COLUMBUS DUO

The history of the band, that is a long and slow evolution rather than a succession of explosions, starts in 1991, the year in which his members formed THING. At the beginning, listening to the bands like Sonic Youth and The Jesus Lizard, they were in the vanguard of Polish noise. THING played dozens of concerts and recorded several demo-tapes but that was not before 1997 that their music was officially released by Nikt Nic Nie Wie. The album Rudder displayed the band’s understanding of noise frequencies, embodied in thrillingly articulate sounds. Live performances with the bands like Surrogat, Spokój, Guapo, Couch, Melt Banana and Ewa Braun confirmed the evolution of THING towards more precise and minimal forms, symbolically represented by the line-up reduction from quintet to trio. Rudder was followed by Killwater, recorded in 1999 and released independently the same year. The album saw THING’s noise arsenal expanding further: its blazing sonic wig-outs recall The Dazzling Killmen but some fragments mark the new way of the band. In the end of 1999 THING turned into COLUMBUS ENSEMBLE, project that reveal the interest of its members for non-linear textures and dynamics. COLUMBUS ENSEMBLE had already revealed their austerely minimalist soundscape playing live with Couch and Ewa Braun, when the former THING’s guitarist completed the line-up, this time playing the trumpet and signaling the new change in focus. Again as a quartet, the band started to forge a distinct and wildly experimental fusion of jazz, noise and minimal, acclaimed by the German and Danish public during the tour in 2001. The same year saw the first COLUMBUS’ album, issued on the Dead Sailor label. This “debut” contains exclusively instrumental development of the band’s experiences throughout all the decade. The record plays to every nuance that COLUMBUS has exhibited these last years and proposes a mélange of different sonic concepts that the critics compare with the new Chicago scene. But that was not the end of the band’s minimalist journey: since 2002 COLUMBUS has played just as a brothers’ duo. The sound has become a little bit more austere, two guitars are sometimes accompanied by loops and a voice. More melodic, COLUMBUS DUO ventures into the areas of alt-country, ambient and avant-garde cameral music, and the new pieces propose the intimacy that seems suited for the post-industrial sensibility.