Polish Ambient
Polish ambient music and its creators (polishambient.pl) is a project carried out in 2023, as part of which a pilot qualitative study on ambient music in Poland was conducted. The project was based on 28 in-depth individual interviews (IDI) with artists, composers, and musicians, as well as theorists and cultural animators associated with the ambient, experimental, and noise scenes. The project was embedded in the perspective of research on ambient music and the broader idea of background music and functional music, focused on the historical-interpretative and theoretical reconstruction of these phenomena, and then developed towards the documentation of the contemporary Polish context.
The main objectives were, first, to collect and organize knowledge about key Polish artists associated with ambient music and their repertoire, and second, to obtain interview material enabling the reconstruction of how ambient music is defined by participants in the scene, identifying the specific features they indicate and the elements considered constitutive of ambient practices. The results of the project are a research report and a thematic website containing documentation in the form of texts and multimedia materials, as well as a catalog of artists and interviews. The project was carried out thanks to a grant from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Respondents included: Jędrzej Dondziłło, Michał Wolski, Tomasz Bednarczyk, Marcin Dymiter, Dariusz Brzostek, Tomasz Mirt, Grzegorz Bojanek, Tomasz Misiak, Wacław Zimpel, Rafał Mazur, Izabela Smelczyńska, Maciej Panek, Robert Losiak, Jan Topolski, Martyna Poznańska, Teoniki Rożynek, Marek Kamiński, Rafał Iwański, Jacek Smolnicki, Tadeusz Łuczejko, Przemek Kamiński, Aleksandra Słyż, Patryk Lichota, Paweł Pruski, Tomasz Mreńca, Piotr Michałowski, Michał Jacaszek, and Karolina Rec.
