Events
Marcin Dymiter (Poland), Paul Wirkus (Germany)The Life and Death of Janina Węgrzynowska
The musical evening will consist of three concerts. The first one, performed by Marcin Dymiter, references the soundtrack to the performance / installation by Ludomir Franczak – The Life and Death of Janina Węgrzynowska. Dymiter will transpose a very concrete experience related to the existence and creative output of the artist onto the abstract dimension, devoid of visual specificity. The concert also promotes a new album of music composed for Franczak’s work, released jointly by the Kaiser Söze Foundation and the Theatre Confrontations Festival and available exclusively as a cassette tape.
The second concert is a showcase of Paul Wirkus’ latest album Carmen et Error, which is construed as the author’s fragmentary self-portrait, focused on minimalism and subtle electronica but also incorporating elements of underground rock, drawings and texts, and altogether justifiably approximating the “record by artists” subcategory.
As a finale – and the evening’s third concert, both artists will play together.
Marcin Dymiter
Emiter explores the territory of electronica and improvised music. He creates sound installations, radio plays, film music, scores for plays, exhibitions and public spaces. He orchestrates and performs music to silent movies. He conducts sound engineering / recording workshops and carries out educational activities disseminating the idea of field recording. Creator of sound maps, originator of the “Sound Postcards” project and the “Field Notes” project. Has collaborated with visual artists and dancers, including Anna Baumgart, Joanna Rajkowską, Anna Witkowską, Ludomir Franczak, Risa Takita, as well as with poet Marcin Świetlicki and novelist Daniel Odija. Member of music projects: niski szum, emiter_franczak audio video performance, Flora Quartet, BAZA.
Music producer. Co-creator and curator, alongside Ludomir Franczak, of the mikro_makro Festival and of other sound projects. Participant in music workshops in Poland and abroad, including workshops by Le Quan Ninh, Andrew Sharpley, John Butcher, Robin Minard. Recipient of the scholarship from the University of the Arts in Berlin, short-listed in the Netmage International Multimedia Festival Competition in Bologna. Recipient of the scholarship of the Marshal of the Pomeranian Voivodeship and of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2011), as well as of the Visigrad Foundation (2012). Member of the Polish Association of Electroacoustic Music.
Paul Wirkus
Independent musician, composer, thinker. In particular, interested in solo forms in avant-garde music. Minimal electronica solo, including the laptop as his instrument of choice and a form of performance interlinked with it or an organic situation involving a few unsynchronised small appliances and a person operating them – these have all been a frequent theme of his works in recent years. As emphasised by David Stubbs in The Wire magazine review of Wirkus’ solo record, “Déformation Professionnelle represents an advanced and eloquent statement about the relationship between the electronic and the human”, or – as observed by Keith Moline, also in The Wire, “Wirkus is no cutting-edge iconoclast – more significantly, he is a serious musician deserving wider attention.” At present, the artist is researching and providing analogies to the above-mentioned current electronic forms by reaching out to classic acoustic forms, such as “solo percussionist”, as pioneered by Cage, Stockhausen, Feldman in the 1950s-60s and developed further by Xenakis, or the archaic solo form of the acoustic guitar delta blues, recorded in the 1920s by such great masters as Blind Willie Johnson, or by the ones discovered much later – and for that reason never recorded in their own time – Fred McDowell.
Paul Wirkus performs his own compositions alongside archaic ones in their original arrangement and, by creating tension between these two forms (and two temporal planes), opens up an entirely new dimension. Palpable electronic elements, which initially belonged to an inadvertent strategy, oscillate between minimalist percussion music and a partially obsessed acoustic guitar. The territory that is currently being traversed by the artist includes: the body, memory, mono sounds, time, perfectionism and irregularities, coarseness – everything that Roland Barthes might have had in mind when he referred to “le grain de la voix.”
Apart from his extensive solo work, Paul Wirkus often expresses himself as part of a duet, e.g., Ekkehard Ehlers/PaulWirkus – both live and in studio; the duo’s Ballads was critically acclaimed by The Wire magazine and lauded record of the month (an enthusiastic review was penned by none other than David Toop); he also performs with Marcin Dymiter: together, they have created Mapa, an electronic project renowned for Fudo, a record considered a contemporary classic and praised not only in Poland but acknowledged by The Wire magazine as such as well. A regular collaborator of the LENZ Theatre in Parma, Paul Wirkus lives and works in Cologne.