Dominik Strycharski Core - Alert (2025)

After the album Symfonia Fabryki Ursus released in 2021, the Dominik Strycharski Core band returns with new material. While the previous album was created with a film in mind, Alert is an independent musical entity, planned and composed from start to finish by the leader of the quintet.

Improvisation is only a small part of this music, because I wanted it to be a very conceptual, compact and specific album with a very defined atmosphere. And above all, I wanted all the structures that appear on it to be the result of some deeper thought - this is how Dominik Strycharski outlines the idea of ​​the album.

In terms of genre, Alert eludes all classifications, bringing sounds that combine elements of contemporary music, concrete music, minimalism, jazz and electronics, and in some fragments do not avoid strong, almost rock expression. The experimental and searching nature of the album resonates with its mood: dark, minor, even catastrophic. As Dominik Strycharski says: This album was born from my feeling of insecurity, from the presence of wars around us, from my conversations with people and from the reflection that the entire sense of security in Western civilization that we felt was just a kind of illusion. I have a sense of an approaching catastrophe, but completely different from the one that is talked about in the media. The song "We Are the Blink" is a very human, melancholic look at the fact that even 100 years of human life is something incredibly short compared to the lifespan of any planet or other cosmic being, and at the same time for us, from our perspective, it is an enormous amount of life, drama and effort. Alert is an album written by Dominik Strycharski for a quintet (and in a specific line-up), and all the compositions were created before the rehearsals, during which the musicians of the Core ensemble also added elements of collective improvisations. We left them as completely intuitive parts and based on what each of us wanted to play - emphasizes Strycharski and adds: This music could only have been created in this line-up and for this reason it is unique.