Raphael Rogiński was supposed to be a sculptor, but his guitar got in the way. He practiced more than he slept; blood “was pouring” from his fingers, he told the Polish publication Polityka in 2015. He tore at his instrument “like wild meat, shamelessly and greedily.” These days, there’s not a trace of aggression in the Polish guitarist’s music. His playing is considered, graceful, meditative. Every effortless run is followed by a contemplative pause; his rubato sensibility suggests someone treading on uneven ground, deliberating over their next footstep. If you were him, you might pause too, because there is a numinous power in his instrumental songs—enchanted, uncanny, swarming with ghosts. His music is a dark forest inhabited by shadows and sprites and unseen forces. His playing feels like a spell designed to keep a forager safe while honoring the wild unknown.
Before he ever picked up the guitar, a pre-teen Rogiński, who grew up on the wooded outskirts of Warsaw, played an Uzbek kemenche, a three-stringed lyre, given to him by his grandmother. He played it without the bow, pulling and plucking as though it were a banjo. You can detect traces of that initiation in his playing still; he often sounds like he is manipulating some other, stranger instrument than his Gibson ES-335. Maybe his grandmother’s kemenche unlocked something in him. She was Tatar, a Turkic ethnic group with roots around Lake Baikal that is today found across Central Asia and Eastern Europe, all the way to the Black Sea. Rogiński once recalled of his grandmother: “As we ate raw meat, I timidly looked into her eyes, and saw the Scythian steppes and beyond. It was my first experience of meditation.”
Much of Rogiński’s music has concerned itself with channeling spirits from the past. His group Shofar—named after the ritual horn blown on Rosh Hashanah, and associated with the resurrection of the dead—is dedicated to the excavation of traditional Jewish music, particularly the Hasidic mystical songs called nigunim. His finest album until now, Raphael Rogiński Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes. African Mystic Music, distilled its inspirations into an ethereal and otherworldly form, a kind of anti-gravity blues. His new album Talàn picks up the spare, beguiling style of that recording and extends it. The record is dedicated to the Black Sea; many of its songs were written in Odesa, a Ukrainian port city defined by its historical mixture of cultures, and the gateway from Asia to Europe for some of Rogiński’s own ancestors. Across Talàn, that history of exchange plays out in eerie runs, folk melodies that feel like ancient wisdom, textures of dusty pages and worn stone.