Percival

“Did you know that’s my brother’s band?”

Zuzanna has worked with us almost from the start. I mentioned once that my son listens to Percival Schuttenbach. She said, in passing, that it was her brother’s band. The conversation lasted maybe a minute. More than a decade came out of it.

Percival and Percival Schuttenbach are two incarnations of the same crew: the first plays early folk, the second folk metal. Mikołaj Rybacki and Katarzyna Bromirska co-wrote music for The Witcher 3, so a great many people know them from there above all. The trouble is that “knowing them from a game” and “knowing them” are two different things.

I do not entirely treat this as a business. It is partly paying off a debt – to music in general.

First the site, then the whole publishing operation

We started with the site. It was elegant, and I still have a copy – it holds up. Then came the store, run end to end on our side, shipping included. Then Dzikie Pola: concept, packaging, limited edition, pre-orders, sales, parcels. They handled the music, we handled everything that has to happen around it. Then the first vinyl.

It did not go smoothly. This band’s history has plenty of difficult chapters, and trust in “business people” had been worn thin long before we arrived. More than once we lost each other’s wavelength – they as musicians through and through, me with my tidy world of processes.

Then came the year when everything was wound up. We handed the band a working store with all of its operations. They still run it today. And it went quiet.

We came back for a book

The idea was simple and cheeky: write up a quarter-century of this band. Zuzanna was the only person who could get out of them as much as was needed – she is not an outside observer, she grew up alongside this story.

The result is the trilogy Ćwierć wieku muzyki (A quarter-century of music). Two volumes are out, we sell and ship them, the third is due in May 2027. Along the way came the album Slava – pieśni Słowian południowych, a CD of the music from the first volume, audiobooks, T-shirt designs for fans and a separate website devoted to the series alone.

Why we do it

This project was never set up for maximum profit and still is not. It has to balance – and it has to make sure that music which so many people know from one game is finally known on the strength of its own story.

They make the music. We do everything that stands between the music and a person who wants it on their shelf.