Praecox: Inside Jerzy Przeździecki’s Hardware Evolution

Praecox True Techno 110 Mix: Jerzy Przeździecki Surveys Three Decades of Industrial Electronics and Buchla Modular Synthesis

Jerzy Przeździecki, the Warsaw-based experimental techno producer known across decades as Praecox, Epi Centrum and under his own name, explores more than 30 years of electronic music evolution in his True Techno 110 mix for True Underground, released in August 2026. The recording functions as a comprehensive career retrospective, uniting tracks produced under his core artistic monikers and mapping a path from 1990s Polish underground radicalism to contemporary hardware-driven experimentation.

In the fluorescent haze of 1990s Warsaw, where heroin shadows stretched across the National Stadium market and Eastern European mafia operated as ambient noise, a different kind of eruption was underway. Strobe-lit clubs, forest raves and the Academy of Fine Arts formed a cultural reactor. Cassette decks blared in studios while students organised parties that slipped the leash of university authorities. Out of this pressure cooker emerged Jerzy Przeździecki — known across scenes and decades as Praecox, Epi Centrum and under his given name — a producer whose work has always resisted easy categorisation.

His contribution to True Underground’s True Techno series captures that resistance in motion. True Techno 110 is less a conventional DJ mix than a cartographic journey through more than thirty years of sonic evolution.

I have to admit I spent quite a bit of time thinking about its concept, especially in the context of my work as a producer. In the end, I decided to create a musical journey through my three artistic identities, different periods of my career, and the styles that have shaped my sound over the years. In the mix you’ll hear tracks by Epi Centrum, Praecox, and Jurek Przeździecki. I hope this journey through more than 30 years of my musical evolution will be enjoyable both for you and for the listeners, while also giving them a chance to discover the different dimensions of my work.

Warsaw in the 1990s was a cultural volcano carrying the residue of decades under communism. Illegal raves pulsed in the forests around the city, vinyl stores fed hungry ears, and the Academy of Fine Arts functioned as a permanent generator of radical artistic ideas. Music poured from cassette decks in every studio. This was the environment in which Przeździecki’s musical identity crystallised. He had grown up on punk and hardcore. Those records gradually yielded to Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Nitzer Ebb and Cabaret Voltaire. Their impact was enormous. For the first time he felt a real need to create something of his own — to find his own voice as an artist and electronic music producer. With little more than an Atari computer and a handful of machines he began making his first tracks.

The Academy was also home to the legendary Blue Velvet club, hidden in a labyrinth of basement rooms where he would disappear for days. Parties happened not only on weekends but throughout the week, bringing together different genres, scenes and communities. It was there that he met Tromesa, the legendary duo who had already built a strong reputation on the international psy-trance scene. Their collaboration became Bigwigs and marked the beginning of a psychedelic journey that took them around the world for years. Looking back, none of it feels accidental. Every stage — from punk through industrial music and psy-trance to the experimental techno he makes today — became another layer of the same story. He never wanted to belong to a single scene or genre. He has always been searching for his own language.

The reason was very simple. Through Praecox, I had become strongly associated with psy-trance and psy-techno. That project was deeply rooted in the fluorescent aesthetics and culture of the psychedelic scene, which made it difficult for people to approach my newer music on its own terms. The music I was creating had very little to do with psy-trance anymore. So I decided to release my minimal techno work under my own name, Jerzy Przeździecki, while reserving Epi Centrum for the darker, heavier, and more experimental material. It was a way of bringing clarity to my artistic portfolio rather than separating my work into rigid genres. For me, these projects have always been different facets of the same artistic identity, not boxes defined by stylistic boundaries.

Industrial music sits at the foundation of that identity, though not as a literal stylistic template. Its uncompromising attitude, rawness and willingness to challenge the listener shaped the way he approached making music. Early Praecox tracks such as Mechanikum and Minigram sampled the sounds and rhythmic structures of machines, fragments of horror and science-fiction films, and even prepared violins. One technique that has always been central is acoustic feedback. Almost anything can be driven into feedback — a reverb, a delay, an analogue filter, a distortion unit — by routing the output back into the input in a controlled way, allowing the system to evolve into organised chaos. Over the years he has become so comfortable with this process that one collaborative project is built entirely around generating and shaping feedback. What he inherited from industrial was its philosophy — its energy, its creative doctrine, and its belief that sound itself can become an act of experimentation and confrontation.

As the 1990s underground transitioned into the early 2000s, Warsaw’s evolving club infrastructure altered his perspective on functional dancefloor arrangements. Hearing his own tracks played by a DJ friend on a proper sound system, alongside records by artists he admired, was both incredibly rewarding and a brutally honest reality check. Every club night became part of his education. He returned home, sat down in front of his machines, and kept refining the sound, learning from every mistake and pushing each new production a little further.

Early distribution arrived via Damon Wild’s Synewave and Jacek Sienkiewicz’s Recognition. Both men had spent time living in Warsaw, so their paths were almost inevitable. In 2009 he released his first EP, Loop Pool, on Recognition. Some time later Damon Wild got in touch after hearing the record. That relationship and collaboration continue to this day. Recognition by labels known for highly selective A&R gave him tremendous confidence — confirmation that his own artistic language had value and motivation to keep pushing forward.

Praecox True Techno 110 Mix and Multi-Identity Studio Practice

When managing multiple active projects simultaneously in the mid-2000s, no elaborate technical firewall was required. Walking into the studio felt like stepping into a travel agency. He would decide the destination — Epi Centrum or Praecox — and switch into a particular mindset, listening differently and searching for specific textures, rhythms and emotions. More often than not the decision grew out of improvisation. A sound, a sequence or an unexpected accident would start to resonate and suddenly feel as though it belonged to one world rather than another. He has always trusted that process, letting emotion lead because the most interesting music usually appears when control is loosened.

Live performance philosophy has evolved significantly. Bigwigs-era shows in Japan, Australia and South Africa used a fairly typical setup for the time: a 24-channel mixing desk at the centre, samplers, synthesizers and a PC connected via MIDI. About fifteen years ago his sets were almost entirely improvised, with only fragments of composed material appearing. Audiences often told him they wanted to hear at least some of the music they already knew from the records. Today he works with two different setups. The first combines a small modular system with an Octatrack: the modular provides the unpredictable, improvisational element while the Octatrack contains loops and fragments from his own productions that are constantly rearranged and rebuilt in real time. The second is a hybrid of Octatrack and Digitakt II, performing released tracks as stems while simultaneously creating new sequences, rhythms and arrangements live. Both approaches deliver a balance between composition and spontaneity. A live performance should never become a playback of the record.

Studio architecture during his tenure with Trapez and Affin centred on Buchla. Despite the incredible growth of the Eurorack world he still believes Buchla has something truly unique in both sound and workflow. What fascinates him is that creating something simple and conventionally tonal is often much more difficult than creating something complex, abstract and unpredictable. He embraces that paradox and lets the instrument pull him toward ideas he would never have arrived at intentionally. Epi Centrum releases for Trapez were heavily influenced by Buchla’s naturally dissonant character, particularly through the extraordinary filtering possibilities of the Triple Morphing Filter. Tracks such as Exponential Density and Crepuscular carry that inherent tension and instability. By contrast, the primary sound source for Affin releases was the Buchla Music Easel — a far more approachable and “civilized” instrument that retains the distinctive Buchla character while offering stronger musical focus.

When tracks reached Sven Väth’s Cocoon Recordings the material was never a typical dancefloor weapon. By Epoxy in Burnout is restless, syncopated and rhythmically fractured — the kind of track that waits patiently for exactly the right moment in a DJ set. Qwerty Poema stands in complete contrast: more romantic, reflecting a period of deep fascination with classical harmony and melodic composition. Both tracks had been tested many times in clubs and at festivals. Looking back, the sense of space and emotional strength in Qwerty Poema remains essential to his music today.

Nina Kraviz’s трип imprint rediscovered Praecox not only for a new audience but for Przeździecki himself. He had considered the project a closed chapter; трип gave it a new beginning. The material captures hypnosis, unpredictability, long evolving phrases and motifs that appear only to disappear before they fully resolve. Basslines are approached differently than in other projects: multilayered, often built from two or even three independent layers providing weight, movement and harmonic character or texture. Careful attention to phase relationships and frequency distribution creates a depth and physicality on large club systems that a single bassline cannot achieve.

Jerzy Przeździecki Studio Workflow, Live Collaboration and Long-Term Vision

Collaboration with classical and avant-garde composer and pianist Andrzej Karalow operates on deep real-time synergy. Despite completely different musical backgrounds they share a need for improvisation. Albums Wir and Pedestal’s Complement grew out of many hours of free improvisation. Rather than composing individual pieces in a traditional way they recorded long sessions and later sculpted them into finished works through editing, thinking in terms of musical blocks and evolving structures. On stage every concert is entirely improvised. Within the project Przeździecki’s role is often to create tension through contrast: the fragile, expressive character of Karalow’s piano set alongside the distorted, unstable voice of the Buchla Music Easel. Those two worlds challenge and complement each other.

Technical mastery can lead to predictable habits; he avoids routine by design. One of the most effective methods is working on several ideas simultaneously. Whenever he reaches a dead end he simply puts that piece aside and starts something else. He never decides in advance what the starting point of a composition should be — a drum pattern, a synthesizer sequence, or hours of free improvisation on the Buchla. Even a small change in the order of decisions can transform the character of a piece. Self-imposed limitations force imagination to work harder. His current studio experiment revolves around a single instrument — the Roland SH-101 — exploring just how much musical depth can emerge from that one voice alone.

Sound design and mixing begin with the listening environment. A well-treated room and accurate monitoring are far more important than any particular piece of gear. Conceptually his approach is closer to hi-fi than to conventional club music. Dancefloor functionality is important but never the starting point; priority is uncompromising sound quality. When mixing he imagines a conversation in which every element has its own place and right to speak. Attention to the tiniest textures, subtle movements and almost imperceptible changes is a form of respect for the listener. Those micro-details reward repeated listening.

Across performances from South America to Europe and Asia the live setup must be absolutely bulletproof, especially at large outdoor festivals. Soundcheck allows subtle adjustments to balance, dynamics and overall response according to the acoustics of the venue and the characteristics of the PA, but the foundation never changes: equipment has to be as reliable, predictable and robust as possible so that technology disappears into the background.

What has never changed across more than two decades is the desire to surprise himself and the childlike curiosity of wondering what will happen if he touches a particular button. That curiosity remains at the heart of everything. His obsession with originality has never disappeared. He trusts intuition more than strategy and lets inspiration guide the process. The studio is closer to a playground or sanctuary than a workplace. Tools and techniques have changed; the goal has remained exactly the same: stay true to himself and make music that brings genuine happiness.

The album Large Kimono, issued under the Praecox moniker via Ellen Allien’s BPitch Control, was conceived as an uninhibited expression of artistic emotion and a provocation aimed at contemporary technology and algorithmic predictability.

In my creative process, I deliberately avoid tools that make artistic decisions for me. Artificial intelligence can be incredibly useful, and I value it as a technology, but in the studio I remain the creator and the final arbiter of every decision. Despite AI’s extraordinary rate of development, I believe that emotional judgment is still uniquely human. The ability to shape, recognize, and communicate emotion is what gives art its meaning—and what continues to define our value as creators. From the very beginning, Large Kimono was conceived as an uninhibited expression of artistic emotion. In many ways, it’s also a provocation aimed at contemporary technology—a question addressed to the mythical “system”: Can you do this? This album is built from everything that has shaped my artistic sensitivity over decades: intuition, lived experience, accidents, contradictions, and emotions accumulated over a lifetime. These are things that no language model or generative system truly possesses. The tension between accident and order, unpredictability and intention, softness and rawness—this is where my music lives. That’s the system I build. Not an algorithm, but a human one.

The album was finished before any contact with Ellen. Ten completed tracks simply needed the right home. A short, direct Instagram message led to a reply within fifteen minutes and, eventually, the release on BPitch Control. Ellen’s involvement was minimal and centred on selecting the four strongest tracks for the vinyl edition — interestingly the same four to which Przeździecki felt most emotionally connected.

Creating genuine art, he notes, has to hurt — not through suffering for its own sake, but through the courage to constantly question decisions and let go of ideas that simply are not good enough. The hardest part of making Large Kimono was resisting the temptation to take shortcuts and maintaining the discipline to reject what is merely average until something truly meaningful emerges.

Looking ahead to autumn 2026, a full-length album for the Polish imprint IDO Records functions as a retrospective of work under his own name, Jerzy Przeździecki. Some of the tracks are three to five years old but have all been revisited, remixed and remastered. The tempo is generally slower, hovering around 134 BPM. Some pieces are more restrained, others more energetic, but they all share a common spirit rooted in Detroit techno — drawing inspiration from the genre’s classic aesthetics, rawness and sense of space. It is a diverse record that explores techno from several different perspectives rather than following a single stylistic formula. More than anything it is an archive of emotions and observations collected over the years.

I think the strongest connection this album can make across generations is authenticity. Not its tempo, not how closely it follows current trends, but the simple fact that it reflects who I am. There’s no performance, no pretending to be someone else. Age is never a barrier if the person on the other side is willing to listen with an open mind. Emotions don’t belong to a particular generation—they don’t have an expiration date or an age limit. Creating music that is driven by emotion requires faith: faith that those emotions will eventually find someone and provoke a genuine response. For me, making music has never been an end in itself. It’s a tool that can lead to something more meaningful—a change in the way someone feels, thinks, or experiences the world. Everyone experiences that change differently, but that’s exactly what gives music its purpose for me. The possibility of moving people, awakening emotions, and giving meaning to an experience is what continues to make creating music worthwhile after all these years.

True Techno 110 stands as the living document of that continuity: Praecox, Epi Centrum and Jurek Przeździecki speaking across three decades in one continuous arc. Listen to the mix on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/trueundergroundone/true-techno-100-Praecox.