OLIN JANUSZ

Olin Janusz is an intensely private individual from London who currently resides in Boston, MA. Operating within a distinctly British variant of alt-country, slowcore, and chamber folk, Janusz crafts challenging, crawling songs to provide company for quiet, tired individuals.

Janusz’s aesthetic preferences are borne from his proudly working-class upbringing, where political leanings and creative output are intertwined, and violence and common struggle form a foundation. Connecting from an early age in the mid-’90s to artists like Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, and The Jam, Janusz’s preferences have not changed much. However, the desire to create has grown alongside them, evolving into a mutated, gnarled creature that operates primarily from a sense of artistic pregnancy rather than anything cathartic.

Entirely self-taught, Janusz didn’t pick up an instrument until early adulthood, and after a few difficult years attempting to fit into bands, retired into a self imposed ostracisation to force himself into expanding his skillset to the point of competence with a wide array of tools. Focusing primarily on organ and guitar these days, Janusz works in a way similar to how a clam produces a pearl. Some kind of disruptive, ugly element is introduced, and coated in layer upon layer of bodily fluids, growing in size, weight and burden as it’s cultivated before being harvested for everyone else as something of remarkable value. This idea of taking something filthy or damaging and transliterating it as something beautiful is crucial to Janusz, and exists through all iterations of his work as an artist, and actions as a person.

Janusz acknowledges that this type of art isn’t for everyone, fervently believing that those it is for are the ones who need it most. For him, it was Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, or Jackson C. Frank, and so lies the ultimate goal of Olin Janusz: to be resonant for someone, anyone in need of resonance. To be that voice for someone else twenty years from now.