The Peterborough-based doom rap enigma returns with an explicit artistic statement that maintains his signature electronic atmosphere pitting destruction against creation.
There is a memory I cherish involving the first time I met karol orzechowski, the mind behind Peterborough’s industrial soul enigma and poet-laureate of the sonic apocalypse, garbageface. It was the second time I had seen garbageface perform on November 18th, 2022. The first garbageface show I attended was the day before Halloween in 2021, when I was at the tail end of what can charitably be described as a months-long race to the bottom, which would ultimately lead me into sobriety. My friend Sarah invited me to that first show. When I asked her what to expect, she told me only that it would be loud—she was right.
I don’t remember much from that first show, if I’m being honest, aside from being critically affected by the cacophony of noise and rapid-fire lyrics emanating from orzechowski’s signature circular audio table set-up in front of the stage at The John. I’ve since been informed by orzechowski that I’m not an outlier in getting sober following exposure to his music and while he would never take full credit, he’s not willing to dismiss it as mere coincidence, and frankly neither am I.
More than a year later, during the November 2022 show held at The Gordon Best Theatre, I was officially brought into garbageface fandom when orzechowski hugged me for an indeterminate amount of time in the middle of his set. Following the performance, I headed to the merch table to introduce myself more (or less?) formally. When I did, orzechowski replied, “You’re the new editor of Arthur, right?” referring to the publication I had started working for a few months prior. When I replied in the affirmative, he hugged me again and gifted me a bumper sticker that reads “GARBAGEFACE IS MY CO-PILOT,” which still proudly adorns my 2008 Dodge Calibre.
The thing everyone should know about karol orzechowski is he’s a very, very kind man who makes frightening, anxiety-infused, heavy electronic music. It is appropriate then that the title of his most recent album, ENANTIODROMIA, alludes to a psychological phenomenon Carl Jung defined as “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.” ENANTIODROMIA is as explicit an artistic statement as anything orzechowski has produced prior and maintains garbageface’s signature slow, menacing, and percussive electronic atmosphere, which he calls doom rap—a genre which at its core pits destruction against creation and preservation.
In the face of this existential grind, the only answer orzechowski has is to continue to create at a furious pace. ENANTIODROMIA is the nineteenth album he has released since 2005 under the GARBAGEFACE INDUSTRIES/RAP WILL EAT ITSELF umbrella and the third he has recorded at his studio – The Werewolf Sanctuary – on the top floor of Peterborough’s Sadleir House. The album’s opening track, “garbageface’s kool summer tunes mixtape” evokes a frustration with menial social norms and the vapid nature of contemporary relationships, comparing it to the process of creating and consuming music to escape the mundane realities of everyday life.
“I just can’t stand the way we attack sustain release decay we’re drowning in our own piss hissing from our psychic wounds on a regular basis,” he sings. “Every song is a quick fix in search of something permanent maybe I’m wrong for even trying to search for it.”
In some ways, garbageface is a project that preempts the inevitability of a long, slow shift toward end time and its adjacent horrors implied by the album’s title. orzechowski cuts a rather singular figure through the Peterborough music scene, not only for his objectively unique sound but also for his fierce independence and understated, near anarchic, approach to production and arts community organizing; garbageface shows run on time, but it’s anyone’s guess how they will unfold once they begin.
During a show I organized last spring, orzechowski played for nearly two hours while interspersing a story of his time spent as a documentary filmmaker investigating illegal Laotian monkey farms and culminated in him performing accapella, with both him and the audience seated on the floor. The new garbageface album can therefore be read as a self-conscious and nuanced reflection on individual creativity in the face of conformity in the way it continually merges audio and material production images with those of social decay.
“All about the analog signal gut check throw another bud down bad in the heat press pressure going off from the steam valve right into the dream house meat neck these motherfuckers want us to Barbie and Ken our way into oblivion,” orzechowski raps on “ancient oscilloscope.”
Bucking against trends and enacting his creative will in a world he recognizes as unsuited to longevity as ours seems to come naturally to orzechowski, who keeps a fastidious record of his releases and has kept a list of every garbageface show he has ever performed.
“I’m a marginal artist,” orzechowski wrote to me late one night while I was working on this review. “The vast majority of us will come and go like a cloud in the wind. If I don’t catalogue my own work, who will?”
I can’t help but feel there is something deeply righteous in the sober recognition of one’s impermanence while actively working against it, if only for your own sanity. The doom of doom rap seems to lay not in the inevitability of social dissolution but in resigning to it without hope. In all this, garbageface makes music that absorbs disillusionment and curates community.
