While creating Kotołak, my intention was to make something with soul, practically being my next incarnation. I never wanted to replicate… I’d rather learn from my musical masters than be one of a million parrot bands. Instead of conforming to trends, I prefer to express what plays in my soul. Instead of saying what people want to hear, I prefer to speak the truth – what I see, what I think, and what I feel. Surely, this won’t earn me friends, radio airplay, or television appearances… And that’s fine! It’s not my place, and mass media is the last place where you can find music created with passion. Because that’s Kotołak – created with passion. The most important thing for me is to express myself through art… whether someone follows me is secondary. I will never change my creativity under someone else’s dictate. This is my world, and I want to invite you into it.
History
If someone had told me once that I would be involved in music, and moreover, in the peculiar genre of heavy metal, I would have advised that person to quit all substances, change dealers, or take only half. I grew up in a non-musical family, and as a child, I had no musical interests. The only rock band I listened to was Kult. My singing ended with voice mutations and high school, which washed away all my ambitions and sense of worth. I was drawn into the world of metal by my ex-boyfriend and our friends from the psychiatric hospital.
For most people, such an episode might be a cause for shame, but I found people and music in the hospital. Besides, it’s not my fault that no one protected me from years of school violence and didn’t make the correct diagnosis. That’s how a little pissed-off girl was born (I would like to emphasize that I wore my hair very short back then), boiling with hatred for the whole world, and above all, for myself. The hospital only reinforced all of this. Before the final exams, my boyfriend dumped me. The psychiatrist prescribed a double dose of ketrel (those were the days when I still believed in the therapeutic effects of psychiatric drugs and wanted to take this poison). If you don’t know what ketrel is, count yourselves lucky – it means you haven’t experienced a chemical lobotomy. I failed to get into the dream university.
I ended up in a city where I didn’t want to study, in a field I didn’t want to study. But I had a choice – either university or work or bridge. Such great advice my parents got from the psychiatrist. To threaten me with a bridge so I’d stop clowning around. I felt like the biggest trash. So one day I decided to end it all… I remember playing Rebel – it was back when they hadn’t sold out to commercialism and played real rock music. Then I remember watching the Maiden concert from Rock in Rio. I started watching that concert and that’s how I abandoned my execution. I was amazed that six guys older than my parents had more youthfulness and vigor than me. A little later, Metallica came into my life. These two bands brought me relief and comfort when I “faked panic attacks” and “pretended to be depressed”. I realized one thing – I really want to play and musically tell my story.
At first, I didn’t believe I would ever create anything independently. The guitar was just for playing Rocksmith (a game I still recommend today, as a break from practice and a help in learning to play guitar). Over time, however, I wanted something more, wondering why it sounded like this and not otherwise? I decided to learn music theory, studying it with fanatic zeal. Meanwhile, I started studying, which revived me. Classes (especially in fields related to biochemistry and animal nutrition) made me start thinking for myself and reevaluate the knowledge and health norms instilled in me. I switched to a high-fat diet. I stopped consuming sweets, processed foods, grains, and gluten. I stopped fearing cholesterol. I got rid of depression, and my mental resilience increased. That’s when I began to question everything I was told was supposed to be good for me. This turned me into a kind of anti-establishment rock star. I felt like the world was opening up to me… only years later would I find out what kind of opening it was.
I spent a long time thinking about the name. Initially, it was supposed to be “werewolf”… but then I found out that there are several bands with that name. Most of them play black metal – I don’t want to join that company. Since I’ve had the deepest bonds with cats throughout my life, that’s why I named this project Kotołak (werecat). I started using GuitarPro, and I still recommend this program today. My musical imagination has always surpassed my technical abilities. To this day, I use rendered backing tracks. After some time, I started writing “Witchcraft,” which was released at the end of 2017. The next album – “New World Order” – came out 10 months later.
Music has always been a reflection of what I was thinking and what was happening in my life. I released another album – 2020 (a reaction to the pandemic) and several singles. Everything had its story… but they’ve long been book-worthy. The year 2020 was also the beginning of my Dark Night of the Soul, which led me to Gdańsk, where I wrote the lyrics for subsequent albums – “Awaken,” “Co ty wiesz o samotności?,” and “Wiwat aktywizm!”, as well as several singles. In 2020, I disappeared from Soundcloud and the album demos were re-recorded and appeared on streaming services and YouTube. Unfortunately, due to the neglect of a certain bug by the YouTube technical team, I had to shut down the channel and started publishing on Bandcamp and on this site. I also switched from the leftist warped YouTube to the uncensored Rumble.
The story of Kotołak is still being written. There are always plans and new life challenges. There are still many things I want to do in my musical life and with this particular project. Here, I also want to thank everyone who has been with me during this musical journey. I also want to invite those who have just arrived here to become participants in this difficult but extraordinary adventure. You can also be co-creators of this story because it depends on you how it will unfold…
My working methods...
Creating music is a fascinating and spiritually cleansing adventure. From the first spark of inspiration, it goes through a series of stages before it turns into a finished piece. Each album and single is a separate, different story, however, in my creative process, there is a certain pattern of action common to all my works.
It all starts with inspiration. Sometimes it’s my reflection, sometimes a reaction to certain life events, and sometimes… I simply feel the urge to create. I don’t seek inspiration – inspiration finds me. Creating is an integral part of my life. I don’t need to focus on it additionally. I always start with writing the lyrics. It’s mainly in words that we think. The voice is the biggest limitation, so I adjust everything else to it. Then I strictly move on to planning the piece – I create its skeleton. I think about what else I want to add to the music and whether I want to make the music more eccentric. Then I open GuitarPro and start creating. That’s when the process begins to live its own life and can deviate from the original concept. Then I practice a lot – rhythmic exercises or scale exercises stimulate my creativity. Along with writing music, I also do text editing.
The standard instrumental lineup of Kotołak consists of 3 guitars + drums. I use an additional guitarist… the one who most often plays jazz on full distortion. I’m surprised that more progressive metal bands don’t use this idea. I consider such an arrangement to be the “core of Kotołak.” When creating “Witchcraft,” I didn’t plan to introduce additional instruments. I didn’t plan to, but I started adding them anyway. Most often, keyboards are added, although sometimes I also include orchestral instruments. Everything is rendered through GuitarPro, but in the future, I hope to purchase well-sounding virtual instrument libraries.
Later comes the time for the most difficult stage for me – recording. I generate the backing track, as I’ve mentioned many times, in GuitarPro. Personally, I would recommend exporting to MIDI and using virtual instruments. This is a “broke student” approach, and I hope to move away from it someday. I overdub vocals onto the backing track. Here, time was my worst enemy – I always had very little time for recordings… among other things, because of this, their quality is unsatisfactory to me. Combined with my throat problems and tightening voice… well, it couldn’t turn out well. However, I have a habit of recording things several times, trying to update the vocals in recordings to the current technical level and my level of study. I would like to someday record with pleasure… I’ve been waiting for this moment my entire musical life! Later, I have to mix what I recorded and do the mastering. So far, it’s been a rescue operation for hastily made recordings. It wasn’t pleasant… mainly because I don’t have the means to record it well. I’m not deaf… although sometimes I regret it.
The last thing is to publish the result of creative work and all other things not necessarily related to music. I have to prepare the graphic design, descriptions on Bandcamp and the website. I need to prepare posts on social media and start the process of “making noise” so that everyone knows I’m working on something. In the meantime, I “feed the algorithms” to make them more favorable to my posts. That’s basically how the music creation process goes.
Tools, I use
My most important tool is GuitarPro. Since my instrumental skills are very limited, GuitarPro replaces a band for me and never argues with me. That’s what I like. The program renders everything I have written in the tabs. That’s how I use tabs – they are more convenient for guitar than sheet music. If you want to criticize me for it, I won’t change my mind. In addition, in GuitarPro, I can do the initial sound processing. A cool feature is the built-in tool showing the distribution of scales on the fretboard. Of course, I believe that virtual instruments on MIDI do a better job than the GP render, but if you can’t afford them, the sound quality is acceptable.
The second tool, without which my work would be impossible, is Reaper. It is a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), with which I record, mix, and master. Here, sound correction takes place, (unfortunately) vocal editing, setting instruments in space (panorama), and applying effects.
ChatGPT is becoming a better and trendier tool, and music is useful for many things in life. I want to clarify right away – I don’t use it for writing lyrics. It’s my job and necessity. However, it works well for translating content into English and checking language correctness. English is my second language, so sometimes I need to check if what I’m writing is correct. When I can’t find a word or a rhyme, ChatGPT also comes to the rescue. It’s helpful in providing me with ideas for social media content and writing sample posts.
Grammarly is the final stage of checking the correctness of texts and content translated by me into English. It catches all typos and grammatical errors.
The majority of the graphic design I create using free A.I. generators. Unfortunately, it rarely suffices for album and single artwork… here, I have to resort to pencil and draw my idea the best I can. And I can… as much as I can.
As for graphic design, important tools for me are also GIMP and Canva, helping me to create the graphic content I need. I also use mind maps, which I create using XMind. To organize my work, I use the Pomodoro technique, dividing time into periods of work and rest. Personally, as a cat lover, I use the Pomodoro Cat channel.
