Riverside

Biography Riverside is a way of expressing reflections, dreams and fantasies through music. It is an idea for exposing emotions, for an escape from the grey or unnaturally overcoloured reality. It is a music inspired by a time, a place, a thought and a word, a figment of their own and other people's imagination. It is joy and sadness, a whisper and a scream. Before they met at the same time and place, Piotr Grudzi?ski (Grudzie?) was experimenting as a lead guitarist in a metal band "Unnamed", Mariusz Duda was creating progressive sounds as a vocalist, bass and keyboard player in a band "Xanadu" from W?gorzewo, Piotr Kozieradzki (Mittloff) was a drummer in death metal "Hate" and "Domain", and Jacek Melnicki, a sound engineer in his own recording studio, played keyboards as a guest musician on the albums of the artists he promoted. Piotr Grudzi?ski: The idea of creating a band emerged rather accidentally. I was travelling with Mittloff in his car, Mit put a tape on and quite unexpectedly I heard Marillion. It turned out that in spite of playing in a death metal band, he was a great fan of progressive rock, and as I was also very keen on that kind of music, we thought that maybe one day we could play some progressive sounds together. After a year we started to talk about this idea more and more often. Jacek Melnicki's studio proved to be a good place to start up a musical project on the side, the one Grudzie? and Mittloff had been talking about, without any commitments. Jacek agreed to play the keyboards and they only needed a bass player. Mariusz Duda: One day I gave Jacek a CD with some recordings of my previous band and asked him to "de-hiss" it. He kept it for about a year and never "de-hissed" the material. But he must have listened to it, because after a year he asked me to show up at a rehearsal of a new band who were to play similar music. I thought, "What the heck, someone here wants to play progressive rock? Why not?" :-) They first met at a rehearsal in the autumn of 2001. It clicked. As all of the musicians had played for at least a few years before, the pieces started to grow pretty quickly. But what was most important, they were not just simple "verse, chorus, verse" compositions. Instrumental at the very beginning, their music began to evolve towards songs, when one day Mariusz experimented with singing in some strange language. Much to his surprise, his friends approved of it and thus the band gained a vocalist. In the meantime, someone suggested the name Riverside. It stayed. The band started more regular rehearsals. Then came the first positive feedback from the listeners and the first recordings. What was to be only a no-commitment project, became the priority for the members of Riverside and lessened their interest in their mother bands. In October 2002 Riverside presented their music at two concerts in Otwock and "Przestrze? Graffenberga" in Warsaw. The reaction of the majority of the listeners was very enthusiastic, which made the band think seriously about publishing their material. They decided on working in Jacek's studio. Mariusz Duda: On the one hand, we had financial comfort. We didn't pay for the rehearsal room, we didn't pay for the recording studio. But on the other, we knew that we were dependent on Jacek's studio plans, which was obvious as the studio had to make money somehow. As a result, we sometimes met for only two hours a week. Fortunately, we had a good atmosphere in the band and could do anything we wanted within the studio's possibilities. In March 2003, the band finished working on the majority of the material for the first studio album. They decided to release a demo first, and they financed it themselves. Piotr Grudzi?ski: The release of the demo was, in my opinion, an essential step on the way towards showing our music to the public and creating an interest in Riverside. We made 300 copies, some of which were sent to radio stations and phonographic companies here in Poland and abroad, and 200 of them were given out as a bonus to the ticket for the concert in "Kopalnia" club. That was a perfect move. We "got rid" of the CDs in a couple of days, and some copied CD-Rs soon began to circulate. We've built up among the listeners the appetite for a full studio album. The promo concert in the Warsaw club "Kopalnia" in March 2003, at which the demo containing a large part of the studio material was added to the ticket, attracted full house and went beyond the group's expectations. Piotr Kozieradzki: Personally, I was a little anxious if the audience comes up to our expectations. It proved to be the other way round. So many people turned up that we ran out of tickets, CDs, cloakroom numbers and everything in the bar. We have very fond memories from that concert. So far, it has been our best gig. The interest of the foreign labels in the recorded material, the warm words in the radio programmes during which Riverside was presented, the favourable press reviews and the letters from the listeners - all that left the band no choice but to finish the recording of the album. Unfortunately, the recording process was resumed only at the beginning of June as the musicians found it hard to find the time convenient for all of them to work together. The slow pace of work was also the result of short, two- or three-hour meetings a week. In August, all the recorded pieces were ready for mixing and the title of the first album was set. Mariusz Duda: The album will be called "Out Of Myself." It will contain the material from the demo, but there will also be some new, more melodic pieces. And there will be one more instrumental "Reality Dream." The lyrics seem to be coherent. It will be a story about a man who is trying to find himself again in a society after a nervous breakdown, he's "entering the same river" and believes that this time everything's going to be alright. But when he fails again, he doesn't give up. The first track on the album is a "wink" to the listener. We know that we're not discovering new lands in our playing. But we do hope that we're doing it in our own way and sooner or later we will work out our own distinctive style and our music will not easily fall into any categories, it will not be easily labelled. In the last song on the album, "OK," there are the words "There is sadness in my mind - OK." I think it's a good summary of the album. It's a kind of coming to terms with things as they are. You're sad for the most of the day, you're locked up inside yourself, you're wearing black clothes or whatever else - so what? You are what you are and that's OK. For us, what we're playing is OK and I hope that the story will not end with "Out Of Myself"? If we release it someday, that is? :-)

Photos