Making an album after the band’s death

How it all ended

The over-used stylistic device that opens this note perfectly sums up what has happened in June 2014. K., B., O, and I were coming back from a terrible concert we’ve played in Kielce (Poland). The audience was not there, the atmosphere at the stage and in front of us was just gloomy. I thought the whole city was kind of illogical on that day.

We did not want to slow down, however. Rehearsals were planned already, live video recording scheduled, next cities of our summer tour waited for us and finally, our EP was a work in progress.

What happened later deeply traumatized me: O. was not answering her phone for a long time. We were trying to reach her or her flatmate but with no success. Eventually, on a secret Facebook group, she wrote that she’s ashamed of playing with us and therefore says goodbye. I was broken, because the band I put some much heart, hope, money and time in, has just vanished. I have never stopped believing that we are on the right way to be a global phenomenon. I believed so strongly, I loaned 10 000 PLN for gear and studio.

For the money we had, we’ve recorded pre-mixes consisting of drums, bass synthesizer, some keyboards and vocals. As we were desperate and depressed, records were poor. But we saved something.

In September we’ve booked a studio for two days and invited people to an open event. Everyone was welcome to just spontaneously add whatever they wanted — under the condition that we will do whatever we want with these tracks. We called that dżindżer projekt ft. YOU. Only K. and I were in charge at that moment.

These were two best days in 2014. A couple of great people were there with us: great musicians, supportive friends, and just some weirdos I’ll never meet again.

The three following years I was not able to find a producer to put the tracks together. I realize how hard it is and at some point, I was ready to pay a big amount of money to close the project. But when I split up with K., I also realized that I’m not able to make this music alive. Even if I could spend thousands of dollars for mixing and mastering, the brand was no more. Nothing would follow up.

I used to organize spontaneous drinks around my birthday. I just inform a couple of people that I’m going to be at a certain place on a certain day and they are welcome to join me. On the day of the EURO 2016 final, I booked a table at some cosy cafe with a TV screen at the south bank of the river. I was amazed how many good people showed up. Friendly faces who accompanied me during the craziest years of my life was there for a drink, a cigarette, a night. Nikodem, my friend and a former fan of the original band joined as well to ask what happened with that 2014 open studio project. He also pointed that he is a producer and could pro bono mix these tracks.
This is how DP2.0 stared.

I will use Medium platform to share the rest of the story. I want to show the great adventure and I hope it will make use of all home-producers, home-musicians and those who want to be close to music.