Dobrawa Czocher spent her 2023 debut proving a point: that a cello, played alone, could carry an entire album. No piano, no strings section, no electronics. Arpeggios, pizzicato, flageolet, murmured extended technique and studio effects did all the work on Dreamscapes, a record built in three parts around falling asleep, dreaming and waking, and produced by Niklas Paschburg. It earned her multiple Opus Klassik nominations.
State Of Matter, her second solo album, breaks the rule she set for herself.
Synths and her own voice now sit alongside the cello, and the change wasn't aesthetic first, it was geographic. Czocher had moved to Sopot, on Poland's Baltic coast, into a flat with a sea view. "I would wake up with a view of the sea. I'd observe it every day," she has said. "The sea would change with the seasons, weather, and sunlight. Every time it had a different colour and look." That daily instability became the record's logic: "Just like seawater, our lives fluctuate, they are one big change."
The ten tracks, released through FatCat Records, trace that fluctuation directly, with titles like Fluctuations and Phoenix doing exactly what they say, and two versions of a piece called Monologue bookending the set like a thought interrupted and resumed. Sirens, Letter From The Soul and the closing Goodbye push further from the chamber-music discipline of Dreamscapes towards something closer to art song, cello and voice layered rather than one accompanying the other.
Czocher's background makes the instrumental widening less of a leap than it looks. She started cello at seven, trained at the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw under Piotr Hausenplas and later at the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold under Alexander Gebert, played with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and as principal cellist of the Neue Philharmonie Berlin, and spent five years, from 2018 to 2023, as leader-soloist of the Mieczysław Karłowicz Symphony Orchestra in Szczecin. She has also spent a decade in a separate, more classical partnership: with pianist Hania Rani, first on 2015's Biała Flaga, then on 2021's Inner Symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon, which made the pair the youngest female composer duo signed to the label.
What distinguishes Czocher from the wider neoclassical field isn't restraint, which is common currency in that scene, but the willingness to abandon a constraint the moment it's proved its point. Dreamscapes was an argument for the cello's sufficiency. State Of Matter is the sound of someone who won that argument and got bored of it, reaching for synthesiser pads and her own untrained voice instead, and trusting that the emotional register carries over even when the vocabulary doesn't.
