“I believe that the intention of electronic music is to capture new forms of aural communication, not to emulate possibilities of human played instruments. To do so is irrelevant. Fusion too easily leads to gimmick.”

I first met Michael Kuszynski in the early winter of 2000. At the time he was fast approaching his days as an incoming undergraduate student at The University of Chicago. The first thing that struck me about this young man when we first spoke, my own head tilted down, eyes making little to no contact as I listened intently, was the assertive manner of his speech—assertive in the sense that it was not overly confident or arrogant, but that his vocalizations were tonally direct and his use of words succinct.

Michael’s speech is lively, clear, and to the point. The same can be said about his music. His debut full-length techno album, Early Collected Works, sounds off as so. It is his authentic electro voice: carefully selected electronic sounds genuinely representative of the artist’s personality and imagination. And included in this voice is a thoughtful (and thought-provoking) audio lexicon, a language that takes into account electronic-based music history, ties, styles, and forms. But nostalgia it simply is not. The entire album is not so much reinvention of the tried and tested but a direction to the innovative.

Michael Kuszynski was born in Lodz, Poland in 1982, at a time of Communist rule. His formative years took place in a small village near Krakow with a radius of four square blocks, the austerity of which more than likely imprinted upon him a deeply imaginative curiosity that would follow him beyond his immigration to the U.S.—to Chicago—in 1992. Nearby Krakow, known for its own fusion of modernity and tradition, also had an effect on Michael with its own brand of cultural spillage.

Once in America, at the age of 11, Michael acquired his first computer. From then on it was computer love as he experimented with computer programming, 3D modeling, and exploring Linux. At the time he also exhibited a deep passion for mathematics, but literature, the great telling of the story, also captured his attention. As such the curiosity of young Michael had transcended to the task of solving formulas, creating programs, finishing works of literature—in essence, variants of story telling. And by 1997, at the age of 15, the self-refinement process that occurs to the curious minded continued as he began a serious inquiry into electronic music, including ambient, industrial, and album-oriented electronic music. Inevitably the feedback loop of exploration that comes from the study of creative works directed him even further. And that creative nudge would dislodge him from strictly technical interests as he began to explore recording software.

By 1998, now 16, Michael began to acquire hardware synthesizers and recording equipment, experimenting with more serious recording and synthesis. Within two years he had been experimenting with wavetable, fm, and analog synthesis, becoming particularly concerned with audio engineering and the importance of recording, mixing, and processing. Not too long afterwards an internal dialogue began regarding frequencies of sound and the material effects of projecting sound waves onto bodies. All of this culminated in his desire to capture emotion or mood expressed through compositional repetition, what the great American composer Steve Reich himself had discovered early on in his musical career, placing more focus on the rhythmic rather than melodic aspects of music.

Thereafter he made the great discovery: techno music, particularly Detroit techno. And with this great discovery came greater experimentation. Michael began formulating permutations of a sparse drum machine and sample driven spaces enveloped within long decaying synthesizer output, relying upon raw samples and original sound sources optimized with various means of filtering, reverb, and equalization.  He began exploring compression, limiting, and amplification, ultimately to the conclusion of recording with minimal processing and relying on the source to provide color, depth, and material context.  Michael arrived to a personal philosophy.

By 2001 he established a continually advancing studio configuration appended with a series of rack components, desktop synthesizer, and rhythm modules, achieving a more optimal environment towards manipulating technology, escaping whim and entering intentionality. Studio space was limited, constraining, isolating, and ultimately responsible and conducive to much creativity. Following this intense period of work, he released his first 12” vinyl in 2002, (Plane Recordings 001) in partnership with Nels Truesdell of Detroit.

Meanwhile at The University of Chicago, Michael began more intensive involvement with performance and event promotions, founding and managing the formally recognized/funded University organization, Electronic @ Chicago. This included managing, planning, and executing events with Full Spectrum-Chicago. He hosted a series of electronic dance music events, peaking with maintaining a stage involving attendance of over one thousand at the Festival of the Arts (FOTA).

All of this paralleled with his studies. Just as with his art intentionality was the name of the game as he focused on and instinctually compiled a perspective for historically relevant and contextually advancing underground musical forms. Simultaneously, he would spend the remainder of his final undergraduate year at Chicago studying philosophy, including coursework on Descartes, Goethe, and Foucault.  In 2005 Michael graduated with a concentration in Economics.

Michael has since secured a position as a securities analyst with a Wall Street firm in New York where he currently resides. He is focused on honing productivity and integrating intense professional demands while executing musical aspirations.  His architecture of sound is to communicate among planes of harmonic and rhythmic content in a dialectic with the developments in electronic music of the past 25 years. But let’s not be mere atomists about it. The individual is not reduced simply to his or her past, and certainly not to bits and pieces of a whole, but also to the possibility of what the new day has in store for us—the possibility.  Michael’s techno is alive, clear, and pointed, and dare I say, heading into the right direction, inward..

Author: Luis Gabriel Aguilera 

Contact: mike@planerecordings.com