środa, 17 grudnia 2014

TYTO ALBA


















Tyto Alba. 
13 portraits of melancolics, birds and their co-hearing

Michal Libera with Martin Küchen and Ralf Meinz

Text, recordings, composition by Michal Libera
Saxophone by Martin Küchen
Sound design by Ralf Meinz

1. Michel Serres
2. WG Sebald
3. Philomela
4. Max Ernst
5. Alvin Lucier
6. Giorgio Agamben
7. Bedřich Smetana
8. Andean Solitaire
9. Auguste Rodin
10. Tyto Alba
11. Georges Perec
12. Wilhelm Heinrich Dove
13. Javier Marías

Sound essay, hörspiel, reading, electroacoustic music, plunderphonics, sound portraits, collection of songs or simply a sonic take on melancholia. Disposition or disease, melancholia is a rich psycho-territory full of apathy, depression, withdrawal, self-dismissal, hallucinations and alien voices. And hearing. In particular, suffering of the ears and peculiar way of listening related to it. In one of the footnotes in his essay „Stanzas”, Giorgio Agamben points out that the well known melancholic posture of a man leaning his head against the hand is actually an attempt to get away from suffering of his ringing ear. This observation bringing together melancholia and sound is the main coordinate of the piece's development. It departs from melancholic listening turning women into birds depicted in the opening chapter of WG Sebald's „Rings of Saturn”. The voice imperceptibly meanders between reading, commenting and distorting the tales ramifying the interpretations of the initial situation. It is accompanied by hundreds of samples from classical music to birds and saxophone playing by Martin Küchen.

POPULISTA presents ALVIN LUCIER




















Populista presents Rinus van Alebeek, Michał Libera play Alvin Lucier, Chambers

Composition by Rinus van Alebeek
Text adaptation by Michał Libera

Voices and recordings by Rinus van Alebeek, Michał Libera and Barbara Eramo

1. Trading Cities 1: Santa Eufemia D'Aspromonte
2. Cities & Names 5: Gioia Tauro
3. Cities & Eyes 1: Chòra tu Vùa
4. Thin Cities 5: Roghudi
5. Thin Cities 2: Catanzaro
6. Trading Cities 3: Rosarno
7. Continuous Cities 1: Ziia
8. Trading Cities 2: San Ferdinandea
9. Cities & The Dead 4: Caulonia

Rinus' words available here.
Rinus' audio teaser available here

The whole idea came from reading Italo Calvino's „Invisible Cities” while travelling among unknown cities of Calabria. The similarities have been striking. The book became a guide, Kublai Khan – an emperor of the land in the south of Italy and the idea – irrepresible urge to actually perform this similiarity. The original text by Calvino was overwritten with some information – including the names of towns – distorted, filtered and overdubbed by its local reflections. Armed with it, Rinus van Alebeek and Michał Libera set out for a dozen of excursions into Calabrian towns to recite, talk, read, listen, drink coffee, perform, play, record, play back... or: blow, bow, rub, explode, scrape, walk, ignore, talk, screw, dance, whistle, which are all suggestions of Alvin Lucier to make large and small resonant environments sound. The material recorded during these attempts to make invisible cities of Calabria sound was then composed by Rinus van Alebeek to form a road-audio-book.


One of three completely different albums intersecting in a territory of interpretation, overinterpretation and misinterpretation of music – beloved themes of Populista. Lucier and Ferrari albums may seem heterodoxical if not simply wrong, especially if compared with previous phonographic releases. Yet literally speaking, none of them violate the instructions of the scores and Populista is perversly proud to state that this time nothing forbidden by the composers have been done here. „Tautologos III” and „Chambers” are radically open forms, presuming a creative approach from the interpreters and this was taken seriously in search of the content that seems close to the music ideas of the composers. Tartini release is more of a classical Populista approach. It deliberately breaks the instructions given by the composer in the name of some other features introduced by the composer himself.

POPULISTA presents LUC FERRARI




















Populista presents Komuna// Warszawa plays Luc Ferrari Tautologos III

Violin by Julia Kubica
Viola by Wojciech Walczak 
Cello by Filip Rzytka
Voices and organ by Grzegorz Laszuk, Alina Gałązka, Michał Libera, Edyta Jarząb


Sound, recording by Ralf Meinz

Cover art work by Aleksandra Waliszewska
Layout by Piotr Bukowski
Recorded and premiered in Komuna// Warszawa

1. Overture
2. Act I
3. Act II
4. Act III
5. Coda

In 2011, the prose score of „Tauologos III”, served as framework for a chamber opera prepared in Komuna// Warszawa. Its core element consisted of three separate performances of a short fragment of Alfred Schnittke's String Trio. Violinist (Julia Kubica), violist (Wojciech Walczak) and cellist (Filip Rzytka) played their own parts of the given movement one after the other. Their performances were recorded live and finally overlapped and played back with no synchronization. The procedure was sprinkled and scattered by dance movements and lecture dealing with notions of division of labor in music informed by both sociological and musicological insights into the topic (references to Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Jacques Attali and Christopher Small). Album release is an updated and re-recorded version of the performance and hopefully a self-explaining tautology as well.

*

One of three completely different albums intersecting in a territory of interpretation, overinterpretation and misinterpretation of music – beloved themes of Populista. Lucier and Ferrari albums may seem heterodoxical if not simply wrong, especially if compared with previous phonographic releases. Yet literally speaking, none of them violate the instructions of the scores and Populista is perversly proud to state that this time nothing forbidden by the composers have been done here. „Tautologos III” and „Chambers” are radically open forms, presuming a creative approach from the interpreters and this was taken seriously in search of the content that seems close to the music ideas of the composers. Tartini release is more of a classical Populista approach. It deliberately breaks the instructions given by the composer in the name of some other features introduced by the composer himself.

POPULISTA presents GIUSEPPE TARTINI




















Populista presents Ralf Meinz, Karolina Ossowska, Mikołaj Pałosz play Giuseppe Tartini La sonata il sol minore al terzo suono

Violin by Karolina Ossowska
Cello by Mikołaj Pałosz 
Sound, recording by Ralf Meinz


Cover art work by Aleksandra Waliszewska
Layout by Piotr Bukowski
Recorded in Królikarnia - Xavery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture

1. La sonata il sol minore al terzo suono, bars 1-3
2. La sonata il sol minore al terzo suono, bars 3-10
3. La sonata il sol minore al terzo suono, bars 38-41

Apart from being a prolific Italian composer, Giuseppe Tartini was also a violin teacher and a theorist. Out of close analysis of intonation, he became interested in a long known phenomena of mysterious third tones which sometimes appear when only two sounds are articulated. He called them „il terzo suono” and was the first one to develop a written down theory of what we now know as combination tones. In his "Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienza dell'armonia” published in 1754 he laid out a mathematical proof of third tone's pitch as either sum or difference of the other two articulated pitches. The idea behind the performance of Karolina Ossowska (violin), Mikołaj Pałosz (cello) and Ralf Meinz (recording) was to search for the combination tones in Tartini's own music. In order to make it audible, we decided to follow the path of a never-mention-his-name-because-you-will-be-in-debts composer, also interested in combination tones, who famously stretched durations of each note in a serial music piece which resulted in one of the milestones of minimal music.

*

One of three completely different albums intersecting in a territory of interpretation, overinterpretation and misinterpretation of music – beloved themes of Populista. Lucier and Ferrari albums may seem heterodoxical if not simply wrong, especially if compared with previous phonographic releases. Yet literally speaking, none of them violate the instructions of the scores and Populista is perversly proud to state that this time nothing forbidden by the composers have been done here. „Tautologos III” and „Chambers” are radically open forms, presuming a creative approach from the interpreters and this was taken seriously in search of the content that seems close to the music ideas of the composers. Tartini release is more of a classical Populista approach. It deliberately breaks the instructions given by the composer in the name of some other features introduced by the composer himself.