The Lockdown Trilogy

Where to start. Play them in release order. The sequence is the point: each album answers the one before it, and the arc only reads correctly forwards. If you want a single record instead, Interior Drawings is the most melodic and the least bleak.

“Lockdown Trilogy” is not a boxed set or a single release. It is the name given to three albums that arrived separately under Mariusz Duda’s own name during the pandemic period, and that turned out to belong together. All three were recorded at Serakos Studio in Warsaw with engineers Magda and Robert Srzedniccy, and all three were composed and performed by Duda alone.

They also mark a shift in what his eponymous solo releases were for. Before 2020 that banner was a home for occasional songs and side projects. From Lockdown Spaces onward it became a dedicated space for instrumental electronic music — the outlet that later produced Intervallum and AFR AI D.

The three albums at a glance

Part one: Lockdown Spaces

Released on 26 June 2020 and recorded earlier the same month, this is the sparsest of the three and the one with the clearest self-imposed rule. Duda has described it as “a dark, minimalist, claustrophobic album”, and to intensify what he called the lockdown effect he restricted himself to electronic instruments, adding only samples and voice.

That restriction is the whole design. Removing acoustic instruments removes the sense of a room with people in it, and what remains is a set of small sealed spaces — Isolated, Bricks, Waiting, Silent Hall. The closing Screensaver runs under a minute and resolves nothing.

Full guide to Lockdown Spaces — tracklist, credits and concept.

Part two: Claustrophobic Universe

Ten months later, on 23 April 2021, the frame widens. If the first album was about the walls, this one is about what a year inside them does to a mind. The official description frames it as a journey into our own heads, with the universe standing in for the exit that is not actually available.

It is warmer and more melodic than its predecessor, and the imagery turns surreal — planets in a bowl of milk, stars with a lemon flavour, an escape pod that never quite launches. The subject underneath is harder: habituation, division, information overload, and how people adapt to prolonged uncertainty. Numbers and Denials closes the record as the least escapist thing on it.

Full guide to Claustrophobic Universe.

Part three: Interior Drawings

The closing album, released 10 December 2021, turns away from confinement altogether and toward the thing that got him through it. It is presented as a story about what a flow of thoughts looks like, with drawing samples scattered through the record standing in for any creative endeavour at all.

The sequence reads as a working day rather than a narrative: Racing Thoughts, Shapes in Notebooks, Prisoner by Request — which names the bargain any self-directed worker makes, choosing the confinement the first two albums had imposed on him. It ends on Temporary Happiness, which is about as accurate a description of finishing a piece of work as anyone has managed.

Full guide to Interior Drawings.

What changes across the three

The obvious constant is the method: one person, electronic instruments, the same studio, the same engineers, no guest musicians anywhere in the sequence. Within that, three things move.

• The subject moves outward. Room, then mind, then work. Each album is less about being trapped than the one before it.
• The palette warms. Lockdown Spaces is deliberately cold and repetitive; by Interior Drawings there is melody, longer development and considerably more air.
• The pieces get longer. Nine tracks in 34 minutes becomes eight in 41, as the writing stops being fragmentary.

What does not change is the refusal to resolve anything neatly. None of the three ends on a consolation, which is a large part of why the sequence has held up better than most music written in that period.

Where the trilogy sits in the catalogue

Two other releases sit close to it and are often mistaken for part of it. Let’s Meet Outside, the six-track mini-album recorded in January 2022, is best read as the epilogue — it looks back on the period rather than being written inside it, and opens with tape of Duda aged two. Intervallum, released two days earlier in December 2022, is a single 27-minute ambient piece with no connection to the trilogy’s themes.

AFR AI D (2023) is the trilogy’s direct successor rather than a fourth instalment. It keeps the minimalist electronic foundation but widens the palette with richer arrangements and guest electric guitar, and swaps personal isolation for the cultural anxiety around artificial intelligence.

The wider context — how these releases relate to Riverside and Lunatic Soul — is on the artist profile.

Where to listen

All three albums are on the official Bandcamp page, where they can be bought individually, and on the major streaming services. The Kscope artist page carries the wider catalogue.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Official Bandcamp discography — release dates, tracklists, timings, credits and the artist’s own descriptions of each album.
• Kscope artist page — catalogue context.

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