K88 & Lauren Duffus & Rainy Miller & Bianca Scout collaborate on new album. They share the lead single ‘ ‘Poetic Fallacy’

There's a dance scene in Tadeusz Konwicki's Kafkaesque 1965 drama film 'Salto' that lodged itself in Przemysław Jankowiak's head while he was conceiving'Everything Always Changes, For We're Truly Here'. The film plays like a dream and the dance works almost like the payoff, a haunting, poignant moment that subtly references the title itself, which loosely translates as 'leap'. "I like listening through images and seeing through sound," explains Jankowiak, who's better known as 2K88. His music has always been cinematic, but this album in particular, made alongside acclaimed British artists Lauren Duffus, Rainy Miller and Bianca Scout, plays like slow cinema, meditating on themes that smolder evocatively without ever fully igniting. It's best described as hypnagogic R&B, a reverie of affecting vignettes pieced together from unexpectedly vivid elements: sensual vocal hooks, free-flowing raps, submerged rhythms and rough, craggy atmospheres. The four contributors pass sounds and memories back-and-forth, imagining melancholy sci-fi hymns, inverted pop songs and neo-trip-hop outlines that melt away at the edges, falling into a captivating rhythm of their own.

Listen to "Poetic Fallacy": https://fixedabode.sup.nr/PoeticFallacy

The project was originally commissioned by Unsound in an effort to match up Polish and British artists. Jankowiak had already released 'SHAME', an album that reflected on the impact of Polish rap in the late 1990s and early 2000s, juxtaposing these elements with the aesthetics of UK club music, so presented himself as the obvious figurehead. Miller, Duffus and Scout were at the top of his wish list of collaborators and before long, the quartet were on their way to his home city of Gdynia for a residency, where they began to figure out the harmony between their respective approaches. It was planned as a live performance at first, with 2K88 overseeing and corralling the ideas from each of his allies. Miller, who is widely acclaimed for his unique fusion of rap, noise and ambient music on albums such as last year's 'Joseph, What Have You Done?', would add poetic, inclement contemplations; Duffus, whose weightless, genre-blending productions have seen her release on AD93 and tour with indie rap heavyweight MIKE, provided cloudy but self-assured vocal hooks; while Scout, a producer and performer who shivered between gothic pop and medieval ambiance on 2023's 'The Heart of the Anchoress' offered haunted textures and desolate chorals.

"I think in the back of all our minds was a possible release if the collaboration worked out well," laughs Unsound's Mat Schulz. "And of course it did." After the live performance in Kraków, the four artists turned the dream into a reality, projecting the same ideas onto 10 fully developed tracks. And on the opener, 'Everything Always Changes', the concept solidifies, with coarse noise rubbing against Scout and Duffus's airy vocal tones and booming analog bass provoking tension before Miller's familiar voice cuts through the clouds. "There's a war where the sea meets the sky," he sibilates, "where the lines blur into fantastical dissonance." His imagery matches Jankowiak's faded soundscape, bringing to mind a half-remembered, long-promised history lost to time and politics. "It's trapped in this romantic haze," says Miller. "It conjures images of fictional seaside towns, ghosts of past grandeur living through imaginary romances in the present." And his voice returns on 'Creeping Thistle', AutoTuned to curve gracefully around sparsely populated, burned out terrain: ominous synths, wailing police sirens and reverb that seems to swallow everything around it.

On 'The Quiet's Song' familiar R&B hits and stabs are isolated and surrounded by ominous negative space that Scout impedes on with her reserved incantation. Loose, casual piano themes wisp through the frame like smoky exhalations and those sirens still groan away somewhere in the distance. The various threads are knotted into a more legible form on 'Poetic Fallacy', when Jankowiak's decelerated beats overlap with heartbreaking half-speed melodies and Duffus's elegant hooks. Scout takes the mic for a moment and a broken de-tuned guitar picks out the remnants of a riff. But it's the aptly-titled 'Salto' that gives the album its nucleus, fixating on Jankowiak's all-important visual reference and using its imagery to power a genuine pop miniature, a gauzy, abstract modern R&B anthem that's as impressionistic and suggestive as Konwicki's's film.

2K88, Bianca Scout, Lauren Duffus, and Rainy Miller will present music from their upcoming album during Ephemera on Friday, June 12, at Komuna Warszawa. Tickets are still available.

The project is supported by British Council.