spalarnia is overcome with subterranean longing in Rozkosz

Performance artist Wojciech Kosma descends into the Kletno Bear Cave to capture the erotically charged visual for ‘Rozkosz’, his latest track under his musical moniker, spalarnia.

As spalarnia, performance artist Wojciech Kosma makes experimental pop music with an explicitly queer, secular and anti-nationalist flavour. Seeking to dismantle outdated notions of division between eastern and western Europe, Kosma interpolates Polish folk music as the foundation of his sound, using trap percussion, drill bass, eurodance synthesis and an ear for irresistibly melancholy hooks to craft a singular take on traditional musical forms. On his second album, USTA, spalarnia addresses love in its various refractions, exploring lust, desire, sensuality and intimacy through evocative lyricism and exploratory sonics. “I wrote these songs thinking what would happen if I didn’t look for love, but sang as if it was already here,” explains Kosma. “I felt that it’s not true that love is supposed to be missing, that you have to wait for it. It’s been always here, it’s happening, in insane amounts, and it makes the world, at least my world.” On ‘Rozkosz,’ a slow and sensual highlight from the album, Kosma groans through an electronic dirge charged with longing, a quivering homage to overwhelming and all-consuming moments of pleasure and delight. Mixed by James Whipple, better known as M.E.S.H, Hesaitix and now EEA, ‘Rozkosz’ finds erotic tension in the interplay between throbbing low-end, sparse percussion, synthetic strings and primal flutes, coaxing lip-biting melodies out of negative space while Kosma’s foundation shaking baritone pins the track back down to earth with visceral heft.

For the ethereal visual artist Ewelina Węgiel worked alongside movement artists Luisa Mateo Dupleich Rozo and Monika Błaszczak to collaborate with Kosma, illuminated against the dramatic backdrop of Kletno Bear Cave, the longest cave formation in the Śnieżnik Mountains. Filmed using both digital and 16mm film, the film uses pale light and expressive movement to collapse the wet walls of the cave into the same texture as glistening skin and soaking fabric, a portrait of lovers slick with sweat and rock worn smooth by condensation. Perspiring stone protrusions are viewed with the same amorous gaze as necks upturned in ecstasy and fingers grazing outstretched arms. Milky stalactites drip onto expectant faces, calcium deposits formed over hundreds of years take on the sensual form of smooth bodies, while craggy rock faces layered against each other in photographic assemblage suggest biological mutations, organic matter bursting at the seams, desperate to spill over into new, more expansive, forms. This desirous overflow reflects the yearning of Kosma’s lyrics, who follows a churning repeated refrain of “too much” with the assertion, “there’s never too much,” begging the question, “why see with eyes if you can see with delight?” Just as centuries transform cave formations, hewn through mountain ranges with crushing patience, so too does the pressure of spalarnia’s desire have radically transformative potential, as he sings: “under the cover of delight, delight / I want to be your husband and wife.”

‘Rozkosz’ is taken from USTA, which is out now. For more information about Wojciech Kosma and his work as spalarnia, you can follow him on Instagram.

‘Rozkosz’ Credits:

Directors – Ewelina Węgiel, Luisa Mateo Dupleich Rozo, Monika Błaszczak & Wojciech Kosma
Performance – Luisa Mateo Dupleich Rozo, Monika Błaszczak and Wojciech Kosma
Camera – Ewelina Węgiel
Editing – Ewelina Węgiel and Wojciech Kosma
Color Grading – Igor Kawecki

‘Rozkosz’ Lyrics:

too much too much too much too much
of you there’s never too much
too much too much too much too much
never too much of our delight
delight delight covers me right
fine fine i can see fine
sky sky sky sky sky
through the thin veil of delight
why see with eyes if you can see with delight
under the cover of delight delight
i want to be your husband and wife
please please take my hand
our beauty might make me break
take me take me as husband as wife
for you i’m alight yet i’m not at all alight
i am a happy oasis of green
no other place like you and me
why see with eyes if you can see with delight

–

dosyć dosyć dosyć dosyć
nigdy nie mam ciebie ciebie dosyć
dosyć dosyć dosyć dosyć
nigdy nie mam dosyć naszej rozkoszy
rozkosz rozkosz całkiem mnie przykrywa
dobrze dobrze dobrze dobrze widać
niebo niebo niebo niebo niebo
przez rozkoszy cienki welon

po co patrzeć przez oczy jak można patrzeć z rozkoszy

pod rozkoszy rozkoszy zasłoną
chcę zostać twoim mężem i żoną
weź proszę moją moją rękę
z naszego piękna piękna zaraz pęknę
weź mnie weź mnie za męża za żonę
dla ciebie płonę chociaż wcale nie płonę
jestem zieloną zieloną oazą szczęścia
oprócz nas nie ma takiego miejsca

po co patrzeć przez oczy jak można patrzeć z rozkoszy