Dawid Chrapla was arguably a most unusual participant of the Dniprovia compilation who led us to discover the whole new field recording scene. Dawid explores the sound atmosphere of his little Polish town Zawadzkie, recording local industrial noises meticulously and thus painting a vivid audio landscape of his daily life. His mid-COVID 2020 album “The Voice of Steelworks,” released on the Polish field recording label Saamleng, is one of the most surprising things that we happened to listen to, especially knowing already that the process of its development is not as obvious as it may seem.

Emerging in the 1970s in some duller industrial areas of England, early industrial music has drawn its formal inspiration from the sound environment, trying to reproduce factory rhythms and noises with DIY electronic equipment. The musicians did not necessarily use the pre-recorded industrial samples themselves, though, relying more on the imitation concept. The curious thing is, the process works the other way round quite well: you can record some factory noises and discover some inner rhythm and structure within the record. With some further manipulations this source material is as good for a creative mind as any analogue equipment, and this is exactly what Chrapla does on his album — finds some interesting sound ideas around him and converts them into something else.

Among those magic techniques developed by William S. Burroughs was the one called playback, intended to alter a location of magician’s choice by recording the audio from it and then playing it back at the same location — probably creating some kind of an influential feedback loop. Burroughs himself saw this as a means to destroy the place and has successfully tried it on some cafe he particularly disliked, mixing the pre-recorded audio with the sounds of alarms and TV noises and thus creating subliminal discomfort among the visitors. Though the destructive ways of this method may be questionable, the story suggests an interesting psychogeographic view on the space we’re living in, the one where you’re not only shaped by the soundscape of a place but can shape it back as well.

“The Voice of Steelworks” does shape an idea for us, one of a common industrial background setting that you don’t always notice even if it follows you every day. In a typical (as we understand it) manner for field recordings, all the tracks on the album are given simple, even ascetic location names, so that we know for sure that we’re listening to the forge or the mill right now. It’s useful to remember, though, that Dawid processes all the original sound material, cutting it into pieces and putting it together afresh. So it’s quite interesting to untangle an audio canvas like this, trying to guess the amount of subtle edits, patches and stitching. As the artist has also said in his recent interview to Khatacomb, the recording process is accompanied with a certain creative randomness: you can have some initial expectations for what you’re planning to capture onto the tape but you’ll never know for sure what exactly will end up there. So among the industrial crunches, rumble and screeches you can occasionally catch some bells, voices or other human interactions that gently remind you of the fleetingness of the moment — long gone but still alive here, on the record.

We also cannot help but think that listening to this album now, in war-torn Ukraine, provides a unique insight that many of us couldn’t imagine just a year before. As we learn the geography of our country by the military maps, we also come to recognize the scale of the Ukrainian industry destroyed by the russian invasion, and the silence forcibly brought to once vibrant and noiseful cities and towns. With an album like that you’re starting to really feel how comforting and reassuring the factory noise can be when you associate it with life.

Purchase the album on Bandcamp