The timeless quality of music tends to be overestimated. A stamp of time, a diary of a singular moment never to be repeated again, a confluence of various impulses and influences add character, carving out shapes and patterns from a mass of nondescript time-space. Slavek Kwi's "Re: Construction of Polar Sleep 1986 - 1987" is composed of various fragments of lo-fi recordings created during the first year of his Belgian exile. He used to live in a bohemian community in a two-bedroom flat in Liege and would spend his days playing in the streets and for the money made, buy food at a Moroccan store and the rest of the time would be spent smoking joints, drawing, reading, playing music or just sitting and laughing.
The community was composed of mainly emigrants from Czechoslovakia, and a few wanderers from around Europe. The following recording is a plunderphonic, cut'n'paste audio diary of that blissfully romantic time, with raw industrial edges not dissimilar to his Quarantaine collaboration, which preceded this recording by a few years. Apparently, Slavek imagined himself being a sort of radio presenter on his own radio "Free Communication", perhaps this was an allusion to the status quo that curbed free expressioin, that still persisted in his home Czechoslovakia at the time. The recordings, created using only the start and stop technique on a tape player, conveys a homely, intimate atmosphere of friends having a good time, drunk conversations, various snapshots of media broadcasts, sonic toys, found instruments, voices. In the end, they sing the national anthem. A bout of emigre nostalgia without the pathos. A fleeting dream, a memory that hasn't slipped by.
