Lil Jon drops over Fruity Loops piano. Hardstyle rave references. Wild general MIDI trilling. The Polish producer Julek ploski’s newest record, Give Up Channel, is a kaleidoscopic piece of contemporary experimental music. Sonically bonkers and highly personal, the album is in conversation with everything from Chuquimamani-Condori to the Orange Milk Records roster; in fact, ploski has worked with Orange Milk in the past. We recently caught up with the artist, email style, and asked him some questions. Read the interview and listen to Give up Channel, below.

You’ve said that this record is your most personal release yet. Why?

Julek ploski: Hmmm the thing most apparent for me is that so far all of my records were mostly about my relationship with a so-called “outside world” hehe (how am I perceived and how am I perceiving). With Give up Channel it’s a bit different because I feel like it’s a journal about my relationship with myself or maybe I should say various (especially past) selves. It’s also about regaining contact with some of them being forgotten or put back for years. It’s also about facing The Eternal Shame (one that almost never leaves me) and finally it’s also about feeling hope for the first time in my life—hope that I might actually be safe. Feel like I really opened myself to myself. These are things I never talked about before in my music. 

Where do these songs start for you?

The first spark is always a melody with a specific instrument (with this record it was usually a frickin’ piano)—I very rarely think about the structure, sound design, sonic space etc. etc. (OK haha I see I wrote “always” and that’s actually not true because also very often when I hear something awesome I’m like “omg i also wanna make a song ALMOST EXACTLY like that” and then my song ofc turns out so different and half of the time it makes me angry so I abandon the project and the other half it makes me happy that in the end I have my own taste/style.)

What do you love about FL Studio?

It would be very easy for me to say what I hate (awful optimization, crashes often as hell on MacBooks, built-in instruments can sound so cheap—still love them tho, using them in almost every song—the interface is just so stupid and non-intuitive compared to Ableton, recording live instruments is a drag etc. etc.), and yet I’ve been using it for years and years and YES I tried switching to Ableton and although I really appreciated the software just being cleaner and maybe even more powerful than FL, in the end it seemed just too stiff and boring. I feel like FL is full of surprises (built-in instruments are actually THE BEST because they sound cheap and MIDI). One might even say that it’s an Adventure to use FL hehe^^ :p.

There are a lot of drops on this record. What is your relationship with DJ culture and the radio?

OMG super glad you addressed that!!!! Finally someone!!!! Well yeah, I’m addicted to funky, thick, monumental drops. And I don’t only mean club drops, as great drops are everywhere around you man (especially in film scores (to not look too far away, Daniel Blumberg and his fat The Brutalist soundtrack) or operas (Akhnaten by Philip Glass))—you just gotta tune your heart to it man. Not sure when the passion for drops began but for sure it was strongly induced by Chuquimamani-Condori. I’m not a radio listener but I have a show at LYL Radio called ‘Give up Radio’ (heehe), I dont listen to many mixes but I love making them and I’m not a club goer but playing DJ sets can work like a balsam for my brain. 

Do you consider your music to be within the history of contemporary classical music?

Naaah I don’t think so. And I know there are people who consider it like that but I very very rarely listen to contemporary classical music (I say “contemporary classical music” understanding it as kinda “academic” music performed almost only at festivals, being very rarely distributed and based on so-called Scores (hehe)), so i’m not even sure what it is (I promise I’d love to know one day). (I really don't want this “Statement” to sound contemptuous.)

How do you choose who to collaborate with?

When I stumble into an interesting artist, I write their (nick)name in my Apple Notes app under “collab??” Sometimes I use bold font if I feel like our match might be perfect. Then I wait for an idea, how to finish a track to not exist. Sometimes, when the idea is finally not there (it can be very hard for me to hand something I “created” to someone else, I’m slowly learning to be less control-freaky), then I go through my list looking for the most suitable collab partner and then I contact this person and then there’s a 50 percent chance they won’t agree to do it^^.

I love the album cover. Is there a story behind it?

Wow, thank you! It means a lot. I created the first sketch when doing an artwork for a mix me and Oliver Torr did for my show at LYL:

At first I was just playing/fooling around with some found footage horror artifacts/ideas but when I sent the artwork to Oliver it struck me that it was too personal to use for radio. I came up with something else for the occasion the next day, but the idea of this kinda surprisingly heavily autoagressive “#Kill-The-DJ CARD” stuck with me. While doing this album, I was thinking a lot about my almost ideologically self hating period of semi-incelity (#NoHope) so after some time I decided that i should remade the radio sketch and make it the cover artwork: ,)

Are you a major multitasker? 

Hahaha yess oh yes.

Photo Credit: Zuzanna Wudarska