Cactus music aleatoric archive#

Twenty people using wooden branches to stroke the spines on a cactus, in aleatoric order, determined – as is always the case with Cage – by the ancient Chinese I Ching (Book of Changes. This is one of the American philosopher/composer’s most wacky works. Sign up online: as a parasite of wood? If so, then what about cacti? It is on these as well as other amplified plants that John Cage urges us to play in his piece Branches. The performance will be preceded by a short workshop. We invite you to perform the piece with us. Another paradox: the eye and ear experience disparate sensations. The result is a natural, southern acoustic landscape filled with cicadas, but which looks quite different. In the MPO production hall she will present a piece from the tradition of sound art – tens of ”membraphones”, laced with nylon wires with varying engine-controlled tension. The Greek artist Marianthi Papelexandri-Alexandri, who also specialises in deconstruction of the instrument, has decomposed flutes, trumpets and guitars in numerous installations.

Some extras are used, but mainly just the hands. Alukot technically isn’t an installation but a balet – a true choreography of the hands, arms and elbows dancing on a wooden table. What about hands? Hands will also be of importance during Installactions. A choreography for hands and percussive sounds on a wooden surface (2011) The latter – a 30 second noise piece – has become a German pop culture hit, mocking the rigoristic copyright law.Īlukot. His performances prove that music may be composed out of anything and everything, using the most simple tools – from stock charts (Charts Music), through ironing (Kinect Studies) to 70200 samples (Product placements).

If there is anyone who truly continues the Cagean mission of thinking about music and thinking through music, it is the young German artist Johannes Kreidler, a recent favourite of the Darmstadt courses and other festivals. A cabinet of curiosities, a gallery of lifeless bodies animated by acoustic waves. Pre-recorded and analised sounds of instruments are played by speakers placed in chordophones strung from the ceiling: violins, violas, cellos, guitars, even a piano. Handplay in Wunderkammer by Jagoda Szmytka, a Pole living in Germany, is a kind of autopsy. Many of the festival’s installations have an underlying theme of the instrument and its deconstruction. Laboratory, organ under construction (2012) What is Zimoun preparing for the Nowy Teatr hall? Another contrast is the one between the monochromatic, static surfaces of his installation and the inner movements that drive it. A wall of sound is created – not a loud hum though, rather a mosaic of murmurs, a hum of waste. The Swiss native delightfully places out hundreds, if not thousands of boxes with various attatchments – balls, pinwheels – controlled by miniature electric engines.

Zimoun is one of the world’s most prominent young installation artists. These interiors – a far cry away from last year’s polished Królikarnia palace and airy gardens – will be home to the music installations festival’s second edition. It is a layer of living, odoriferous history. The most unusual of all is the floor – what seems to be a hard earthen floor, black and spongy, is in fact a thick layer of grease that had gathered here over the years from thousands of Sanitation vehicles and was trampled by hundreds of boots of it’s employees.

Cactus music aleatoric archive#

Tall lampshades, the worker’s metal lockers, wooden archive drawers. The main hall with its vaulted ceiling, cantilevers and skylights. In the end, this is not a museum but the old MPO depot, a dark industrial space. We sharpen our vision differently and prick up our ears in a new direction. A festival, a review, an installation gallery. A form, which in its very essence is meant to intervene in everyday urban space or even conventional exhibition space, is supposed to challenge habitual seeing and hearing, provoke and disturb, becomes an object of contemplation itself, a kind of museum artefact. Several stories below them – a modern music festival and installation festival.Īn installation festival: what a paradox. Surrounding it are tower blocks, balconies, and their residents out for an evening beer and barbecue. This former City Sanitation Department (MPO) building now houses the newly opened Nowy Teatr headquarters - awaiting adaptation and modernisation. In the dense urban matter there is a void: an empty parking lot and a low production hall. Old Mokotów, a district of villas, embassies, a church and a hospital.