★Bolt
Plays PRES
“CD • 12-page multifolded insert • digipack. Polish Radio Experimental Studio is the first official series of CD releases dedicated to the music produced in the legendary Studio. Established in 1957 by Józef Patkowski, it was among the first institutions of that kind in the world with only Paris, Cologne and Milano preceding the Warsaw one. Despite that, unlike their foreign colleagues who quickly became the most important figures of the XX century music, Polish composers working in the Studio a…
Novella
The CD album entitled Novella consists of two electro-acoustic, not-experimental pieces composed in 2002 and 2004, and an almost 50-minute long composition from 2007-2009. This is what I noted down in a digital form; it's time frozen, time which has acquired a certain shape which, however, is by no means an emotional rendering of those gone days, hours, and minutes. Aquaforta is only a piece called Aquaforta; it's the result of the artistic relationship with Agata Zubel and Cezary Duchnowski. T…
Travel Notes
Most of Bogusław Schaeffer’s electroacustic works emerged in the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. Among the works produced there in the years 1966-1978 were 15 autonomous compositions, 6 illustrations for the film and 11 works for the theatre and outdoor spectacle. The “Travel Notes” album assembles 5 out of 10 works created by Schaeffer outside Warsaw (in Berlin, Belgrae and Stockholm among others) in the exceptionally fertile eighth decade of the 20th century.
The Notebooks
In the archive of the Janacek memorial in Brno, lies a somehow odd treasure: a series of very tiny notebooks where composer Leoš Janáček used to annotate scraps of spoken language he would hear during his daily life in musical notation. Each one of those speech-melodies, as we call them today, taken roughly from 1904 till 1928, is a small sound photograph of a mundane and ephemeral situation, a fragment that let us blink into an acoustic reality long gone. Janacek practice and obsession re…
Musikaliszer Pinkos
This music was inspired by “Musikaliszer Pinkos” – a collection of more than two hundred Hebrew religious hymns and Chassidic songs compiled and published by Abraham Berenstein in the year 1927 in Wilna (nowadays Vilnius). The selection of songs from “Musikaliszer Pinkos” was used by Arturas Bumšteinas as a source of fragmentary pitch material and re-interpreted in a new context of electronic sound and cut-up composition. All music was recorded with the use of Soviet-era Russian synthesiz…
Ghost
“The story of this album began with the idea of composing my response to Melodie – one of the Louis Andriessen’s pieces dedicated to Frans Brüggen. At first, I searched for information on the circumstances in which Louis Andriessen’s specific composition was created. As it has quickly turned out, however, I’m not so much interested in these circumstances any more. I have realized that this piece is a presentiment but also a goodbye. A farewell to the spirit of community. The community whic…
Populista Box
A lovely 3cd box collecting the latest Roginski efforts on Bolt records. "An imperial person complained to Mozart that there were too many notes. A merely imperious trumpeter said pretty much the same to John Coltrane. Here’s a kind of answer. Polish guitarist Raphael Roginski, perhaps most widely known for his work with the Shofar trio, slows up and spaces out Coltrane’s music, unwinding some of those much covered test pieces – “Equinox”, “Countdown”, “Mr PC” – and taking them almost to stallin…
Plays Henry Purcell
Raphael Roginski, guitar. Olga Myslowska, voice, synth. Sebastian Witkowski, synths. “I feel a very intimate relation with English culture thanks to my admiration to the music of the 60s. But then there is also William Blake’s Albion, Benjamin Britten and the myths. I have been puzzled by why do I constantly hear the same thing in the music of Bert Jansch and Led Zeppelin, Joy Division and Dead Can Dance. And then in the music of PJ Harvey and Traffic. And in Henry Purcell too, and in John …
Liminal Studies
Wojciech Blecharz is somewhat an exhibitionist. An emotional one, of course. With his music, he doesn’t create a vision of the contemporary world burdened with disasters, being neither a “digital indigent” nor a fan of algorithmic passages. He’s not even recognized as a political rebel who discloses his outlook on life between the notes. In the centre of his interest remains what’s closest to him – the human psychological condition in the context of experiencing crises and break-ups, trauma…
Zaswiec Niesi?cku and other Kurpian songs
Populista is proud to present a new music reinterpratation by Raphael Roginski. After Coltrane, he is now paired by Genowefa Lenarcik to perform music from Kurpie. The singer is a daughter of legendary Stanislaw Brzozowy, famous caretaker of kurpian folk, the tradition she is now developing. According to Roginski, the only musicians he can compare her with are bluesmen from Sahara. Together, they form a duo just as unconventional as natural. In the end, Zywizna in kurpian language stands for Nat…
Pupation of Dissonance
The latest Hubert Zemler’s release entitled “Pupation of Dissonance” makes a sort of tribute to percussion music history.The title work by Hubert Zemler relates to a gradual emancipation of percussion sounds throughout the 20th century. From timbre ornaments in symphonic music, through discovering the beauty of sounds previously regarded as “non-musical”, to marriage of electronic devices with acoustic instruments. The album’s programme is complimented by Steve Reich’s iconic minimal music work …
Dissociative Counterpoint Disorder
Andrzej Chłopecki, the late critic and animator of the music scene, wrote extensively about Szymański's music as well as supporting the composer by means of his longtime role with the Warsaw Autumn festival. Chłopecki puts things thus: "the formal structure is beautiful while stylistic expression is calculated: for Szymański's music is a continual game." He then offers precedents in Johannes Ockeghem and Anton Webern, deducing that Szymański's "guiding principles would be speculation and con…
Umbrae
The four works on this CD, ranging in date from 2004 to 2014, form an integral part of Andrzej Kwiecinski’s creative development and at the same time demonstrate his particular affinity with music for strings. Umbrae (2004) for string quintet. Mural (2008-10) for string quintet. Luci nella noote V (2014) for four string quartet. Contregambilles (2014) for string quartet. After studying composition, musicology and Baroque singing (countertenor) in Warsaw, Kwiecinski moved in 2005 to The Hague, wh…
Et vidi caelum novum
'Composing as contemplation of a musical archetype' - this is the best recapitulation of what Georgescu says about his own music, pointing to Jung's archetypes of collective unconscious. What is most crucial and powerful in these works is not how originally the composer captures the musical material, plays with it and reshuffles it. One could even say that Georgescu does not compose and does not 'arrange' sounds, but rather contemplates archetypical figures and turns towards basic component…
Stille Post (Radio Works: 2003-2011)
Outstanding 4xBOX with 36-pages booklet that includes the bulk of Alessandro Bosetti compositional work of over a decade in which "I found shelter in the simultaneous intimacy and distance of radio. I feel happy, thrilled and relieved to be able to share those five pieces wich form a coherent unity and trace a personal itinerary while making use of translations, misunderstandings, travels, microphones, headphones and sonorous telephone games as creative tools."It includes five radio compositions…
Grand Tour
Tilbury left communist Poland in 1964 and his visits grew rare. He got involved with Cornelius Cardew’s Scrath Orchestra and the AMM; later he went on to become known for his performances of Morton Feldman’s compositions. Meanwhile Zygmunt Krauze, aside from his work in the Musical Workshop, grew to be his generation’s leading conceptual composer, mainly thanks to his reception of Wladyslaw Strzeminnski’s unism. The worlds of Krauze and Tilbury were separate, but adjacent.
The Musical Worksh…
plays Parallel Winter
Voice, guitar and zither by Richard Youngs. Composed, recorded, mixed and mastered by Richard Youngs.Motto of Populista Winter Triangle came about on 13th of December, 2014. It was a cold and windy day, a classic of pre-winter Warsaw, cold, wet, transparent yet at the same time grey, or perhaps mostly grey. It was also a day of the first Warsaw show of Richard Youngs in Komuna// Warszawa. Not fully by accident, there was a piano in the room, which made Richard propose performing 'ParallelWinter'…
Playing with a Dead Person
When you contacted me about the duos, I thought there is nothing more original than playing with a dead person […] which is curious because Derek Bailey is very much alive, especially when we hear his voice and I feel he's sort of sitting here, in the studio, and he's waiting for me and I'm waiting for him and we're not quite sure what's gonna happen. „Derek and I always wanted to do a duo recording together and we never quite managed that. Within the later years that we were trying to set somet…
Pianophonie
'Forte e piano' is one of Serocki's lesser known and acclaimed works, while 'Pianophonie' is considered his greatest masterpiece. However, it's worth remembering that 'Forte a piano' and 'Pianophonie' are interrelated. It's difficult to imagine the latter without the former. Serocki was born in Torun. He studied composition with Kazimierz Sikorski and piano with Stanislaw Szpinalski at the State Higher School of Music in Lódz and graduated in 1946. He continued in Paris, studying composition w…