Five years ago, Kora made a very bold decision: she parted ways with her composer, ex-husband and Maanam bandleader Marek Jackowski. Maanam began the era of new rock in the 1980s and created the soundtrack for the solidarity revolution. For 30 years, Kora and Maanam spoke as they once used to be: Party and Lenin.
And Kora left this great comfortable layout. It was a jump into deep water. For five years, Kora searched for musicians, producers, experimented, and sometimes erred. For a year now, the line-up of musicians has stabilized. There was also a great composer and guitarist: Mateusz Waszka Waszkiewicz . He is the author of almost all the tracks on PING PONG. Krzysztof Amik Skrzyński - solo guitarist Kora is an artist whose individual energetic chord style of playing this instrument is a synthesis of Hendrix, Page and above all Jack White. During concerts, fans ask him to keep his solos last as long as possible. If Waszka and Amik are the new fry on the Polish rock scene, then Marcin Ciempiel and Artur Hajdasz are veterans of the Polish new wave. The tempiel that Kora brought from California had already played in the Closed Squad, Maanam, Pharmacy, and Wolves. Hajdalon, the son of the drummer of legendary Breakouts, has beaten drums in Pudels, Homo Twist, Pharmacy and Made In Poland.
And finally, the fifth instrument - the Bark. On this record, like no previous record, Bark has been perfected in expressing the complex emotions of an adult, self-aware and reflective leaning over the condition of the world, a woman. Kora's voice is both fresh and mature. Girlish and deep.
Most of the lyrics on the album, as happened with a dozen or so Maanam albums, were written by Kora. One exception is the title Ping Pong.
This is the text that Kora extracted from the poem of the Przemyśl poet Józef Kurylak The Beat of My Heart. Ping Pong is a mysterious song, sung with punk bravado, about the eternal waltz of good and evil: the devil we burden with our guilt and the angel to whom we do not want to attribute our merits. In the text, like deus ex machina, the question arises: from where this child comes, from where. We know where, but we leave listeners room to guess. Look Straight Into The Eyes Of The Moment, this is a song built by Kora from Overhead Sentences by painter and poet Richard Grzeb with a very funny lyrics. The silence zone is already the text of Kora itself. Poetic manifesto and deep ecology. A subjective vision of nature tired of the destructive presence of man in her sphere. I'll Never Close the Door to You, One Word Changes Everything, Like Drug and Radio Wave are the songs for which Kora is best known: rock erotica, confessions of love mature, full of understanding and warmth woman towards the other: partner, husband, lover. Fortunately, the recipe is a beautiful ballad that reminisces of bark's stay in Brazil, Bahia, where every evening Bark watched horses swim in a river falling into the hot Ocean for coolness.
The Viper - A mocking song about the daily rituals of an urban businessman taking part in the daily rats race, or rather the snakes.
Finally, I'm not white and I'm not black- an auto theme song, Kora settling accounts with her own ambiguous, fluid and mercury-changing identity.
Ping Pong is an album very rich in sound: a guitar duel between Amika and Vaszka, followed by a masterful rhythm section.
The bark is in its best shape in life. This plate can stand boldly on the shelf next to the Night Patrol and the Rose. The more so because it was produced in his studio by master Rafał Paczkowski himself. Photos of this album were taken by Andrzej Tyszko, collage - Kamil Sipowicz and everything was put together graphically by Mateusz Jackowski.