Reviews

Chain D.L.K.The Polish sound artist Jacek Doroszenko has long been an expert in extracting the emotional residue from spaces most of us would describe as lifeless. In R_sin_io, a digital prelude to his broader "Environmental Practice: Resin Arpeggio" project - already reviewed on this space -, Doroszenko finds poetry in petrochemicals, arpeggios in exhaust ducts, and a kind of ambient intimacy in the belly of a Czech chemical plant. Yes, this is field recording music from inside a factory - yet it's as far from sterile as it gets. Think of it as musique concrète in a hazmat suit, humming softly under its breath.

Built from the sonic ecology of Spolchemie, a chemical complex in Ústí nad Labem that probably doesn’t make many people think of musicality (except maybe in nightmares), Doroszenko’s composition does something gently radical: it listens without fear. These aren’t just industrial sounds, in the genre sense - they’re the actual voice of industry, filtered through analog synths, prepared piano, and what could only be described as alchemical ambience. The artist doesn’t merely document; he transmutes.

The first track, “R_sin_io”, opens like mercury sweating in a glass pipe. It trembles. It pulses. It doesn’t rush to prove itself. Instead, it builds slowly, as if unsure whether to be a machine or a memory. Synths spiral like DNA strands made of static. Somewhere beneath, a sequence tries to form - an arpeggio, maybe? But it’s constantly dissolving, eroded by delay trails and muffled drones. You might hear a voice, or steam, or both. It’s as if the plant were remembering being a forest.

The title itself, "R_sin_io", suggests both data corruption and poetic code - like a computer trying to write a love letter to entropy. It's not hard to imagine these tracks as the internal monologue of a very polite, very anxious robotic arm trying to describe emotion after years of bottling solvents.

Then comes “R_Consonances”, which - if "R_sin_io" was an inhalation - feels like the exhalation. Slightly warmer, less alienated. Strings shimmer. A piano stumbles over its own reverberations. This piece contains something that might be called melody, but only in the way a ghost contains a face. What we really hear is a negotiation: between analogue warmth and mechanical repetition, between human gesture and factory rhythm. Consonance is never just harmony here - it’s a fragile truce.

The irony (a soft one, not a bitter one) is that this music, born of a place associated with pollution, regulation, and cold utility, is incredibly human. Or maybe post-human. Doroszenko, along with collaborators like Jan Krtika (field recordings) and Ewa Doroszenko (artwork), isn’t trying to romanticize the machine. He’s just asking what happens when we stop tuning out its voice.

Doroszenko’s previous works have often explored the porous boundary between sound and space, between visual and auditory thinking. But R_sin_io feels like it takes this ethos into more volatile territory - into places most artists wouldn’t bother listening to unless forced to wear earplugs. And yet, in his hands (or knobs), even a chemical drone can feel like a confession.

This is music for long exposures. For sitting in silence with the residues of labor. For imagining that the building itself has dreams - and they sound a little glitchy, a little metallic, but kind of hopeful.

If Brian Eno is the grandfather of ambient and Ryoji Ikeda its data-obsessed technocrat cousin, then Jacek Doroszenko might be its industrial therapist - quietly massaging meaning out of the mechanical until it purrs.

In the end, R_sin_io is not just about the sonic artefacts of a factory. It’s about the ecology of attention. About learning to hear the unheard. About listening "with" space, rather than "in" it.

And perhaps, most poetically, about how resin - the hardened memory of a tree - can become the symbol for something entirely synthetic. Or vice versa.

Original > HERE