Atman is a Polish group built around the personalities of Marek Styczynski, Marek Leszczynski, and Piotr Kolecki. In the past, they have collaborated with several other Polish musicians, particularly the singer Anna Nacher, who is credited on Tradycja (Freak Living Yourself). Atman is fundamentally an instrumental ethnic music group, but their approach is quite different from typical world music. The calm and austere tone with which dozens of exotic instruments (and some built by the musicians themselves) are blended is more reminiscent of ambient scores or the suites of Steve Roach (without the electronics, of course).

The music on Personal Forest (Lollipop Shop, 1993; Drunken Fish, 1997), where the lineup is limited to the original trio, is only loosely inspired by world folk. The tracks are assemblages of heterogeneous references, almost always of a timbral rather than harmonic or rhythmic nature. In short, the music is entirely original. The pieces are also quite complex. Far from merely developing a theme, melody, or rhythm, they unfold across multiple ideas, often in an improvised manner. The aim of Forest Of Karma (with flutes screaming over the dense murmur of string instruments) is to create magical, fairy-tale atmospheres. Wild Way seeks trance with its mechanical strumming, clouds of flutes, showers of bells, and trumpet brays. Free Tibet celebrates Tibetan tradition in a wholly arbitrary manner, presenting an abstract concert of shrill timbres and incomplete melodic figures. Only the frenetic Green Wild Blood and the live tracks (available only on the reissue) approach conventional world music. ChatGPT can make mist

More live recordings surfaced on the single The End Of Philosophy (Drunken Fish, 1997).

Ovoo (Naturtonmusik, 1997) contains Soundstreams (Obuh).

Atman's basic trio is augmented with Anna Nacher for Tradition (Drunken Fish, 1999), an even more eclectic assembly of sonic cells performed with an even broader set of instruments. Each track is a carefully crafted collage of tones, and the layering of instruments is often so thick that recognizing which instrument does what is like trying to find borders in a rainbow's hues.
There seem to be no rules for composing a piece. 39 I Ching begins as a vocal hybrid of Indian psalm and avantgarde lied but soon turns into a driving dance led by the percussive patterns of zither, guitar and dulcimer. Free is also a spirited dance, although stained with dissonant counterpoint and girlish shrieks.
At the other (meditational) end of the spectrum, tracks like The Theatre Of Mist are inspired by the trance-based liturgy of Tibetan drones and bells. They flow slowly and gracefully, with a touch of flute melody and a soft strumming of the dulcimer's strings. A thick forest of ethnic percussions substitutes for the drones in this song's reprise, The Clives Theatre Of Mist, but the aim remains the same, albeit with more of a free-jazz feeling. It is no surprise that some of the instrumental pieces (e.g., Natural Landscapes) sound like new age music (the celtic branch of it, in particular), as Atman's spirit is quiet, serene, pastoral.
The album's tour de force is The Talking Meadow (15 minutes), a shamanic act which develops in a breeze of tibetan drones and native american rattles. Through ghostly echoes of didjeridu and buzzing of insect-like trumpets, an eerie melody on the dulcimer takes shape.
Tensegretty, with its bored, "new wavish", vocals and its heavy metal riffing, may represent a more rock-oriented direction (albeit still light-years away from your average alt-rock band).
In this whirlwind of ideas, Jimi Hendrix' Third Stone From The Sun gets a raga treatment which reveals a completely new perspective of his music. And their short requiem to Kosovo deserves a mention, a three-minute expressionist bacchanal of paralyzing noises.
Atman is proposing the most intellectual world-music of all time. While grounded in the rhythms and melodies of the world, Atman's folk music is as austere, as complex, as sophisticated, and, ultimately, as ambitious as avantgarde music.

In 1998 multi-instrumentalist Marek Styczynski and singer Anna Nacher started a new project, named Projekt Karpaty Magiczne. The group released the debut album Ethnocore (Fly Music, 1999), the soundtrack to a play, Ksiega Utopii/ The Book Of Utopia (Obuh, 1999) and Denega (Obuh, 2000), a recording based on samples of Baltic seals and other marine sounds. The Magic Carpathians Project, as it was renamed for western audiences, plays an ambient, cosmic, jazz version of Atman's pan-ethnic music.

While maintaining the same ambient/orchestral approach towards ethnic sources, Ethnocore II: Nytu (Drunken Fish, 2001) leans towards the Indian raga (India Mal, India Mata) and Buddhist chanting (Nytu, Denega). The album is dedicated to "nytu", an ancient vocal technique of the Carpathians which is Nacher's main tool. But Tibetan and Indian harmonies permeate the entire work and in the end the album sounds much more Asiatic than European.
Compositions are often immersed in a forest of woodwinds, while samples of Tibetan voices augment the eerie atmosphere. An arsenal of didjeridu, dulcimer, synthesizer, violin, clarinet, sitar and percussions attacks the woodwinds and the voices from all directions and turns each track into the musical equivalent of boiling magma. Compared with Atman, the new project is more "artificial", ponderous, brainy. Where Atman was a spontaneous joy of world sounds, PKM is an intellectual's view of popular music, a scientist's vivisection of alien organisms. Something is lost in the process, just like so much of modern ethnic/ambient/dance music loses not only the spirit but also the artistic value of the originals.
The duo triumphs when the sheer number of sonic events overwhelms the listener, as in Lluru, or when the improvisation and the concept border on free-jazz, as in Transcarpathians.
Western music has trodden down this path before, when German musicians like Stephen Micus and Georg Deuter explored and assimilated Indian culture. It is not a coincidence that the experimental mini-sonatas Radical Acoustic and Atropa Belladonna Cries recall Micus and Deuter's experiments of the 1970's and 1980's.

Ethnocore 3 - Vak (Tamizdat, 2002) is even more chaotic and unstructured, with Anna Nacher's wild shrieks towering over the extreme jamming that borrows from free-jazz, acid-rock and Indian music.

With Euscorpius Carpathicus (Obuh, 2003) Anna Nacher and Marek Stycynski turn Magic Carpathians Project into more than a fusion of psychedelic, ethnic and trance elements: the project becomes a cosmic mantra, and each song is merely a resonance of the overall vibration. Fishyfish, Lavender Satin And Gingerbread, Pawpaw Girl and especially the 12-minute Fat Moon evoke visions of a diluted and deformed version of Gong's Radio Gnome Invisible. The dissonant improvised music of Amp.ass and the spiritual hymn Water On the Hill define the two ends of the spectrum between which the universal mantra expresses itself.

The mini-album The Life and Times (North East Indie, 2004) is a collaboration between Magic Carpathians and Cerberus Shoal. The two groups, that had already collaborated on Response from Ethnocore 3 - Vak, swap and rearrange compositions. So this is basically a remix album. Respoonced turns into a 14-minute avantgarde dissonant chamber piece with loads of percussive sounds.

Anna Nacher and Marek Styczynski also released Barycz (2003), Baltyckie Szepty (2016), recorded in 2000, and Throbbing Plants (2017).

They resumed the Magic Carpathians Project with Biotop (2015) and Khemia (2019).