Name: Paul Wolinski aka Polinski

Nationality: British
Occupation: Songwriter, guitarist, producer
Current release: Polinski's new full-length Telex from MIDI City is out via Data Airlines.
Recommendations: I just finished reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber. It was dead good.
I will also recommend BLACKPINK IN YOUR AREA by BLACKPINK because it’s what I was listening to answering these questions and it is full of hyperpop bangers.

If you enjoyed this interview with Polinski and would like to stay up to date with his work, visit his official website. He is also them on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

Music was a central part of my life from as far back as I can remember. Aged about 7 I had a walkman and a collection of C90 tapes mostly full of New Order and Meat Loaf. Electronic beats and extreme melodrama. There’s quite a clear line you can draw from those cassettes to what I’m doing now.

As to what drew me to music, it is just the best form of expression I have found to communicate with other people. I’m better at making noise than talking, that’s for sure.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

I just see patterns I guess. Maybe that’s in the form of shapes and colours, I can’t really tell.

I think my perspective is a little more utilitarian than yours. I am less paying attention to what it does inside me and more concerned with how I can push music from inside me out into the world to prove to myself and others that I exist.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

You know that image of a carrot tied to the head of a donkey on a pole so the donkey endlessly walks toward the carrot but never reaches it?

I am the donkey, the carrot, and whoever set up this miserable contraption on the poor donkey’s head in the first place.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

Dunno how to answer a question like this very usefully. I’m a white cis guy in his forties from a middle class background. All I know for sure is that my plight as an artist, as hilariously commercially unsuccessful as it has been, has nevertheless been couched in privilege and opportunity that I’ll never be able to untangle and be fully aware of.

I don’t think this invalidates me personally or that I shouldn’t be allowed to release music, but I don’t feel it is super useful to centre myself in the process. I’d prefer to centre the work. Which, certainly, is incredibly personal, but isn’t actually about me.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

I think I just want it to be useful.

If there’s any necessary task for cultural production in this contemporary moment perhaps it is in trying to produce works that demonstrate how things could be done differently. That none of this is inevitable. That another world is possible.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

Nostalgia is the enemy. And broadly speaking, for most of my career I have been incredibly distrustful of tradition and genre and forced myself to keep believing that there was some kind of ‘new music’ out there to be found.

This was very useful in the beginning, but now it seems like it/I was a victim of the idea that ‘progress’ in and of itself is innately a good idea. I’m not so sure about that any more. I think the Luddites had a point.

I still want to avoid nostalgia and lazy escapism in my music, but I am coming to understand that there is a distinction between that on the one hand, and a more deliberate archeology of history on the other. An intentional building of new histories of the present from the wreckage of the past.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

Computers. My strategy is to spend entirely too much time using them.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Oh wow my days very much do not work like this!

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

My creative process is a mysterious, hot mess. I have no idea what I am doing but I am doing it always and as hard as I can and as if I might never have the chance to do it again. And subtlety is not my strong point.

So in that sense I would say that it’s a bit like the performance of "One-Armed Scissor" by At the Drive-in on Later With Jools Holland in 2000.



Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

Don’t think I have a preference either way. None of these things seem in competition with each other!

Listening to music alone is fantastic. Listening to music with others is also fantastic. Same goes for writing probably. I love writing alone and I love writing in my band. Both are struggles in their different ways.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

I’m not sure if I can definitively answer this. My bit is putting it out into the world and the rest is a somewhat collaborative effort.

As far as the role of music in society more broadly, I mean, your guess is a good as mine. All I know for sure is that for my generation we were born with ‘pop music’ (in the widest definition of that term) being perceived as this eternal, central column of popular culture.

But really as a concept its only about 70/80 years old, right? Nothing says it will necessarily last forever.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

In all ways and on all occasions, I think!

Now that you’ve asked me that, I’m not sure I can even imagine the act of listening to or making music that doesn’t fall under the above.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?

At 65LABS, the noise research labs where I work, there are two distinct camps of thought. One team is all like, ‘MUSIC IS SINE WAVES!’ and the other team is always ‘NO, MUSIC IS SOCIAL RELATIONS!’ And sometimes they fight. I think that’s called dialectics or something.

I guess one reason music is good is because it exists at pretty much any intersection of art and technology you can think of. I reckon you could take almost any great, global hit, like a big Taylor Swift banger, and analyse it from whatever perspective you want.

I bet you could get a collection of PhDs on maths, colonialism, geopolitics, neurology, sociology, anthropology, physics, all with the same song as its subject.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

It is materially different. I think most people could learn to make a good cup of coffee faster than they could learn to play Rachmaninov on the piano.

But it’s all about context right? In my band 65daysofstatic, we bore ourselves stupid rehearsing our songs. Mundane is too glamourous a description for an average day in our rehearsal room if we’re preparing for shows.

But in a different context, playing those same songs in the same way is one of the best experiences of my life. As is, in yet another context, receiving a lovingly-prepared cup of coffee at exactly the right moment.

Don’t ask me to choose between music and coffee! Please.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

Sure. I reckon music is sine waves and social relations. On a physiological level there’s a bunch of biological stuff going on. There’s research showing that bodies can perceive and react to things like rhythm and tempo at a much deeper level than any culturally learned meaning. It can elevate heart rate, I think (?) it can produce endorphins? I might have totally made that up.

And then more interestingly for me these days is the social relations. The vibrations in the air are such a tiny part of what gives music meaning. If you like a band, the meaning for you as a fan isn’t just drawn from their songs. It is seeing the band live, it’s the para-social relationships you have/imagine with the band members, putting their poster up on your wall, the feeling of comradeship and shared intention/understanding amongst strangers at a live show. And most pop songs use the same kinds of chord patterns and melodic hooks and formal structures and scales …

All of these things are social constructs and so all the meaning we pull out of music through those means is socially-learned. Pop music is like a socially-constructed shorthand that allows us to absorb this tangled web of social relations all at once without having to parse it and dilute it into conscious thoughts and words.