Have you ever listened to music so captivating, so crazy and so different from anything else that you wondered ‘For God’s sake, what do these people have inside them to make that music?’ Sometimes, I even want to sneak into their minds to understand the source of that beauty…

This is just the start of a report written by Araceli Tzigane and that has been recently published in Culture.pl, the outstanding communicative project by the Instytut Adama Mickiewicza. It includes a brief bio of Andrzej Bieńkowski and his partner Malgorzata, as well as an interview, translated from Polish to English by Ewa Gomółka.

Andrzej’s life is one of those that make a change in the world. Andrzej, a painter and a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, was widely disdained at the time by his colleagues because of his obsession with rural musicians from around Radom: he would constantly play their music at his house and they were practically the only motif in Andrzej’s paintings over the last few years. He had opted out of a promising career as a painter, even though he was demanded and valued in Switzerland and Italy, so that he did not to have to leave his rural Poland. For years, he recorded without respite those old forsaken musicians from the Radom region, one of the poorest and most isolated in Poland.

Read all the thrilling report here: https://culture.pl/en/article/music-lost-refound-an-interview-with-andrzej-bienkowski You’ll understand how this demanding obsession developed to be one of the most relevant shapers of the current escene of folk music in Poland.