Song You Need: Introducing Tarchominska 6
“My Love Is True” is an eerie dub experiment from the brand new duo of Gods Wisdom and Europu$$y.
The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.
Gods Wisdom has a preternatural capacity for making genuinely weird music. Intentionally or not, everything he touches with his deep, detuned voice or his perpetually spacey production is immediately riddled with leering, uncanny overtones. Case in point: “Walt Disney’s Grave,” a mid-album cut from his recent joint project with fellow western Mass iconoclast Lucy. Here, Gods Wisdom’s growling omnipresence on the track adds a sinister depth to Lucy’s cheerful precision, clarifying his hatred toward the Mickey Mouse creator and notorious Nazi sympathizer.
Anka Diamentova (Europu$$y) is a Polish singer-songwriter-siren and part of the nine-woman noise-pop band Rock Angelz. “I am a nice, simple girl from a hood [called] Jarosław where my wings start[ed] to grow while i was listening [to] Polish hip-hop and smoking a blant with my friends [sic],” she tells The FADER. “In Warsaw I [met the] other Angelz and we started to make music together. God bless my girlies. My escape from reality is music, fashion, and animals.”
Gods Wisdom met Europu$$y and the Angelz crew on his recent first visit to his ancestral homeland and immediately connected with them on levels both musical and personal. “Anka and the Rock Angelz are people I’ll love forever and who made me remember why I love art and how to live life blissfully in the moment with childlike wonder,” he explains.
Today (December 22), they’re introducing their brand new duo, Tarchominska 6, via a FADER premiere of their first song, “My Love Is True” — a liminal triangulation of reggae, dub, and two-tone, like The Specials’ “Ghost Town” stripped down and pulsed in a blender. Co-produced by Gods Wisdom’s frequent collaborator Sen Morimoto, it’s a tender tweaker’s ballad, a slow-motion duet whose titular refrain (“and if my love is true”) slowly denatures along with its simple-yet-sinister instrumental into the far creepier “in death, my love is true.”
The new song comes with a video, shot by Maciek Prochal and mixed by Gabriel Kowalewski, that matches the music’s claustrophobic aura with lo-fi closeups of Gods Wisdom and Europu$$y dancing and vibing together in an apartment, staring into the camera for seconds at a time as if daring the viewer to look away.
Watch the clip above and read the full origin story of Tarchominska 6 in Gods Wisdom’s words below.
In the Spring, I was invited to go on tour in Poland by an online friend from Warsaw, Filip “Trash” Todd, with his noise band Furminator, a collaboration with the well-known visual artist Stach Szumski. It had been expressed to me for a while online that I had fans in Poland. However, I have a complicated relationship with Poland: both my mom’s parents grew up in Tarnow, a small city outside of Krakow and were detained in concentration camps for years. They were of just a couple of their family members who survived, while dozens others were murdered by German Nazi occupants. After the war, they were relocated to refugee camps because their homes had been sold to Polish families, but they eventually were able to come to America. Despite their trauma and Jewish faith, they never assimilated into American culture and kept a strong Polish identity and language. I’ve always felt a need to represent their lost culture.
I felt immediately at home and was warmly welcomed in Poland. Gaining acceptance in a country my ancestors had to flee from was a profound experience particularly with music as the catalyst.
My first show in Warsaw was with the legendary rapper/producer Bella Cwir. Bella is part of a nine-woman pop group called the Rock Angelz. I was extremely impressed by their music, their style, and the aura surrounding them. They make some of the rawest, most futuristic, and most genuine music I’ve ever heard, and the way they function as a unit and support each other’s artistic vision is beautiful. They have very little music out, but their unreleased album is a masterpiece, and I think they have the potential to gain global notoriety. They are also the most inclusive and diverse group I met in Poland, and I loved the time I spent with them. We recorded a lot of music together which will be released in the coming months.
Anka Diamentova, who records as Europu$$y, is their most technically skilled singer and one of the most expressive, soulful vocalists I’ve ever met. After she heard some jazz/reggae instrumentals I had produced a while ago with the Chicago artist Sen Morimoto, we decided to make music altogether different than the computerized sounds of the Rock Angelz. We met at the one-bedroom apartment she was sharing with Bella and their friend Heimei in the Tarchominska 6 (the namesake of our duo) project building in a tough neighborhood in Warsaw. We recorded a few songs quickly during a multi-day bender and were very pleased with the authentic feeling of the results. Heimei, who is bilingual, helped us a lot with writing and translating the lyrics. Music (and stimulants) was a way that we were able to communicate despite not speaking the same language. A few weeks later, we would perform these songs together at the Mazury Club festival alongside Rock Angelz, Evanora Unlimited, and Anatol, another crucial artist in underground Polish music. At Mazury, we recorded two music videos in one surreal day, one of which we are releasing today. We will release our first single “Odkleja,” a more jazz-oriented track, in early January with “My Love Is True” as the b-side. My ancestors might think this was all kuku na muniu, but it was very full circle.