could buy and collect. The nerdy side of it. The academic and technical side of it. Let’s refine this turntablist grammar. Let's perfect the flow of these letters. That’s just the surface level. It’s not how it works when you return to the source.”
That said, it wasn’t as simplistic as that might make things sound. The world was changing, and as we began to enter a global decentralised culture, singular hubs of cultural power like New York began to give way to an ever-expanding matrix of micro scenes all vying for attention with the digital landscape. “There's a rupture in the timeline where I had my burnout,” Polowczyk said. “Then there's a moment where I launched into a project of self-healing and self-discovery by rethinking what music is and investigating what sound is, which now informs everything that I do.”
Over the following years, he undertook what he described as “backstage work,” where he made sense of what defined him as an artist and a human being. “For those colours to come out, I had to shed the whole matrix,” he admitted. In the process, he stripped everything down to the essence of who he understood himself to be and began rebuilding from there. “This process was really radical,” Polowczyk explained. “I got rid of the beat, and at some point, I was just laying my spoken word over proto-ambient music because I wanted to feel the freedom away from the grid and find my own body rhythm.”
Interestingly, feeding ambient music, noise and field recordings into his process wasn’t the result of exposure to those types of music. Instead, Polowczyk naturally found his way into those zones through writing and recording based on instinct. “I just conducted sound experiments and came to the same conclusions that others came to way before me,” he admitted. “I read about Pauline Oliveros’s deep listening theory after I’d figured it out for myself. I was already recording funny appliances making weird noises, feasting on the harmonics, and then the musicality of these sounds. Now, I know they were doing exactly the same things back in the ‘70s. My relationship with the experimental scene is only in that we do the same things, but we arrive at them in completely different ways.”
A key turning point for Polowczyk was Noise in the Key of Life, an impressionistic, non-linear sound diary he released in 2022 after regularly walking around Berlin with his daughter and a field recorder before listening back over the recordings he’d made afterwards. “I started to sit and meditate for two hours daily,” he continued. “So meditation and deep listening became intertwined. They were an outcome of what was happening in my life instead of an academic investigation. It was nice when I started to pick up the books, got my subscription to The Wire and realised that we’re all doing the same thing in different ways.”
Polowczyk’s investigations into deep listening and the materiality of sound changed his relationship with his voice and music production in general. This extended epiphany was the turning point when he realised how much subtle work he was already doing to sculpt his voice as a textural element or sound object. “As an emcee or a proto-rapper, I was more interested in percussion, flow and lyrics than the body of my voice,” he said. “I didn’t control the production of my voice either. I just handed it to other people; they did what they felt they should. Apart from one gentleman, they’d all cut from 90 hertz down. Now, it’s all about the low end.”
Another crucial moment was when Polowczyk intuitively shifted from being the centre of his universe to helping others deal with their processes and solve their problems. “This solved my problem, which was that I was suffocating inside this solipsistic self-referential bubble of mine,” he admitted. “Also, everybody around me was as self-absorbed. It was not a good place to be. Helping others freed me from that suffocating, hermetic space I was inhabiting.” As part of this, Polowczyk also acknowledges the influence of his young children, who have reinstituted the notions of play and fun within his life. “Serving them, being there for them and not being the centre of my universe has been fucking liberating,” he said.
In this headspace, Polowczyk asked himself two questions: Can I record music without it just being about me and spinning back into another narrative that will trap me? Can I release this music in a way that’s not self-reflexive? Rather than trapping people in his world, he wanted to return them to reality after an experience that felt more like a home-cooked meal than a product. From those questions, Ain’t About Me was born.
“When I think back to how I came up with hip-hop and punk, the movies I watched and the music I consumed always released me back into reality,” Polowczyk reflected. “I want to live in a universe that is a communal exchange of ideas. You like this? Learn to DJ, rap, dance or tag! Make your shit better! Be more you! Start your own band! Throw your own show! Design your own logo! Make a T-shirt!”
On November 15th, Polowczyk and Jacobs launched Pink Warm Belly of A Dying Sun at the off-space on Richard-Sorge-Str. 79 (Berlin - Friedrichshain) with a multimedia exhibition that showcased a series of sculptural, sound, and video installations on the theme of “the mediated nightmares of our times, as soundtracked by the EP. Artists involved included Clemens Behr, Brigitte Fässler, TIND, and Manuel Carbone. If you’re in Berlin, you can still view the exhibition for a few more days. Check out some details here.
FIN.