SOUNDING THE BODY ELECTRIC

Sounding the Body Electric
Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1964-1984
Bôłt (BR ES10)

One more adventure with PRES in its surroundings and an honorable collaboration with Daniel Muzuczyk and David Crowley - curators of the exhibition at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź

coming up very, very soon; official release date: TBA

CD 1
1. Vladan Radovanović, Voice from the Loudspeaker (1975)
2. Szabolcs Esztényi and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Just Transistor Radios (1970/2012)
3. Wojciech Bruszewski, Junction (1973/2013)
4. Collective Actions, Music Within and Outside (1984)
5.-8. Eugeniusz Rudnik, Scalars – technological study (1966)
9. Hugh Davies, Shozyg (1964)

CD 2
1. Rudolf Komorous, Tomb of Malevitch (1965)
2. Arne Nordheim, Ode to Light (Sculpture) (1968) – studio mix 1
3.-6. Milan Grygar, Acoustic Drawings (1974)
7. Arne Nordheim, Ode to Light (Sculpture) (1968) – studio mix 2

The album is a natural alliance of the producers working with the Polish Radio Experimental Studio’s archives and the curators of the exhibition dedicated to intersections of technology and body in art of the 1960s and 1970s. The thematic “common” field was operationally called “early Eastern European sound art”, although none of us really meant it literally. Undoubtedly, we were all interested in such works of art where the sound was approached from the perspective of other art disciplines. Leaving film, theatre, dance and radio art to other occasions, we mainly focused on visual arts, performance and architecture – mostly due to their conceptual connotations. We followed the two fundamental issues discussed in the 1960s: object and space.

In this context, the exhibition Sounding the Body Electric was a breakthrough. For the first time, the history of sound of the above mentioned period was told from a different point of view than the musicological one. On the following pages David Crowley and Daniel Muzyczuk write about the Experimental Studio’s place in the wide spectrum of Eastern European art. To us, it is more important to see what the latter one tells us about PRES.

Experiments undertaken in Warsaw’s Studio found their reflection on the magnetic tape – a fixed object presenting the final vision of the composer. In consequence, space was usually understood as a parameter of musical form defined by stereophonic system. The most vivid examples of this compositional legacy is an unfortunate and never fully exploited Oskar Hansen’s project of adjustable acoustics of the Studio as well as Tomasz Sikorski’s attempts at composing reverberations of instrumental sounds – brilliantly faked on console by Bohdan Mazurek.

For this album we were trying to find the pieces in PRES’ archives that would deviate from this dominant tendency.

Michał Libera and Michał Mendyk