Two pieces, one per side, roughly twenty minutes each — and one of them has no words at all. The most severe record SBB made.

The short version

Released by Polskie Nagrania Muza in April 1977 and recorded in Warsaw the previous month, this album consists of exactly two tracks, one filling each side. The title piece carries a lyric credit to Julian Matej; the second, ‘Przed premierą’, is credited for music only and is instrumental. Skrzek’s credits here are the widest of the trio period, taking in synthesizer, clavinet, Mellotron, electric piano and grand piano alongside his vocals. The pressing run is documented at fifty thousand copies.

Two pieces, and one of them wordless

The structure is the statement. Where the previous album had put words on every track, this one splits cleanly: a sung side and an instrumental side, each of roughly twenty minutes. That is a genuinely uncompromising piece of sequencing for a band selling fifty thousand copies at home, and it says something about the latitude SBB had earned. It is also the last of the trio’s Polish albums before the band began recording for foreign markets, which gives it the character of a summing-up whether or not it was intended as one.

The sound

This is two-sided, keyboard-massed fusion prog. The Mellotron gives the record a thickness the earlier albums did not have, and Skrzek layers keyboards to a degree that occasionally disguises the fact that only three people are playing. Anthimos is credited with percussion as well as guitar here, which widens the trio’s palette further. The instrumental second side is the more austere of the two and the more admired among listeners who value the band’s improvisational side; the sung first side is where the melodic writing lives.

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The songs

The title track fills the first side at over nineteen minutes and is the album’s vocal piece, with words by Julian Matej. ‘Przed premierą’ fills the second at nearly twenty and is instrumental, carrying no lyric credit on any pressing. There is no third option: this album is two pieces, and the choice a listener makes is which side to put on rather than which track. That is unusual even by the standards of 1977.

Reception and legacy

The documented facts are unusually specific for a Polish record of the period: a pressing run of fifty thousand copies at a retail price of eighty złoty, with at least two sleeve-print variants, which indicates the run was produced in more than one batch. Contemporary critical writing is not accessible through the sources available. What is clear is that this album closes the trio’s domestic period at full strength, and that it has been remastered and reissued on CD in the decades since.

The verdict

This is the SBB album for the committed. Two twenty-minute pieces with no concessions to sequencing, one sung and one not, is an unusual proposition even within progressive rock, and it works because the band had spent six years learning how to sustain that kind of duration. Newcomers should go to the debut or to ‘Pamięć’ first. Anyone who already knows those and wants the trio at its most single-minded will find this the most impressive thing they recorded, and the instrumental second side one of the best long-form performances in the eastern European catalogue. It is a record that makes no attempt to meet anyone halfway, and is better for it.

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