Over forty years late premiere of one the most important material in Polish alternative music and most of all, the very first studio recording of punk band from Poland!
Tilt’s 1980 recording session is a milestone, whose significance, due to the lack of an official release, has never been sufficiently understood and appreciated. This is the very beginning of the studio experience of the band, which a few years later became one of the most significant performers of the domestic music scene.
Tilt, along with Deadlock and Kryzys, is one of the most key formations of the first wave of punk/wave in Poland. Together with a few other bands of that period, they were a part of cultural subversion, they created a space that was filled with a community that could boldly express itself and propose its own forms regardless of external and internal limitations. Creativity and means of expression escaped the expectations and control of a gloomy regime. The essential message was conveyed and received; it was expressed in the formation of subsequent music groups, the first Polish-language zines, leaflets, graphics, collages, performances and other forms of artistic expression, which at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s initiated the culture of the third circulation.
The first stage in the history of the band TILT closes in the period 1979-1980. Initially, the band was formed by three people who already had some musical experience – Frantz (Tomek Lipinski), Rastek (Tomek Szczecinski) and Luther (Jacek Lenartowicz) – who previously played in the legendary DEADLOCK from Gdansk. After some time Pyza joined the band, she was playing the keyboard instruments.
From the very beginning, the band had a broader artistic vision, and their activity was supported and promoted by significant representatives of Polish avant-garde and modern art, such as Andrzej Zuzak (theatre, situationism, Agencja Sztuki Alternatywnej), Piotr Rypson (“Post” fanzine, art historian, curator) or Henryk Gajewski (Galeria Post Remont, independent cassette label, “Post” fanzine).
After the band disbanded, Tomek Lipinski and Tomek Szczecinski co-founded the supergroup BRYGADA KRYZYS. Luter and Pyza are active in the dada-postpunk band BIALE WULKANY. The band Tilt, on the other hand, will return in a new line-up in 1983 and will function with longer and shorter breaks for the next decades.
The album “On the Border line”, which we are presenting, contains four songs whose sound was influenced by the process of transformation of the first wave of western punk rock into post punk. They were recorded during a two-hour session in Studio S1 of Polish Radio in the first months of 1980. Additionally, the album includes an acoustic version of the song “Photo is photo”, recorded on a four-track at Tomek Lipinski’s house. The song was used in Henryk Gajewski’s film “Tilt Back”.
The studio session from the Polish Radio was not officially released, but these four numbers appeared on the first release with punk music that appeared in Poland – a cassette compilation “First Polish New Wave”. The whole first side was filled with Tilt recordings, both studio and live, which were recorded during the 1st New Wave Festival in Kolobrzeg (the second side was filled with other bands performing there – Deadlock, Kryzys, KSU, Poerocks and Kanal).
The presented tracks now have a chance to sound in their full splendour on the most noble format, thanks to the mastering in Studio As One. Four decades later, they will undoubtedly be rediscovered or even heard for the first time. An absolute pearl of the times when punk/wave music was forming in Poland!
The album is released thanks to the cooperation between Warsaw Pact Records and the Trasa W-Z Archive – with a 24 page booklet and poster.
