I know everybody is laughing at it and I also realize it is missing the point for many reasons but... my phantasy is that MIMEO is today's Duke Ellington Orchestra (Rafael Toral being Johnny Hodges for sure...!). Yes, of course, I know, there is no Duke here but how about everybody's having such a clear and autonomous voice - immediately recognizable sound, particular way of playing, maybe even a method?

I believe this is why the set up in Wigry with separate loudspeakers for each musician worked that well. One, because of the difficulties with setting up the stage for ten musicians and two, because everybody played a single line. So despite a regular church reverb there was no cloud of noise but 10 people really playing at the same time; all the sounds in the air really coming from somewhere or rather from someone.

Clarity of separate loudspeakers also meant that the audience could mix it live. People got it immediately and started walking in search of different acoustic niches of the place. But also the music itself. It looked a bit like a live installation with balance of voices depending much on the listener's position. What you hear on the recording definitely is a Marcus Schmickler position - in Cologne.

But one thing about about the amplification struck me the most. Five of the musicians arrived an hour before the concert, after few hours of flying to Warsaw and then 6 hours of driving to the distant lake area of Northeast Poland. What is the link? Many things have been said about MIMEO and how XXI Century they are, how up to date is everything they do with all the electronics, ways of communicating etc etc. But in Wigry the feeling was also that it was all very easy and simple. No complex amplification systems, no labyrinths of cables and no rehearsals - just a raw, very basic meeting of people who come, plug in and play.

Michał Libera

We are proud to present the first complete release of a milestone of XX century music and a first piece to be called minimalist (by Michael Nyman). In a nearly 5-hour long recording of the piece one can hear Webern's punctualism, Reich's trance music, Ligeti's "clouds of sound" and echoes of Cage's conceptual provocations. The monumental music-theater mystery, on the one hand, evokes long lost spirit of archaic tribal rituals and, on the other, prophesies emancipated, experimental home-made music of the XXI century. Cornelius Cardew, one of the most visionary composers of the revolutionary 60., never attempted to create a masterpiece nor a summa of New Music; be it composed, improvised or experimental. "The Great Learning" is most of all a fulfilled utopia; a universal, egalitarian and unconventional art. Not meant for a concert hall, theater stage, avantgarde gallery or art lofts but performed by a group of amateurs gathered together in an archaic-leftist Scratch Orchestra wandering through the fields in search of authentic, emancipatory experience. "The Great Learning" has become exactly this for many of contemporary visionaries such as Michael Nyman or Brian Eno.

Four decades after its completion, the composition remains one of the most often recalled and imitated masterpiece of counterculture avantgarde. And the most ignored by the music market - official, popular and independent. Most probably because of its ideal and unabated inadequacy towards their consequences and standards.

We have managed to recreate its original scenery and context. In an almost untouched outdoor of Polish north-east and historic, sacral spots of Suwalszczyzna, Cardew's insiders met amateurs from ten different countries to bring back to life this unique ritual. Here, in a form of 4 CD album, comes an audio documentation of this unprecedented event.

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.

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.

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.

Creating music out of nothing is simply impossible. It's better, then, to consciously "re-write history" rather than pretend to be some kind of demiurge [...] An interesting example is the cycle "Five Songs" which includes "Nasdaq" and "Malcowa". Each singer sent me his favorite song which ranged from pop to real folk-music. The recordings of these pieces have been then re-composed and transformed in many different ways. I used spectral analysis to come up with harmony material for the instrumental ensemble. I re-organized the original vocal parts using graphic and number notation; I also made use of the so called "audio scores", which are model recordings, imitated later by the performing musicians [...] Open forms are introduced in order to make more space for the creativity of performers. This increases the possibility that the music will become some kind of communication, that the meeting with the musician becomes a meeting with another man, and not only a performer. And pretty much everyone can understand the language of numbers I used for the notation to approximate the pitch and rhythm intervals in my "Antiradical Opera". Anyone can interpret my "sound scores" by simply imitating the prototype recording. This entails the concept of shared responsibility for the overall effect.

"Ancient Songs" - the first album by Antanas Jasenka for Bôłt Records is the composer's selection of diverse pieces, from different phases and genres of his creative output, as well as a synthetic attempt at presenting his total artistic personality.

Antanas Kučinskas' works from the collection "Parasite" have been based on a method of re-composing, i.e. reworking certain historically and stylistically recognizable material by using techniques "alien" to its nature. For a bunch of newly adopted techniques, including sampling, looping and scratching, Kučinskas coined the term "Parasitic music".

In "Uniforms" collection Arturas Bumšteinas employs, for one, imprecise (e.g. digital) notation of rythm and melody as well as audio-scores, that are standard recordings, imitated later freely by a performing musician. Instrumental material obtained in this manner, in many differing variants, is then often subjected to derivative treatment including editting and further processing. This is why traditional chamber and orchestral music occupies only a tiny place in a composer's overall output - its position being taken over by hybrid genres integrating the means and techniques of instrumental, electronic, and concrete music.