Everything started in January 1959. It was when the first autonomous composition was created at the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio, which had been established only 2 years earlier. The piece marked the beginning of Polish electronic music, and 60 years is an entire era! What seemed at that time to be new, impossible, abstractly alluring, today sounds with a note of nostalgia and fits into the overwhelmingly popular trend of retromania, which was also characteristic of the old avant-garde. We can’t deny that we miss the old school!

Etiuda na jedno uderzenie w talerz (Study on One Cymbal Stroke) by Włodzimierz Kotoński was the first of its kind. To celebrate the Study’s 60th birthday, Polish composers were commissioned by Program 2 of Polish Radio to create works inspired by the piece. “Birthday Party” album is a recording of this unique concert.

Drogi is my hommage to Polish Radio Experimental Studio, a pioneering center for electraocustic music, and one of the Studio`s outstadning composers - Bohdan Mazurek.

Jacek Sienkiewicz

The studio became a meeting place for Eugeniusz Rudnik and Krzysztof Penderecki who, guided by the former, made his first forays into the fascinating world of electronic music. In the early 1960s the duo created over 30 movie and theatre scores. At first, scared of the high voltage inside the studio’s tape recorders, Penderecki leaves most of the work to Rudnik. However with time the two composers achieved great creative synergy, and their work seemed to take place in an atmosphere of ‘boyish horseplay’. They became homo ludens incarnate.

The film 15 Corners of the World includes simul- taneous audio and images. Images do not supple- ment the music here, nor does the music simply illustrate the photos. Meanings, senses, feelings, and scenes are created where those two spheres cross. Without vision, there is no “moving of the viewer’s imagination, the inventory of his feelings, experiences, and associations”, as Eugeniusz Rudnik defines the goal of art in general.

The Polish Radio Experimental Studio has been, since its founding in 1957, a source of music associated with space imagery. The uniqueness of sounds, robotics, automation, interplanetary travel, spectacular crashes, and explosions of suns – all these could be accommodated in the  imagination of a creative sound engineer. Points of reference consisted in the sounds made by planes, rockets and weapons, whereas space emptiness and silence were incarnated by nebulae spatial sound, filled with reverb and echo. Almost always when there was a need in a film for the voices of green aliens, Warsaw engineers were asked for help.

"If You play Mozart slower, it will sound like Beethoven"

(The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, dir. Guillaume Nicloux)

The credit for making me aware of the above quote must go to Michał Mendyk. Actually I should just leave it at that as it perfectly illustrates my approach to music in general. I remember when I got my first grammophone (that was a very long time ago). Apart from the standard rotational speed it offered also two additional ones: 16 and 78 rpm. I was able to slow down any record I wanted to - and as a matter of fact I used this opportunity a lot. Out of curiosity. In hope that a bad record would sound interesting. In order to here more...

Kåre Kolberg is a pioneer of electroacoustic music in Norway, and he was the first Norwegian composer to write a piece of computer music (in 1973).  […] Kolberg’s basic ideas for electroacoustic form were shaped in his first works made in Sweden and Poland in the early 1970s, and he used a collage technique with easily recognizable elements that communicated well with audiences. Later, he extended his technique by adding a more electronic-sounding and abstract timbral palette.

Jøran Rudi

Making music is to be in constant dialogue with your own aesthetics and preferences. In inspired moments, you can get surprised by where the process leads you. And in welcoming circumstances, there are no limits or sneaking doubts that disallow you to try out any possibility. The electronic music made by Eugeniusz Rudnik unquestionably encourages such a position. Working with his music has been greatly inspiring, and the nature of his music feels strangely fitting to my own approach to electronic media.

Maja S. K. Ratkje

Samples:  Bohdan Mazurek „Pensylvania Dream” (1-4), Tomasz Sikorski „Echoes II” (5)

If I were to look at the ideas promoted by the Experimental Studio against Małe Instrumenty’s practices, I would refer to the concept of music which is – for certain reasons – “impossible”.

In all respects, Andrzej Bieżan (1945-83) was an original and creative composer. His main means of expression were intuitive creation based on general assumptions and well balanced improvisation respecting proportions typical of traditional narrative.

The Polish Radio Experimental Studio, founded in 1957, was as an experimental centre and a production unit of the Polish Radio but it has been mainly known as one of the most import_ant creative centres in Europe. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Warsaw centre hosted numerous guests from abroad including almost all of the most distinguished epresentatives of the art of electro-acoustic music: Lejaren Hiller, Franco Evangelisti, François-Bernard Mâche, Vittorio Gelmetti, Roland Kayn, Christian Clozier, Tamas Ungvary, Nigel Osborne, Stephen Montague, Bengt Emil Johnson, KĂĽre Kolberg and Arne Nordheim. Nordheim often visited “the black room” on Malczewskiego street where the main production space of the Experimental Studio was located. The emotional bond with his Polish friends was as import_ant to him as music. There were many private meetings with Józef Patkowski, Witold Lutosławski and Włodzimierz Kotoński. The composer’s relations with engineers were also more than professional. After flying from Oslo to Warsaw, Nordheim went from the Okęcie airport straight to the hospitable home of the Rudnik family and “ritually” consumed his favourite Polish dish: white borsch with sausage. Already at the dinner table, the composer discussed with Rudnik their tactics of planned technological and artistic activities . Then, subsequent Nordheim’s compositions were born during long hours spent together on Malczewskiego...

The album is a natural alliance of the producers working with the Polish Radio Experimental Studio's archives and the curators of the exhibition dedicated to intersections of technology and body in art of the 1960s and 1970s. The thematic "common" field was operationally called "early Eastern European sound art", although none of us really meant it literally. Undoubtedly, we were all interested in such works of art where the sound was approached from the perspective of other art disciplines. Leaving film, theatre, dance and radio art to other occasions, we mainly focused on visual arts, performance and architecture – mostly due to their conceptual connotations. We followed the two fundamental issues discussed in the 1960s: object and space.

The American flavour of minimalism has an "urban" soundscape that emerges from frenetic human interaction. It is the environment that informs a lifestyle and thus, informs the composer. On the other hand, the Dutch style of minimalism is what I'd call "Hippie minimalism". It is informed by culture of activism, as seen in Louis Andriessen's Workers Union and by the pragmatism within the Dutch ethic. This brings me to what the Polish style of minimalism is mostly known for as well as personal experiences and environment of its creators. It's been called "mystic minimalism" and at its core there is an inherent interest to express emotions in a grandiose way.

'PRES Scores' contains original and new realisations of five out of seven Studio's published scores. These are pieces by Andrzej Dobrowolski, Bogusław Schaeffer and Włodzimierz Kotoński 'performeed' in PRES by Eugeniusz Rudnik and Bohdan Mazurek and as Bôłt Records commissions by Lionel Marchetti, Thomas Lehn, Philip Zoubek and Wolfram, Arszyn and Piotr Kurek, Marion Wörle and Małe Instrumenty. The scores are a fascinating chapter in the Studio's history. Not only because of the insight into first attempts to write down electronic sounds, being a great material to analyze or displaying links between music and graphics. It is mainly due to the fact that even in those few published scores it is explicitly visible that their utilitarian functions were rapidly replaced with the experimental ones.

Presenting yet another collection of 'absent' works is an evidence of their creators' critical approach and lack of consent to political pressure, under which they had to function. This album is only a selection of compositions belonging to this trend. Under the wing of the Warsaw Polish Radio Experimental Studio emerged dozens of hours of socially engaged music. These compositions to a various degree alluded to the current events but also pointed to the broader historical and humanistic context. Visible references to "here and now" do not lower the artistic rank of those works. What is more, they mysteriously make them more universal.

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 are known only to a limited number of insiders.

Marcin Lenarczyk in his portable studio improvises as often as composes or designs soundtracks. The studio is two amps (guitar and bass guitar), turntable, sampler, loop station. Even though the set up brings to mind decades of early concrete music, today it is hardly a tool to break in to new music territories. It is rather a tool to play (with). It is in the muscles and gestures of its users, just as much as 'Goldberg Variations' have been embodied in hands and posture of Glenn Gould.

The KEW stands for a group of three composers: Krzysztof, Elżbieta and Wojciech, founded in 1973 when they were all students at the Fryderyk Chopin Higher State School of Music in Warsaw. They were a group of friends who enjoyed spending time in good (i.e. each other's) company and collectively coming up with new compositions. They weren't average students. Elżbieta Sikora had already been on probation (1968-1970) in Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris under the guidance of Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle and had performed in France several times. Wojciech Michniewski (who had graduated with honours from the Department of Composition, Conducting and Theory of Music) was giving numerous performances and was supposed to shortly obtain 'Orfeusz', the main award for the best performance of a Polish composition at the Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music. Krzysztof Knittel was already successful in the area of popular music and he did not cease searching: he took part in courses on the Fortran programming language and attended lectures on mathematical and humanistic logics and on theories of probability. He was also a listener of a cycle of professor Tatarkiewicz's philosophical lectures.

Instrumental versions of the pieces from Polish Radio Experimental Studio arranged by probably the most unusual ensembles of contemporary music - zeitkratzer. International virtuoso group is specialized in this kind of provocative approach to electronic music. Taking as starting point the fact that instrumental techniques are indebted in electronic music, zeitkratzer proves that what in the 60. was possible only thanks to recording studios, nowadays can be played live, on violins and pianos. This is exactly what happen on 4th of September in Sejny's White Synagogue, where the premiere of the repertoire took place. After listening to hours of compositions from the Studio, musicians have selected six of them to be reinterpreted for the concert. They represent different stages of Studio's history and were prepared for instrumental covers by zeitkratzer during its members stay in Residential Arts Centre in Wigry. Now the selected six compositions are presented as a CD album.

Sentinel Hypothesis is a monograph 2xCD album by one of the most important figures of Polish Radio Experimental Studio. Bohdan Mazurek started working in the Studio in 1962 as a recording engineer but soon became its prominent composer, both of illustrative (film music) and autonomous music. His compositions are known for their solicitude for sound and extensive use of traditional instruments - not as neutral or random base for composition but rather as a material presupposing its limitations and ways of usage. The selection of compositions on the album are dated from 1967 to 1989 showing a wide spectrum of his interests from 'classical' electronic music to what would today be called field recordings. The CDs are accompanied by thorough analysis of the compositions by one of the most active researched of Studio's history, Boleslaw Blaszczyk, as well as comments of their author, Bohdan Mazurek.

The album's core is the recording of the concert dedicated to Polish Radio Experimental Studio in London's Cafe Oto (CD2). Electronic pieces from the Studio were turned into instrumental structured improvisations performed by legends of improvised music, members of AMM John Tilbury and Eddie Prévost, coming back to playing violin, Phil Durrant and two Polish musicians of the younger generation - guitarist Maciej Sledziecki based in Cologne and Warsaw cellist, Mikolaj Palosz. In their solo sets, they presented their individual variations on the compositions created in the Studio. Their collaborations were framed by graphic scores based on original recording and prepared by Denis Kolokol. His attempt was to make use of the idiosyncratic instrumental language of each of the improvisers; language that owes so much to the development of electronic music. CD1 consists of original, remastered recordings of the pieces that were performed in Cafe Oto as they seem to be among the greatest productions of the Studio.