Cradle – Songs About Circular Movements, 2024
Cradle is a music album I composed in 2022, on two Analog Four synthesizers. It was released in 2024, and now exists as
- freely streamable music (Spotify, Apple Music, …), as
- music that you can buy digitally (including a 72-page booklet), as
- a physical booklet and as
- a series of drawings, exclusively made for this album.
Before I started drawing and painting, I mainly made music — it truly was my first love. After various band projects and releases, this first love lay dormant for almost ten years.
Around 2018 I started composing more regularly again, and in 2022 I wrote an album that has now been released: Cradle. You can listen to it on all streaming services (e.g. Spotify or Apple Music) — you don’t have to spend any money. There are also various ways to purchase the music and the surrounding universe of images: see below for details.
Composition now takes up a lot of space in my life, but I hardly ever make it visible. I’ve wanted to change this for a long time, but it hasn’t been that easy. That’s why I’m very happy to finally be taking the next steps: there will soon be more of it.
On fifteen tracks, Cradle focuses on “circular movements”: based on childhood associations, and less frequently discussed aspects of difficult childhoods, emotions open up to greater possibilities in and beyond our lives:
I thought I had written music about children and childhoods – where curiosity, energy and movement sometimes meet disinterest, fear and limitation.
I eventually understood that this music isn‘t about a specific phase in life; that it isn‘t simply “about childhood“ – but about life as part of (and container for) circular movements.
About cycles: emotional cycles, life cycles, cosmic cycles. Feel your life as fragment of a continuous cycle, with infinite layers of meaning, infinite beginnings and endings.
The Digital Booklet
The music of Cradle can be bought via Bandcamp. This also includes a 72 page PDF-booklet with
- illustrated lyrics to the album,
- lyrics to each song, and
- drawings (by me, and also by Zofia Chrzanowska, who created exclusive works for the album).
The Physical Booklet
I decided against producing records, CDs or cassettes for this album. If you want this music to inhabit physical space, you can do so via the analog Cradle booklet instead. It is the limited version of the digital booklet, with the same content — but as a 20x20cm booklet, 72 pages, perfect bound.
It exists in a limited edition of 50 copies, and can be purchased for €25 (excl. shipping). Whoever buys it automatically gets the Bandcamp download (and thus also owns the digital data of the album).
The Cradle Drawings
The Cradle universe also includes a series of drawings made exclusively for the album. You can see the entire series here.
