The concert dueing 11th edition of Sanatorium of Sound festival in a cooperation with Department of Sound Katowice
9.08.2025 16:00
Michał Sember
Śreżoga (2025) * 20′
for spatialized guitar
Even before I knew what the harmonic series was, I used it intuitively, producing harmonics on the strings of a classical guitar, and later, an electric guitar. Bringing out individual harmonics can be imagined as holding a magnifying glass to the guitar’s spectrum. This illuminated, purified sound is the foundation of the piece.
Czarny Latawiec
Vox Balanea – the melting world listening (2022) 20′
R. Murray Schafer saw silence as salvation for a noise-polluted world. But silence may prove to be the sound of our catastrophe. A spatial, multi-channel composition composed of field recordings of dying whales and melting glaciers from the research archives of the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), made available as part of the Cities and Memory – Polar Sounds project. The proposed material addresses the transformations of the soundscape caused by climate change.
The title “Vox Balaenae” refers to a composition by George Crumb, now a classic of 20th-century music. He was inspired to write it by listening to tapes recording whale communications. The starting point for this peculiar piece was also a whale. Or rather, its wooden skeleton, towering over the “Republic of the Sun” exhibition at BWA Studio in Wrocław. Both this and the works by Amélie Laurence-Fortin and Kuba Bąkowski, included in the exhibition, made us reflect on the changes in the soundscape of the North. Ecology is acoustic, and climate change, which is contributing to the melting of permafrost and the extinction of species, bears its sonic imprint. R. M. Schafer saw silence as salvation for a world polluted by noise. But salvation comes after death – silence, as well as the absence of sound, may prove to be the sound of our own catastrophe
❝A whale skeleton washed up on the beach. Apart from the wind whistling between its ribs, it makes no sound. Dead ice. Melting at the foot of a shrinking glacier, it drizzles, splashes, and leaks. Ice left alone is silent; a living whale weaves its characteristic songs.❞
10.08.2025 15:00
Piotr Bednarczyk
blended (2020) 7’30”
for tape
The quadraphonic composition is based on the techniques of sampling delicate noise structures recorded from a close perspective and simple synthetic sounds, which freely intermingle in space. The interactive modelling applied in the composition process was developed for the series of workshop activities thar refer to the concept of Jerzy Rosłowicz’s Neutrdrom.
Alina Dzięcioł
Sklejka (2025) 9’30”
for electronics
The composition combines several diverse color and narrative ideas, seemingly incoherent in content, as emphasized by the formal “cuts” used. Over time, the contrasting textures begin to interact with each other in a somewhat more logical and predictable manner.
Alina Dzięcioł
Life Simulation Sewing Machine (2025)* 11’30”
for electronics
In this composition, the austerity of sound is humanized by creating intervallic micro-motifs with hard timbres. Mechanical structures are broken by contrasting textures with sparingly used reverb, representing, as it were, the seeds of human emotional layers, which, within the form, appear as a dialogue between extreme elements.
* world premiere
