One of the eight tracks on Divided by Dusk is called, simply, Piosenka Ludowa, Polish for folk song. Not the name of one, just the category itself, deployed the way another composer might use a title like Untitled.
That's a good way into how Magda Drozd works. Born in Warsaw in 1987 and settled for years now in Zurich, she has spent her career treating folklore as a set of instructions still being carried out rather than a museum piece to quote from. Divided by Dusk, her fourth solo album for the Swiss label Präsens Editionen since 2019, following Songs for Plants, 18 Floors and Viscera, took shape after a stretch of time in Japan sent her looking, on her return, not at Japanese tradition but back towards the Polish one she had spent longest away from.
The record plays that distance for atmosphere rather than confusion. Drozd's violin, thickened and detuned, sits against a Lyra-8, the compact analogue synthesiser that has become a fixture of the drone underground, and against field recordings that never quite resolve into identifiable places. On Rounds, the Japanese musician Rai Tateishi adds shinobue, the bamboo flute used in Noh and folk festival music alike, so the two traditions overlap rather than take turns.
None of this reads as fusion for its own sake.
Titles such as Hungry Nightmares and Vertigo pull the record towards something closer to dark ambient than folk revival, while the opener, Eclipse, and the closer, From The Depths, frame the title track like the entrance and exit of a ritual rather than a conventional set of album bookends.
Drozd's regular writing partner, Nicola Genovese, with whom she also performs as the duo Sopraterra, contributes additional composition, and the finished tapes went to Glyn Maier, Nick Klein and Koshiro Hino to mix before Lawrence English, whose own Room40 catalogue has spent two decades mapping similar liminal ground, mastered the record.
Drozd calls the record's terrain twilight, a place where identities blur and traditions keep changing shape rather than settling into folklore's usual past tense; it's a reasonable description of a career that has taken her from theatre scores for directors including Yana Ross and Tom Kühnel to sound installations and, since 2023, to co-running Studio Z4, a residency programme, and her own imprint, Rivercore, for ambient and experimental work.
Divided by Dusk doesn't resolve the tension between the two heritages it draws on. It just keeps them both audible at once.
