Introducing OLO
OLO
From Warsaw to The World: Aleksander Tomaszkiewicz
If we imagine music as a vast terrain, then at minimum the musician must navigate its landscape, trace routes across established ground. At best, however, the musician redraws the map entirely. The established norms of music define this aesthetic geography as tradition, its characteristic questions, internal divisions, and historical strata. Through generations of cumulative effort, this cartography has grown comprehensive enough to accommodate nearly any creative gesture one might envision. Yet the musician, even today, truly begins only when that system no longer suffices—when the plot of these boundaries becomes visible and demands redefinition.
Aleksander Tomaszkiewicz's trajectory traces this arc from learning the map to leaving it behind. A child prodigy cellist in Warsaw, who performed with major Polish orchestras and accumulated numerous national and international awards, including Young Musician of the Year in 2012 (Polish National Competition), he went on to study musical performance at Musik-Akademie Basel in Switzerland before deliberately broadening his horizons to work with more hybrid sonic forms, exploring sound as essential material.
His fascination with sound's internal logic, its structural grammar, dynamics, and expression has a particular character. For the classically trained musician, by training and necessity, the Apollonian claim on form is foundational. There's simply no alternative. Tomaszkiewicz, building upon his background in classical performance, brings a precision that operates not at the margins but at the very core of his expressive instinct — a precision he now deploys within modern genres like pop, R&B, and soul. As a producer, immersed in sound's material flow, he moves beyond ingrained auditory expectations to recover the textural imperfections, the micro-irregularities of human expression that contemporary production technology systematically erases.
He has enacted these principles in the studio, in artistic collaboration, and in film scoring. His soundtrack for Blindman's Buff (2019), a film that won first prize at the Hollywood Short Film Festival, achieves a particular formal tension: its structures remain deliberately, ostentatiously simple, yet this simplicity serves as a container for a semantic density. Silence acquires weight; individual sounds condense into statements; each statement, in turn, undergoes refinement to the point of estrangement from itself.
Today, Tomaszkiewicz works primarily as a producer and sound designer, focusing on vocalists—recording, producing, and mentoring singers through the formation of their artistic identity. His practices at the borders, at the crossroads of genres, traditions, and arts, suggest something of the era's aesthetic nature: gesamtkunstwerk in its current form. To some extent, it's a kind of glass bead game: we take the elements of existing rules and genres and let them shift and collide. Out of this rearrangement, new meanings begin to form — possibilities that could not exist within a single tradition's vocabulary.
Written by Piera Lolandes
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