2K88 Shame

Following acclaimed albums by Piotr Kurek, bela, and Antonina Nowacka and Sofie Birch, Unsound will release the album Shame by 2k88 on 28th June, on vinyl, as well as in digital format and on streaming.

On Shame, producer 2k88 (Przemysław Jankowiak, fka 1988) invokes the era and spirit of PL Sound, a local genre inspired by British soundsystem music but infused with the social, urban, and sonic themes that developed during Poland’s post-communist transformation. Shame is a progressive, bass-fueled transmission built from scraps of hip-hop’s past; it’s a cinematic vision of Y2K Polish rap that’s in constant flux, where every detail is just as important as the whole structure.

Sampling the Polish canon of beats from the low-rent districts of the nineties, 2k88 plunders tracks already based on samples and channels the experiences of the generations that grew up with those sounds, struggling and celebrating with them. And just as he did with his previous projects Etamski and 1988, 2k88 draws out, processes, and ages his elements in an echo chamber, asking questions and formulating answers.

Jankowiak works on the fringes of genre: traces of ambient, dub, rap and jungle flicker into low-lit urban rhythms, chunky nightclub basslines and paranoid production touches. This is in keeping with his new, futuristic handle, 2k88. Not for a second does he succumb to today’s omnipresent nostalgia, instead putting reconstruction before deconstruction — he finds whole worlds in his scraps, and in the long-gone turn-of-the-millennium period, whose liminal qualities feel like a precursor to the unease of the present moment.