Tracks:
1.	Studio AS One vs Orkiestra Swietego Mikolaja - Kolomyjka Jarocinska Remix
2.	Psio Crew - Hajduk
3.	Zakopower - Kiebyś Ty
4.	Vavamuffin - Sekta (RMX by Perch)
5.	Warsaw Village Band - Matthew (Horn Lane Skank)
6.	Lao Che - Hiszpan
7.	Strachy na Lachy - Przedskole
8.	Twinkle Brother's Trebunie-Tutki - Pierso Godzina/Don´t Betray My Love
9.	Masala (Soundsystem) - XXI.Wiek
10.	Mesajah - Mocsłowa
11.	Warsaw Village Band - Joint Venture Inna Village (Activator remix)
12.	Meritum - Miszcz
13.	Kosmosfski - Taniec weselny
14.	Żywiołak - Świdryga i Midryga
15.	Habakuk - Mury
16.	Kayah - Nieznajoma (Activator Remix)

Poland was the only country behind the Iron Curtain with an active reggae scene in the early Eighties. Later dub and electronica were added. At the same time there is a deeply-rooted folklore in Poland, which is important as identification and for the culture to survive. The most interesting it gets, when folk meets reggae/dub/electronica. Then you get a new exciting musical genre which we call Polska Rootz. The deep folk roots of the Polish culture get connected with skills & sounds of the here and now. Polska Rootz compiles sounds with context which work on the dance floor, but also reveals many exciting details during concentrated listening.

Roots & Culture – these value terms, often used in a reggae or at least afro-centric context, also have a high value in Poland. Taking into consideration the background of their painful history in the last centuries this idea stands for a return to cultural roots as a sign of resistance against the oppressors and occupiers and the attempt to survive by means of cultural resistance.

Polska Rootz aims to give a first overview of this variety of dealing with traditional music culture, which you find in Poland these days, where musicians actively absorb these traditions and make them their own. The sounds of Now are melting with the various Polish sound forms giving them a contemporary garment and making the roots accessible for younger generations. At the same time you can hear mixtures with other world music influences; thus creating new bastard hybrids and additions to the globalized sound cosmos.

It goes without question that there is a history of musical crossover in Poland: the development of individual styles of Polish tango or Polish jazz or fusion jazz in the Seventies, where they already experimented with folk or world music which wasn’t even called this back then. Check out Zbigniew Namyslowski´s album Kujaviak goes Funky or bands like Ossian or Atman.

The influences on Polska Rootz go back to the end of the Seventies, when reggae and dub made their first impact on stylistically open Polish punk bands like Kryzys and Brygada Kryzys and this leading to the development of an original Polish reggae scene – the only one behind the Iron Curtain. Another example of a first fusion of folk songs from the Polish mountain regions and post punk is the band De Press set up by the musician Andrzej Dziubek Nebb in Norway where he fled in a canoe over the Baltic Sea.

Out of this situation which was open to experiments and influences this variety which you can find on Polska Rootz developed over the 80s and 90s. Musical playfulness often went hand in hand with social and political consciousness in this Polski punky reggae tradition.

The band Masala (Soundsystem), which usually mixes Asian oriental sounds into their modern tracks, adopts on Polska Rootz a song by politic punk band Dezerter from the 80s and creates a drum’n’bass track with vocal lines by the singers of Warsaw Village Band which is internationally renown for their revival of Slavic music traditions. The band Habakuk performs here the famous song Mury by Jacek Kaczmarski, a sort of protest hymn against the system in the 80s, as a groovy reggae track. Live they also like to mix this with Get up, stand up, the milestone by Peter Tosh and Bob Marley, which was already covered by the punk band Deadlock from Gdansk in 1980 in order to support the Solidarnosc movement which formed around that time at the Gdansk dockyard.

Polska Rootz stands for mixing up, impuristic development, beat-driven bastardification and sound-focused hybridization but with solid knowledge and great respect for the origin of the sound sources. Reggae and dub are getting mixed up with Tatra folk when the Goralic musician’s family Trebunie Tutki meet the Jamaicans Twinkle Brothers with the result getting an extra shine over by On-U-Sound mastermind Adrian Sheerwood. Meritum gives us klezmer against all odds which sounds like improvised street music with skilful scratching. And the singing of pop icon Kayah gets a whole new impact when it is embedded in relaxed ambient dub with an Arabic flavour. There are loads of such original mixtures to be discovered on Polska Rootz. On this compilation you get to hear a vivid scene which does not need to hide from international competition. The Poles not only know the current beats and master good song writing, but also connect to their own historical material and to adopted culture and thus transfer this into the 21st century. Polska Rootz compiles sounds with context which work on the dance floor, but also reveals many exciting details during concentrated listening.
 
Compiled by Alexander Pehlemann, ZONIC, www.zonic-online.de & Eastblok Music