The Wyraj [‘vi-ray] project harks back to old Slavic mythological motifs describing the sacred effects of entheogens – psychoactive substances, which are understood as a source of a constitutive religious experience. This Slavic thinking about holiness as unity with nature being an interface of the self was confronted with a set of gestures and formulas for the celebration of holiness developed on the basis of Christianity (along with a whole set of infra-quotations from Medieval and early Baroque church music). Christianity, through the remains of the Slavic culture’s spirituality poking out of it, has digested itself like a serpent.
Polish Christian culture has always been a hybrid, resonating with never rounded, mutilating edges of bodily experience of the sacrum, magical practices, and semantic networks beyond the truths of Scripture.
On the album we focus on portraying the spiritual exhaustion of the present day, where the group becomes a participant in a new speculative movement, breaking out of a strongly institutionalized distribution of metaphysical knowledge and saturated with the symbolism of rituals.
Psychonauts – new believers – seek this zone from before the transformation, a body of authentic experiences to which they sigh in unbearable longing.
Incorporation of the oldest sources of Polish national identity can occur in many different ways, not only those appropriated by nationalistic narratives.
Slavic psychedelics hold a strong and still relevant potential for practical spirituality, which we cultivate through transgressive and escapist, modern technologies, in often compulsive acts devoid of a philosophical framework.
The songs in Wyraj attempt to capture this audio-vision of the bizarre mystery of our times on the brink of disaster, among the growing fears and anxieties of the still uncatalyzed excess and emptiness of the new system of values, not updated to our times and situation.
So we move to romantically stale marshes, dance and sing on wet stubble, in the vapour of smog, stimulated by the current-fed loudspeakers and the beating of the drums accompanied by the intoxicating noise of the waste of the culture of excess.
