This is the musical diary of Anne Sulikowsi. She has been musical since she was a child and started noodling with electronics her last year in highschool. Since then she has performed in many groups and duos often sticking to improvised works and various forms of audio installations using primarily synthesizers, pedals and a guitar.
She began this solo project to musically document and explore extraordinary events, dreams, her experience of love and lack of love, battles with introspection, her wildly vivid imagination, promises made and broken, random thoughts and all the simple pleasures and bursts of boredom in her everyday lifea musical diary of a wanderer.
Building Castles out of matchsticks cannot be easily lumped into a particular electronic genre. her songs are reflective of her emotional drive, scattered and often all over the place. when asked, she often refers to her music as "drone-pop". she is always recording using sounds and thoughts she finds in la la land and in her daydreams. Her experimentations are filled with analogue synthesis, drones, organs, fruity loops and toots, broken guitars, pedal manipulations, circut bent toys, found sounds, disjointed beats and often intimate vocals telling secrets she wouldn't dare write.
some press and words:
Building Castles Out Of Matchsticks, a project that fuses abstract songwriting with highly unconventional electronics, resulting in a magical blend of electroacoustic ambience, and disembodied vocal loveliness. (Bookmat)
deeply intimate and revealing. equally comfortable writing songs about the demons that lurk deep in her heart and the soaring joy that true love can bring. (Rik Mclean, Ping Things)
a constant undertow of symphonic bass and murmuring synth that conjure images of happy water babies, oceanic worlds of mermaids. (God is in the TV)
Sulikowski crafts out a sumptuous spectacle of spectral synth mirages haloed beautifully by fleeting passages of ebbing and flowing celestial crests and gently pirouetting figurines that twinkle and serenade as though beset in night skies firmament of stars (Mark Barton Losing today)
Lovely proof that “experimental electronica” can also provide a happily “straightforward” listening experience without imploding into cuteness.
(Jonny Dovercourt, Wavelength Toronto)
Rainy sketches for rainy days. (Vital weekly no 409)
This is lushness that is trippy, hazy and mostly lethargic. When present, beats are intermittently woven into the fabric of the songs. I'm not exactly sure that I could even call these tid-bits songs. They could be better described as edits of Anne's wildly imaginative dream-world. I'm not sure if her dream world is scary or fun as most of the time, her words are obscured [my guess is, they're obscured on purpose]. Obscurity works wonders in hiding away her real intent. Let's face it, on a human level, absolute honesty in a song could be equal to suicide. Why would anyone want to share the most innermost thoughts and feelings and throw these out for all to see? With the cricket sounds surrounding my warm, fuzzy musical reality, I conclude that Anne is one brave soul. Unafraid to be honest in her intent and musically coming off as a soothing remedy, "Secret Land" is an altered-reality experience that is not to be missed. (Tom Sekowski GAZ-ETA)
More than anything, music was an intrinsic force that pushed her to record her thoughts. Using the songs like a diary, she documents her thoughts: of daydreaming, dreaming, wondering, and wandering. This is her purpose for Building Castles out of Matchsticks. Under the hefty moniker, Sulikowski has recorded a steady stream of over ten albums, with nearly as many collaborations on the side. Through each release she has grown, and so too her music, forming into the unique conglomeration of sounds she produces today. In practice, Building Castles out of Matchsticks is a pretty simple outfit. With her picturesque imagination, a few pedals, synthesizers, and a guitar, Sulikowski weaves melodies that are anything but primitive.
(Andrew Schlag, In your Speakers)
