Formant

The year 2023 marked a turning point in Udo Volfram's creative endeavors. The promised and long-awaited musical comeback, a return to compositional and generative practices, did not dissipate into thin air, as previous declarations might have suggested; instead, it became a reality. Udo initiated his sonic transmigration by organizing his private magnetic archive, comprising reels and cassettes. He spent several days listening to the surviving contents of his collection. Additionally, he revisited numerous digital music recordings created while working with the ZX Spectrum 128k and PC Pentium, which he acquired in 1995.

The most intriguing aspects were the mutations resulting from two environments in which Udo oscillated at that time – the analog, occupying 1/3 of his room in a residential block, and the digital, utilizing widely available software like Music Maker and Acid. The sonic discoveries of the latter captivated Udo's attention. Initially, he selected 4 to 5 recordings, subjecting them to gates and noise correctors from online software. Subsequently, more recordings were added, and with the collaboration of Piotr Krompiewski, they were refined.

Today's tools afford nearly limitless possibilities with minimal effort, ranging from cleaning recordings from tapes to enhancing and normalizing the overall sound. The revitalized sequences of recordings became intertwined with Udo's post-cold-war sensitivity. Despite being sketch material, a foundational construct (bass-drum) prepared for further modifications and musical additions, Udo assessed these tracks as already carrying certain values and emotions. The atmosphere of numerous sleepless nights spent processing material, sampling his own samples, sounds, settings, and constructing the character of each piece was palpable. Unfortunately, Udo's creative impulses were paralyzed by his brother's death in 1999, leading him to escape into a safer visual dialogue in creative melancholy. Consequently, listening to all of this years later and restoring those recordings is a significant process for Udo. Despite attempts to enhance them with more meaningful sounds or vocals, he couldn't find a place fo

The album "F O R M A N T - consisting of 9 recordings created between 1997-1999 and arranged in achronological order. Udo Volfram presents the material for listening without the use of modern engineering or the often-used supersonic surgery; only the mentioned noise detection and necessary normalization (due to varied recording levels) were applied. As a musical faction, he add the cover design featuring an image of a Welder, referring to the Ant Man. This is a nod to his years spent working in two metallurgical factories in Lublin, Ursus, and Sipma. In both of these plants, he was merely a worker ant in a peculiar world of machines and the sounds flowing from them. They FORMed him and his musical fascinations while fulfilling the factory plan implemented just before the fall of communism in Poland.