Paweł

Audio travelogue 

(for field recordings and voice)

19/10: Miasto Literatury, Gdańsk

20/11: Komuna Warszawa 

21/11: Audio Art, Kraków 

22/11: Biuro Dźwięku Katowice 

25/11: To Pikap, Thessaloniki 

26/11: Nekubi, Kavala 

27/11: Stellage, Athens 

30/11: Desibel, Istanbul 

„Paweł” is an audio travelogue, a half-phantasmagoric, half-mocumentary depiction of rivers, canals and sewage, whether en route towards water reservoirs, or upstream, towards their often inaccessible sources. The piece consists of eight scenes, or rather eight encountered landscapes. Together they form a not very logical and not very conclusive story about water dams and locks, abundance and floods, dry lakes and stony riverbeds, as well as everything they hide and reveal. It is also about the rhythm in which they perform this work. Actually it is mostly about that rhythm.

„Paweł” is based on field recordings made with homemade geophones, hydrophones and contact microphones. This choice means that the landscapes in „Paweł” are not soundscapes, nor do they resemble spaces as we usually hear them. Little comes here in the perspective of human ears, yet these recordings are absurdly real - the editing is minimal, there are barely any effects, practically no overimposed drama. What really makes „Paweł” are juxtapositions of different takes of a given landscape at a given time - simultaneous, although arbitrary, seemingly overscaled, perhaps disproportionate.

The field recordings in „Paweł” are accompanied by a voice reading the text - something between travel notes, outline of a lecture on social history and a curatorial narration explaining the nature of the sounds heard. Facts, anecdotes, myths and everyday observations definitely reveal something here, but they probably hide even more, especially since there are so many quotes - or rather crypto-quotes. The only exception is a lengthy fragment of Robert Ashley's libretto entitled „The Mystery of the River”, a rarely performed part of the opera „Atalanta (Acts of God)”.

Massive thanks to Nicolas Malevitsis and Volkan Terzioğlu

Concerts in Greece and Turkey supported by Adam Mickiewicz Insitute

VANISH SE24-T1

 

VANISH SE24

curated by Michał Libera and Konrad Smoleński

scores by Anton Lukoszevieze

Tour 1

or rather Anti-Tour with scores mounted on the flanks of the van, to be interpreted in the following towns, by the following artists:

13/07: DOM, Riga (Latvia) - Liene Rumpe, Lidija Zaneripa, Kristers Krūms (all artists are part of DOM gallery team) 

15/07: Suomenlinna (Finland) - Annika Fuhrmann

16/07: Kemiö, in front of Kulturhus Björkboda (Finland), 16.00-17.00 - Isto Rahkila, Antti Tolvi

19/07: Mooste (Estonia), 19.00 - John and Evelyn Grzinich

20/07: Strenči Sonification Station (Latvia) - Orbita Group 

21/07: Galera / UMI, Vilnius (Lithuania), 20.00 - Kristupas Gikas aka DJ Extended feat. Kazimieras Jušinskas

more details to come

VANISH is a mobile art gallery housed on the flanks of a MB W903 vehicle. The van serves as a canvas for paintings, drawings, screenings, but primarily as a platform for meetings and discussions with artists, collectors, curators, and the general public.

In the third season, main themes and inspirations will come from music and sound art circuits. From music, VANISH will borrow communication tools. First, the score. It will be pasted on the side panels of the gallery, where visual art works were in previous seasons. Second, VANISH will go on tours - one of the most emblematic ways of spreading music. However, the gallery will not serve as a means of transportation for travelling musicians. Equipped with the score, it will move from one location to another in quest for artists willing to interpret it in the gallery. Performances will be meticulously documented - audio and video - and published as a bootleg album of the tour, the third hint to the music world.

VANISH will also learn from sound art, especially from its attention to the physicality of the detail. In the first place - detail of the room. There is a long tradition of sound art investigations into acoustics of galleries. Sizes, shapes, surfaces, angles, materials - physical aspects of the room are not merely contexts of sound pieces, they are integral parts of their sonic content. In the third season we want to hear how all these acoustical features work in a gallery room that has four wheels, engine and a camshaft. We also want to find ways to document this sonic life of the gallery in a manner that would do just to its materiality. 

Bringing it all together makes the concept for this season of VANISH clear. It cannot be anything but circumnavigation. Going in circles. Loops. The gallery circles around Europe. The sound bounces around the gallery’s pipes, electric circuits and body. The score keeps on being interpreted again and again. We carry on following the details of these envelopes. In physics, circulation seems to encompass random vectors that emerge when the main current is being examined. We try to do the same.

SIXTEר in NYC

   

SIXTEר (edit)

Performance for quiet reading

e-flux NYC

Launch of e-flux journal #144 

incl. Throat on Brain. Magic and the Art of Memory in Robert Ashley's Operas

​Event with Arto Lindsay, Ben Vida and Amy Gernux, Kimberly Alidio, David Grubbs, and Daniel Muzyczuk

11/04/2024

172 Classon Ave

Brooklyn, NYC

What is SIXTEר? Could be a six-pack caught at a gas station, of course. Could be a sexophobic hipster either. Or a musical sixth ending with a tail falling to the right. It can be various things, in fact anything, whatever you want to hide behind it. Because it is all about hiding. The word itself comes from the dictionary of Sergei Pankejeff, one of Sigmund Frued's most important patients. He created words in order to mislead the Viennese neurologist. This silent reading performance is about those words. And also about Pankejeff's mouth, about the history of printing and shorthand, about masturbation, deafness and Akkadian stone inscriptions, about wheezing, wolf-men in general and the tail dragger in particular. However, all these threads are only barely able to conceal a meditation on #metoo and reactions to the growing content of performativity in the air around us, to fake news, to overpopulation, to healing therapies, completed and unfinished, successful and unsuccessful. To the pandemic too? To the pandemic too.

Dry Mountain

 

Dry Mountain

Keith Rowe / Gerard Lebik

released by Inexhaustible Editions

Compact disc housed in stylish 6-panel digipack with transparent tray are available to order from 1 August 2023

Graphic scores by Alicja Bielawska, Bożenna Biskupska, Daniel Koniusz as well as Lena Czerniawska, Brian Olewnick and Michael Pisaro

Performed by Johnny Chang (violin), Jonas Kocher (accordion), Gaudenz Badrutt (electronics), Bryan Eubanks (electronics), Kurt Liedwart (electronics), Xavier Lopez (electronics), Mike Majkowski (double bass) and Emilio Gordoa (vibraphone)

Commissioned and recorded at Sanatorium of Sound Festival 2016 in Sokołowsko, Poland on 13/8/2016

Edited, mixed and mastered by Gerard Lebik

Liner notes by Michał Libera

Cover artwork by Keith Rowe

Graphic design by László Szakács

Produced by László Juhász

Special thanks to Zuzanna Fogtt & In Situ Foundation

KL Plaszow Sound Monument

KL PLASZOW SOUND MONUMENT

commissioned by KL Plaszow Museum 

to be installed at the territory of the former German Nazi Concentration Camp in Krakow

in 2025

with Mark Bain, Marcin Dymiter, Björn Schmelzer & Graindelavoix, Shelley Hirsch, Eva-Maria Houben, Michał Kupicz, Iván Larrea, Barbara Kinga Majewska, Mirt & Ter, Tony Di Napoli, Marcelina Obarska, Lee Patterson, Jaśmina Polak & Jerzy Rogiewicz, Pękala-Kordylasińska-Pękala, Wojciech Pustoła, Roma Sendyka, John Tilbury and more.  

The Sound Monument of KL Plaszow is designed as a multilayered, collective audio composition created on the basis of a concept authored by Roma Sendyka and a scenario authored by Michał Libera. The inspiration for the Sound Monument composition is given by the soil of the camp: the soil understood as a depository of the memory of camp Plaszow and its history, and as a source of audio material.

The Sound Monument will only be available to visitors through headphones connected to mobile devices collected from the Museum. The Sound Monument will not be heard in the post-camp area without those devices, and the only sign of its presence will be people with headphones, walking in the camp area, guided by the composition structure, at a pace and in a direction of their choice.

More information soon 

Deep Sound in Vilnius

 

Sappho, 29a

+ new version of "Commentator"

Surface is enough

Swallow Gallery

Vitebsko g. 23, Vilnius

from 19/05

Two pieces by Grupa Budapeszt will be part of a split exhibition with Jakub Czyszczoń.

Deep sound - that's all that's left of the Sapphic stanza numbered 29a, like any other, built on the principle: three lines of eleven syllables and one line of five syllables. Most of Sappho's work is lost, most likely forever. Papyri were deliberately burned or used to wrap mummies. Those that survived suffered a natural process of disintegration. What remains of fragment 29a may suggest that the poem was a description of a ritual that included music. Perhaps the words were part of narration referring to sounds performed on aulos - a double wooden flute. Or the other way around - maybe deep sound referred to the musical performance of the very poem itself, for which - like other poems by Sappho - it was intended. Or even more - maybe the written words of the poem are its performance. 

Grupa Budapeszt operates in a narrow space between glossary, commentary and translation of audiovisual materials. With this work, the group adds a couple of more: reconstruction and transposition. Reconstructing the original content of Sappho's poem is impossible, and perhaps also unintentional. Unless we take it seriously that after fragment 29a only a deep sound is left. So what remains of the poem is not only what is written, but also what goes beyond the notation - the sound, the deep sound of its performance. If so, everything seems a bit easier. The unique space in which the poem resounds needs to be reconstructed – one would like to say: its architecture needs to be reconstructed – in this case, the room of Swallow gallery in Vilnius. 

We approach the deep sound as a synecdoche - part meaning whole. This assumption, together with the regular meter of the Sapphic stanza, allowed for the discovery of spatio-rhythmical relationships between meanings. Lyricism is a record of sounds - a score that assumes performance. Hence, the exhibition also included a flat model of space. It is both a record of a resounding stanza and a transposition of its third verse. The exhibition is a poem which is a non-verbal spatial structure. It is a radical realization of the Objectivists' project: poem as voice as object.

Two Szpakowski Pieces in Riga

Two Szpakowski Pieces for Two Trombones

Latvian Center for Contemporary Art

Riga

28/04

Concept, scores: Michal Libera, Barbara Kinga Majewska
Trombones: James Fulkerson, Hilary Jeffery

The drawings of Wacław Szpakowski not only look like music scores. They also served as such for the author himself who used to play them on violin. We know nothing more about the actual performances. Yet could they be anything but prefiguration of minimalism in music? Certainly, we will never be sure. But we know that his drawings from 1920' and the music genre born in the 1950's face a similar question: how to derive all harmony and all rhythm from a single, unaccompanied line?

Concert at LCCA in Riga will be an attempt to face the question via musical performance of two pieces by Szpakowski. Scores prepared for two instrumentalists are a rigid transfer of visual data contained in Szpakowski's line onto staff notation. The only two parameters at work here will be pitch and durations. Derived proportionally and solely only from the lengths of the stretches of line, they will form a single melody for each piece. The same melody-line of each piece will be performed by the two musicians at the same time but in opposite directions, from left to right and from right to left. All emerging harmonies and rhythms will then be an outcome of overlapping of the same line with itself.

One of the pieces, "a00", is symmetrical and hence the duration structure for both performers is the same, only the glissandi will have opposite directions. On the micro level, each glissandi will have a focal point when musicians intersect; on the macro level, the piece as whole will have a center of intersection right in the middle. In the other piece, asymmetrical "A1", no such thing will occur. In both cases only the core segment of the drawing's structure will be performed.