It’s about time I posted some more Myslovitz, and I’ve had this track on my mind since the turn of the year. I got the “Skalary, Mieczyki, Neonki” album along with a couple of their earlier releases when we were across in Poland for Christmas and New Year, and I had a rather surreal morning with it as the soundtrack.

“Skalary, Mieczyki, Neonki” is an album of improvisations and out-takes from the Korova Milky Bar writing sessions, and is largely instrumental. The album title means “Angelfish, swordtails, neon tetras” – tropical fish – although my fumblings with the Polish-English dictionary failed to identify this common theme, and I thought it meant “Neon swords at scale”!

My morning began by waking up early with a hangover (my fifth or sixth in a row, as it was the 3rd or 4th of January and we’d been doing New Year properly). We’d been in a ski resort on the border with Slovakia for a few days, but had come back to Warsaw for the last few days of our trip, and were staying with a friend in the city. She works from home but was out meeting clients, and my other half was away at the dentist or beautician or some such place, hence the early rise. With the hangover to consider, I decided against going out until later in the day, and instead curled up on the sofa in the sunlight to listen to my new purchases – it was minus 10 outside, but in a well insulated south-facing flat it felt like a summer’s day. The soundscapes that make up the first few tracks of “Skalary, Mieczyki, Neonki” soon helped me to drift off into that no man’s land between sleep and wakefulness, until the first “conventional song” jolted me awake. The lyrical theme translates as something like “stand up, life is surfing, don’t be scared to fall”, and something in the music is reminiscent of surfing – possibly the keyboard sound, although it’s more The Doors than The Beach Boys.

After that track I dozed off again, only to be woken by what I thought was someone in the flat downstairs hammering nails into the wall. A couple of minutes of this had me on the verge of going down and using my pidgin Polish to give it “that’s plenty!” before the hammering took on a more regular beat, got a bit louder, and sync-ed with the music. Sounded more like someone hitting a drum than hammering a nail too…

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I can’t find a link to this album on an English language website, but it is available here for 30 zloty (about £7). Korova Milky Bar is also worth getting hold of though, so I’d strongly encourage you to click the link below.