POPULISTA WINTER TRIANGLE | Awaiting

A month before a new Populista Winter Triangle 

Awaiting

- BRPOP 14: Barbara Kinga Majewska and Emilia Sitarz play Franz Schubert Winterreise

- BRPOP 15: Richard Youngs plays Parallel Winter

- BRPOP 16: Joanna Halszka Sokołowska plays Franz Schubert Winterreise

Official release date: 25/01/2016

Release and pre-release parties

21/12/2015, Komuna// Warszawa, 19.00: pre-release performance by Joanna Halszka Sokołowska, Izabela Chlewińska, Michał Libera and others (please note: 17 hand made and signed albums containing pre-release material of "Joanna Halszka Sokołowska plays Franz Schubert Winterreise" - available for sale)

21-28/12/2015, XS, 7 hand made and signed albums containing pre-release material of "Joanna Halszka Sokołowska plays Franz Schubert Winterreise" - available for sale

22/12/2015, Copenhagen, concert: Richard Youngs plays Parallel Winter

25/01/2016, DZiK, 20.00, concert: Barbara Kinga Majewska and Emilia Sitarz play Franz Schubert Winterreise, official release party, day 1

26/01/2016, Królikarnia, 19.00, concert: Joanna Halszka Sokołowska plays Franz Schubert Winterreise, official release party, day 2

26/01/2016, Eufemia, 21.30, DJ set: Michał Libera plays Winter Music, DJ set, incl. B-sides and unreleased material of new Winterreises in Populista

***

Motto to the upcoming Populista Winter Triangle came about on 13th of December 2014. 

It was cold and windy, a typical Warsaw-style pre-winter day, wet, transparent and grey, well, mostly grey, and also the day of Richard Youngs' concert in Komuna// Warszawa at Playback Play. Almost by accident, there was a piano in the room which made Richard propose to perform "Parallel Winter" which I didn't know anything about. When introducing the piece to the audience a couple of hours later, he mentioned playing it only few times before that day. It takes something between 15 and 45 minutes to perform, I remember him saying, because there are as many lines of the text as there are winter days. So it is all about going through the piece, I still recall his voice, not unlike going through winter. 

I have never heard a better introduction to Winterreise by Franz Schubert. 

GRAND ENSEMBLE

Grand Ensemble

6-channel sound installation 
for 
Przełomy, National Museum in Szczecin

Michał Libera, recordings, found footage, montage
Ralf Meinz, sound design

Premiere: 17/12/2015

Commissioned by Piotr Wysocki for permanent exhibition in National Museum, Szczecin (room to be shared with Grzegorz Hańderek). Installation material consists of field recordings and found footage only, all related to what the French neatly call Grand Ensemble. 

JOHN TILBURY | Grand Tour

The one and only

John Tilbury, Grand Tour, Poland, October 2015

14/10, Kraków, Unsound Festival
John Tilbury / Robert Piotrowicz

15/10, Łódź, Muzeum Sztuki
John Tilbury / Samuel Beckett / Celine Condorelli / Wojtek Traczyk

27/10, Warszawa, Studio PR im. W. Lutosławskiego (20.30)
John Tilbury / Zygmunt Krauze / Szabolcs Esztenyi / Hubert Zemler 
play 
Morton Feldman (Three Pianos), Terry Riley (Keyboard Studies), Cornelius Cardew (Solo with Accompaniment), Tomasz Sikorski (Zertreutes Hinauschauen, Echoes II), Zygmunt Krauze (Stone Music, One Piano Eight Hands), Christian Wolff (Tilbury 3)
program may change slightly

30/10, Warszawa, Muzeum Rzeźby im. X. Dunikowskiego (18.00)
John Tilbury / Hubert Zemler improv
John Tilbury plays Morton Feldman (Palais de Mari)

More information

Tyto Alba on Tour

Tyto Alba LIVE

Michał Libera: voice, text, concept, composition

Martin Küchen: saxophone

Ralf Meinz: sound design, electronics

featuring 

Barbara Kinga Majewska: voice

September dates: 

21st: Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Warszawa

22nd: Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź

23rd: Śródmiejski Ośrodek Kultury, Kraków

24th: Galeria na Czystej, Wrocław

25th: Centrum Amarant, Poznań

26th: TBC, Berlin

27th: Teater Alabtross, Goteborg (part of Tilde project)

more details soon

Tyto Alba. 13 portraits ofMelancholics, Birds and their Co-Hearing

released on Bolt Records

A bit too depresing for me

- Frans de Waard

Sound essay "Tyto Alba", initially conceived as studio album now is reworked for live performance or a modest chamber opera for a saxophonist, sound designer, two readers and a number of “caged tape-birds”. It is a sonic take on melancholia, the sounds of melancholia, the hearing of melancholia, obsessions and pains, pleasures and loops of melancholia; a landscape with Max Ernst, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Michel Serres, W.G. Sebald, Giorgio Agamben, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georges Perec, Javier Marías and many more.

***

The notion of melancholia covers a vast semantic territory from art history to global politics to most intimate and idiosyncratic psycho-geographies. It tends to be more vibrant in times of transition, even if only imagined, and it is far from coincidence that last decades witnessed „Rings of Saturn” by W.G. Sebald, „Melancholy: Genius and Madness in Art” exhibition in Neue Nationalgalerie or world awards winning „Melancholia” by Lars von Trier. The visual and conceptual realms of melancholia are well rooted in our collective representations. Yet until now, it has never been a subject of a thorough audio-analysis. "Tyto Alba" is a unique inquiry into sounds of melancholia. More than that, it shows that it is an inevitably aural phenomena, which only through sound can reveal some of its features.

"Tyto Alba" has been conceived as a theoretical research and a recording studio experiment which resulted in a sound essay published by a leading contemporary music label, Bôłt Records. Blurring the edges between sound genres, it is a horspiel and a reading; a piece of electroacoustic music as well as plunderphonics; an attempt at sound portraits or simply a collection of songs. All in all, it remains a sonic take on melancholia. But forget weepy piano music and sad boys' songs. The sound of melancholia is extreme and obsessive. It is painful and pleasureable. Apathy and self-dismissal come not from weary music but from sonic hallucinations, acousmatic sounds and alien voices arriving at a special mode of hearing. In one of the footnotes of „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 is the main coordinate of the piece's development. It departs from melancholic listening which turns women into birds and was portrayed in the opening chapter of W.G. Sebald's „Rings of Saturn”. From there on, the leading voice of the performance imperceptibly meanders between reading, commenting, quoting and misleading the tale – an interpretation of the Sebald's initial intuitions. Narration wriggles from Auguste Rodin to Bedřich Smetana, from Georges Perec to Alvin Lucier. Their music and words are accompanied by hundreds of found footage samples bringing together laryngological patients, paranormal voices, death rattles, monaural beats, tinnitus sounds but most of all birds, in particular barn owls. They are all mirrored by saxophone playing by the one and only – Martin Küchen.

Live performance of "Tyto Alba" heads for an overwhelming and immersive seance in which all the aforementioned sounds merge and collide to form an audio phantasy of melancholic listening, a room-full of sound in which a listener loses a sense of space - designed by one more one and only sound engineer in Europe, Ralf Meinz.

ONE NIGHT STAND in Eufemia

Alessandro Facchini / Michał Libera / Ralf Meinz 

Eufemia
08/09/2015 (Tuesday)
21.00

The only day the three of us meet in the same town and by some coincidence it is Warsaw. 
We decided to celebrate. 
Post-Smutaz DJ duo with a great guest from Tubingen playing vinyls, CDs, mp3 files, maybe waves as well as digital sound generators.
There's gonna be depression, noise and beauty. 
I think. 
We'll see. 
Come.

Weekend passed and resulted in a different triangle.  
An update. Ralf had to stay in Germany. Piotr Kurek will come. 
Smutaż after Smutaż, apparently.
Exclusively. 
One night only.

Alessandro Facchini / Piotr Kurek / Michał Libera 

Eufemia
08/09/2015 (Tuesday)
21.00

POPULISTA presents JOHN COLTRANE and LANGSTON HUGHES

BR POP 13

Populista
presents
Raphael Rogiński
plays
John Coltrane and Langston Hughes
African mystic music

Official release concert: 16/06/2015, Pardon To Tu 20.30
CD will be available at promotional price

1. Blue Train
2. Equinox
3. Lonnie's Lament
4. Walkers With The Dawn
5. Mr. P. C.
6. Countdown
7. The Negro Speaks Of Rivers
8. Grand Central
9. Seraphic Light
10. Naima

Guitars by Raphael Rogiński
Voice by Natalia Przybysz

Compositions by John Coltrane (1-3, 5-6, 8-10) and Raphael Rogiński (4, 7)
Poems by Langston Hughes

Recorded by Michał Kupicz
Mastered by Sebastian Witkowski
Produced by Michal Libera
Cover art work by Aleksandra Waliszewska
Layout by Piotr Bukowski

Published by Bôlt Records
Distributed by Monotype Records

Populista is a CD series curated by Michal Libera for Bôlt Records

Voice-over | Prague Quadriennale

VOICE-OVER

Michał Libera & Wojtek Ziemilski

Prague Quadriennale

Charles Bridge, Prague

22/06/2015

People reading out loud, together, on the street.

Such a simple form of collective demonstration. Perhaps the purest way of expressing common will and the most basic strategy of claiming the space. Being together, acting together and wanting together - naivety to the extent of being suspicious if not embarrassing. And rare.

It did happen, in Poznań. People stood together and they read. Nothing more. It was a public reading of the text of Rodrigo Garcia’s performance "Golgotha Picnic" and a protest against censorship. But these readings were also a claiming of a space, and a performative gesture of speaking-to-possess. At the same time, the taking over was executed as a theatrical performance with the use of the most ephemeral tool - voice.

The disturbance in the public sphere by an act so modest seems symptomatic. It reveals the background of the question "who owns the public space". How does the space become owned, even possessed and fixed with content? What are the strategies of spreading the message and reaching the others? And who are the others? How efficient - performative if you like - can people get with their voices? Can they reach universality? Can voice strategies become universal?

"Voice-over", a city tour and a live presentation, will form a two-chapter performative tale on owning, possessing and appropriating the space. The execution by Wojtek Ziemilski and Michał Libera will use techniques of reenactment, impersonation, playback and different forms of electrical and acoustical amplification to highlight the importance and ambiguity of the voice in claiming the space. Playing with the idea of voice as the ultimate human property, a signature and a proof of reality, they will explore the agency of the speakers (in the double meaning of the term). Referring to the neutrality and transparency of the air – voice's medium – they will deal with the politics and proxemics of open spaces.

The walk in the city will relate to owning and possessing and take as its stage one of the most crowded spots in Prague - the square in front of St. Salvador church. Can we take any of the Golgotha Picnic Poznań voice strategies and use them in this particular environment? Once in the conference space, this question will become a more private and intimate one.

CALVINO in Torun | Sluchalnia

CALVINO opera & radio play
in framework of SŁUCHALNIA

curated by Małgorzata Burzyńska

30/05/2015
CSW Znaki Czasu 
Toruń

21.00: DOMINIK KARSKI / PAWEŁ KRZACZKOWSKI, Między nimi a wiecznością nie było więcej niż minuta i pół

Concept inspired by Italo Calvino: Dominik Karski, Paweł Krzaczkowski, Michał Libera
Music: Dominik Karski
Libretto: Paweł Krzaczkowski
Performance: Flute O'Clock
Tape: Alessandro Facchini, Wiktor Milczarek
Scenography: Paweł Modzelewski
Voice: Paweł Krzaczkowski 

more here

22.00: _KELO & MICHAŁ LIBERA, Invisible City

Live mix of recordings and composition by _Kelo & Michał Libera 

Composition is based on text by Italo Calvino adapted by Michał Libera and read by Cédric Degrange, Roberta Deambrosi, Barbara Kinga Majewska, Daniel Muzyczuk, Léna Pellandini-Simányi, Agnieszka Tarasiuk, Cédric Van Der Poel, Wojtek Ziemilski, Wojtek Zrałek-Kossakowski.

more here

Tony Di Napoli | Majątek

fot. Igor Omulecki

Tony Di Napoli - stones / litophones
08/05/2015, 22.00, Królikarnia, Warszawa

facebook event

Concert accompanying "Majątek" exhibition

Tony Di Napoli plays stones. The ordinary ones, found in random spaces, of unidentified origin and unspecified sound as well as precisely chosen ones which are selected, sculpted, tuned and finally turned into litophones. One of the oldest instruments in his case is made of limestone which is over 300 million years old. Small blocks of stone differ in size and shape what results in rigoriously various tones making his instrument a fully microtonal one. They don't sound like the stones we know. They sound like electronic compositions we might have heard. In his hands, they also come in close relation with the acoustics of space they sound in. And Królikarnia has got a lot to offer in this realm. 

BOND | OFF-Biennale

BOND
Curatorial opera for the Opening of 41°N 93°W exhibition

Prepared for OFF-Biennale

24-26/04/2015

Mazart Gallery
Elnök utca 1.

Budapest

Objects: Celine Condorelli, Goldin + Senneby, Igor Krenz, Kazimir Malevich
Space: Robert Rumas
Sounds: Arturas Bumšteinas, Pierre Schaeffer, Edgar Varèse, Iannis Xenakis
Words: Daniel Muzyczuk, Michał Libera
Spirit: Michał Mendyk
Binding: Noviki

Daniel Muzyczuk says:

When two curators are handed with a tape they embark on a travel that would lead them through a series of questions that seems mock at the first glance. The seemingly dated medium is a proof of conspiracy that starts in the depths of manifestos of avanguarde artists, goes through catacombs electroacoustic studios and ends in apexes of abstraction based money flows. Their fellow travellers (artists: Celine Condorelli, Goldin + Senneby, Igor Krenz, Robert Rumas, Kazimir Malevich and composer: Arturas Bumsteins) supply them with hints that point to the hidden message of the tape itself and the recording technology as such. No need for corpses in this crime story. They are replaced with multitude of sparse information that questions the common meaning of abstraction and the way it turns into something concrete. Or is it the other way around?

The show is an opera. Libretto serves as the guided tour and music as one of the objects or architecture of the show. This ensemble points towards a renewed meaning of abstraction as uncannily unstable and political. The objective is to challenge the politicality of art by means of fiction and staging.

The exhibition shows four works that point towards something much larger then themselves. Two of them question the structure of field of art. Kazimir Malevich's Black Square on White 1985 is a copy, but not a work of art. It contains everything that was already in the original, and much more thanks to its secondary nature. Moreover it is not a piece of abstraction, because if we think about it as a painting it is depicting reality, that is an original. In this way it is based on a similar act that we can observe in the next piece.

Igor Krenz found a scientific book written in Polish titled Morfologia matematyczna w teledetekcji (Mathematical Morphology in Teledetection, 2010) and bought a pile of copies. The show then made its task the embodiment, in the form of sculptures and videos, of the diagrams, graphs, and images in the book. These images, extremely abstract for those not educated to decipher them, were given objective, material reality thanks to artistic practice. The videos were based on blurry images used to make points about teledetection, but their aesthetics had much in common with structural film. Based on the book’s diagrams, the sculptures were close to the geometrical, minimal, abstract art of the 1960s. Everything made the viewer feel like being in a familiar sort of art show (especially in a time of nostalgic revivals). But Krenz didn’t stop at this obvious stage: His pile of copies became “catalogues” that were resold at the exhibition. This operation self-reflexively pointed out the frequent illegibility of art writing and the hermeticism of art itself, as seen from the point of view of outsiders. This time figurative schemes were turned into pieces of abstract art by the sole materialization and act of presenting them in a specific context.

Celine Condorelli's piece Structure for communicating with the wind is a real obejct, a metaphor and a sound device. A piece of architecture that divides the space and creates a certain atmosphere. But it is something more: the curtain is a materialization of a passage from a word based music score by Cornelius Cardew.

This aspect leads to the final piece, a video by Goldin+Senneby The Discreet Charm. It stages a miniature theater piece on abstraction of banking system in an art gallery. The speaker frequently gives obvious suggestions that what he is actually discussing is in fact the creation of value in the artworld. The last piece serves as the introduction of the method.

They are all becoming characters in a story that unfolds in an opera by Arturas Bumsteinas, Robert Rumas, Michał Libera and Daniel Muzyczuk. That tells a well known story of the 1958 Brussels Expo Philips Pavillion by Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varese in a new way, which points towards the hidden objectives of the project and its unexpected and disastrous consequences which can be observed in such distant regions as economic debt policies and contemporary art discourses.

BILDUNG | "Majątek" Exhibition

Sound essay "Bildung" will be premiered as a sound installation at the opening of the exhibition "Majątek"

Królikarnia, Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, Warsaw
15/03/2015, 18.00

Michał Libera - recordings, montage
Ralf Meinz - recordings, sound design
Tony di Napoli - performance on litophones

About "Majątek" exhibition (in polish)

Curated collectively under direction of Agnieszka Tarasiuk. 

The team: Katarzyna Kucharska-Hornung, Karolina Puchała-Rojek, Krzysztof Pijarski, Jan Sowa, Michał Libera

One of the two features of "Majątek" exhibition is an extraordinary collection of sculptures developed by von Rose family in 1930-ies, in a small town of Eastern Prussia called Döhlau (now: Dylewo). Consisting mainly of Adolfo Wildt marbles, it was violently put to an end during World War II when the property was demolished and ruined. Sculptures remained underground for over 50 years until excavations by an archeological crew directed by Tomasz Mikocki were undertaken. What then became the collection of National Museum in Warsaw are sculptures distorted and disintegrated. Due to chemical processes some of them were turned into "sand" while others gained new colors and shapes. Most of the items seem nothing but random stones, others - oddments of once great pieces of art.

Looking at them - whether you call them stones, sculptures or remains just doesn't matter - the history seems at the same time continuing and mute. No recordings have survived WWII. More than that - it is barely possible that any of them had ever existed. We don't know the local soundscape of 1930-ies, past voices of the inhabitants are inevitably gone - everything there was to hear back then got disintegrated immediately, incomparably faster than the disintegration of the stones which proceeds until now.

It is disintegration where the voice and the stones meet at the same time becoming the topic of sound essay. "Bildung" consists exclusively of recordings of today's Döhlau remains, marble from "cave di marmo" in Carrara used by Adolfo Wildt, sculptures from "Majątek" exhibition and limestone of one of the first stone instruments ever - litophone. They are all brought together with the voice of Sibylle Friedberg, von Rose family descendent who is recollecting her past memories and reading fragments of philosophical texts. One of them comes from Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Judgement" which also delivered the essay's title. It is not easy to translate it in a word. "Bildung" means education in a sense originating from its Enlightenment axioms; it means shaping and integrity. It also means formation, not excluding its chemical connotation. All the meanings were of importance to Kant when he attempted to clear out his vision of art referring to salt crystallization. All of them are also fundamental for the exhibition bringing together art, historical fall of a social formation and disintegration of stone.

POPULISTA (ONLINE) presents ENRIQUE IGLESIAS plays ENRIQUE IGLESIAS

BR POP@2

Populista
presents
Enrique Iglesias
plays
Enrique Iglesias
Rhythm Divine
 

Recorded live in Warsaw, 2nd of September 2000 at Gwardia Stadium, Warsaw

Mixed by Ralf Meinz

Produced by Odyssey

Layout by Piotr Bukowski

Published by Bôłt Records

Populista is a CD series dedicated to interpretation, misinterpretation and overinterpretation of music curated by Michał Libera for Bôłt Records. 

Populista online forms margin notes – irregular, quick and polemic. 

 

Enrique Iglesias plays Enrique Iglesias
A youtube found footage classic.

How many times did you give it a listen?
The original.
And the original.
Enough to have it as a new take on Echo and Narcissus?

Echo - the beautiful and the speechless. Repeating.
Narcissus - the beautiful and the appearing. Mirroring.

Their ancient conversation is well known.

Who's there?
Who's there?
Why do you run from me?
Why do you run from me?
Let's meet.
Let's meet.
May I die before what's mine is yours?
What's mine is yours?

Their recent interaction is known even better.

All I need is to look in your eyes.
Look in your eyes.
Say you'll be mine.
Be mine.
I will follow you wherever you may be.
You may be.

Some people ask if it is really him singing?
Well, I always wonder which version they mean.
Here comes one of them.

INVISIBLE CITY

 

Großer Lärm

Invisible City
_Kelo & Michał Libera
 
1. Cities & Memory 5: Warszawa
2. Trading Cities 4: Warszawa
3. Cities & Signs 2: Warszawa  

Recordings and composition by _Kelo and Michał Libera

Text by Italo Calvino adapted by Michał Libera and read by Cédric Degrange, Roberta Deambrosi, Barbara Kinga Majewska, Daniel Muzyczuk, Léna Pellandini-Simányi, Agnieszka Tarasiuk, Cédric Van Der Poel, Wojtek Ziemilski, Wojtek Zrałek-Kossakowski.

Art work by Thomas Hauri

It is no more than half a dozen of words. That will do to overwrite three tales of Italo Calvino’s invisible cities and contemplate Warszawa emerging. It instantly embraces Maurilia, Zirma and Ersilia. It makes their new geography. They reterritorialize. They distend and fit the turnpikes of Warszawa. We follow.

Bandcamp version
or a beautiful hard cover version with printed art work by Thomas Hauri and full adapter text of Italo Calvino to be purchased from Großer Lärm from 22nd of January