Released on Populista
Composition by Alvin Lucier / Rinus van Alebeek
Concept and recordings by Michal Libera and Rinus van Alebeek
Voices by Michal Libera, Rinus van Alebeek and Barbara Eramo
Text overwritten in Calabrian villages on top of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities"

The whole idea came from reading Italo Calvino's „Invisible Cities” while travelling among unknown cities of Calabria. The similarities have been striking. The book became a guide, Kublai Khan – an emperor of the land in the south of Italy and the idea – irrepresible urge to actually perform this similiarity. The original text by Calvino was overwritten with some information – including the names of towns – distorted, filtered and overdubbed by its local reflections. Armed with it, Rinus van Alebeek and Michał Libera set out for a dozen of excursions into Calabrian towns to drink coffee, recite, talk, read, listen, perform, play, record, play back... or: blow, bow, rub, explode, scrape, walk, ignore, talk, screw, dance, whistle, which are all suggestions of Alvin Lucier to make large and small resonant environments sound. The material recorded during these attempts to make invisible cities of Calabria sound was then composed by Rinus van Alebeek to form a road-audio-book.

Alvin Lucier Chambers [excerpt]

Released on Grosser Laerm
Concept, recording and composition by _Kelo and Michal Libera
Voices in this excerpt by Léna Pellandini-Simányi, Wojtek Ziemilski and Klaus Kinski
Text overwritten in Warszawa on top of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities"

It is no more than half a dozen of words. That will do to overwrite three tales of Italo Calvino’s invisible cities and see Warszawa emerging. It instantly embraces Maurilia, Zirma and Ersilia. It makes their new geography. They reterritorialize. They distend and fit the turnpikes of Warszawa. We follow.

Invisible City [excerpt]

Released on Bolt Records
Concept, recordings, composition and voice by Michal Libera
Saxophone by Martin Kuchen
Sound design by Ralf Meinz
Text in this excerpt is assembled from words by Walter Marchetti, W.G. Sebald and Michel Serres

Sound essay, hörspiel, reading, electroacoustic music, plunderphonics, sound portraits, collection of songs or simply a sonic take on melancholia. Disposition or disease, melancholia is a rich psycho-territory full of apathy, depression, withdrawal, self-dismissal, hallucinations and alien voices. And hearing. In particular, suffering of the ears and peculiar way of listening related to it. In one of the footnotes in his essay „Stanzas”, Giorgio Agamben points out that the well known melancholic posture of a man leaning his head against the hand is actually an attempt to get away from suffering of his ringing ear. This observation bringing together melancholia and sound is the main coordinate of the piece's development. It departs from melancholic listening turning women into birds depicted in the opening chapter of W.G. Sebald's „Rings of Saturn”. The voice imperceptibly meanders between reading, commenting and distorting the tales ramifying the interpretations of the initial situation. It is accompanied by hundreds of samples from classical music to birds and saxophone playing by Martin Küchen.

Tyto Alba [excerpt]

Released by Grosser Laerm
Composition, concept and recordings by Michal Libera
Voice by Aleksandra Kapis
Text by Franz Kafka

Grosser Laerm

Unreleased, premiered as sound installation at "The Estate" exhibition in Krolikarnia - Sculpture Museum in Warsaw
Concept, recording and composition by Michal Libera
Litophones by Tony di Napoli
Voice by Sibylle Friedberg
Sound design by Ralf Meinz
Text by Immanuel Kant

One of the two features of "The Estate" exhibition is an extraordinary collection of sculptures developed by von Rose family in 1930-ies, in a small town of Eastern Prussia called Döhlau (now: Dylewo). Consisting mainly of Adolfo Wildt marbles, it was violently put to an end during World War II when the property was demolished and ruined. Sculptures remained underground for over 50 years until excavations by an archeological crew directed by Tomasz Mikocki were undertaken. What then became the collection of National Museum in Warsaw are sculptures distorted and disintegrated. Due to chemical processes some of them were turned into "sand" while others gained new colors and shapes. Most of the items seem nothing but random stones, others - oddments of once great pieces of art.

Looking at them - whether you call them stones, sculptures or remains just doesn't matter - the history seems at the same time continuing and mute. No recordings have survived WWII. More than that - it is barely possible that any of them had ever existed. We don't know the local soundscape of 1930-ies, past voices of the inhabitants are inevitably gone - everything there was to hear back then got disintegrated immediately, incomparably faster than the disintegration of the stones which proceeds until now.

It is disintegration where the voice and the stones meet at the same time becoming the topic of sound essay. "Bildung" consists exclusively of recordings of today's Döhlau remains, marble from "cave di marmo" in Carrara used by Adolfo Wildt, sculptures from "Majątek" exhibition and limestone of one of the first stone instruments ever - litophone. They are all brought together with the voice of Sibylle Friedberg, von Rose family descendent who is recollecting her past memories and reading fragments of philosophical texts. One of them comes from Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Judgement" which also delivered the essay's title. It is not easy to translate it in a word. "Bildung" means education in a sense originating from its Enlightenment axioms; it means shaping and integrity. It also means formation, not excluding its chemical connotation. All the meanings were of importance to Kant when he attempted to clear out his vision of art referring to salt crystallization. All of them are also fundamental for the exhibition bringing together art, historical fall of a social formation and disintegration of stone.

Bildung [excerpt]

PLEASE NOTE: this is NOT an fragment of the performance, it is audio track for trailer and it is a rough version of it
Unreleased, premiered as theatre for the ear in Nowy Teatr, Warsaw
Concept, libretto and composition outline by Michal Libera
Voice by Pete Simonelli
Trombone by Hilary Jeffery
Percussion by Andrea Belfi
Sound design by Ralf Meinz
Text by Thomas Bernhard

The plot of „Kalkwerk”, one of Thomas Bernhard's masterpieces, oscillates around the main protagonist's unsuccessful attempt at writing „Studium” – treatise on listening, „the most philosophical of all senses” and the one which „had never become subject to a magnificent study, prominent dissertation, not even a solid article” (Bernhard). According to widespread interpretation, treatise on listening is nothing but an allegory; a symbol of failure, work not only unfinished but not even started, endlessly postponed, continually distracted and finally paving the road to the degenerate crime. Seen from this existential perspective, as in famous theatre adaptation by Krystian Lupa, defeat in writing about listening is a mere narrative background, anecdotal course of events which only serves to display grand metaphysical drama which is at the core of Bernhard's real interest.

"Kalkwerk / Studium" is rooted in an entirely different reading of „Kalkwerk”. Listening here is not an incidental alibi to examine more profound realms of human's existence. Quite the contrary. There is no drama in Bernhard outside of listening or perhaps the drama is the listening itself. Construction of the book seems to support this thesis. It is not built of characters but rather overheard and misheard voices – uncertain gossips, never fully reliable rumours and contradictory tales written down and given to the reader in a fragmented and sometimes disembodied versions. „Kalkwerk” is thus firstly a book on listening and more importantly a book to listen to and it is in the latter one where the piece displays its structural majesty. Seen in this way, it is questionable if treatise on listening had never been written. It is true that it was not conceived by Konrad, the main character of „Kalkwerk”. Yet one can argue that Bernhard wrote „Studium” himself, aware of the fact that the theme of listening calls for liteterature for the ear rather than the eye. 

If Austrian author wrote the treatise himself, the only possible way to depict it is to follow the auditory features of the given discourse, reconstructing Bernhard's theory of hearing.

Kalkwerk / Studium [rough take of audio trailer track]

To be released by Absurd Records from Athens
Concept, montage and composition by Michal Libera
Saxophone by Martin Kuchen

More information soon

Truth Be Told

Cosmos-Cosmos [excerpt]

Michal Libera - dramaturgy, libretto
Tomasz Nosinski - voice
Le Quan Ninh - percussion
Ingar Zach - percussion
Witold Gombrowicz - text

Fragments of "Cosmos" by Witold Gombrowicz in English (translated by Danuta Bockhardt, Yale, 2005): 

A soaring bird appeared
—high in the sky, immobile—
vulture, hawk, eagle?
No, it was not a sparrow,
and by the very reason of not being a sparrow
it was after all a non-sparrow,
and being a non-sparrow,
it was,
in a small way,
a sparrow. 

When the door opened, the cavern of the small,
low room that gave off a bitter, oppressive odor,
like that of a laundry room, or bread, or herbs,
that cavern of EEEEEHM.

I looked around,
nothing, silence, calm,
I looked again.
A hanging man. 
Ludwik? Ludwik.

He was hanging.
And yet this FACT was hanging,
a hanging fact,
a Ludwik-like fact was hanging,
hitting one on the head,
a fact that was big, heavy,
hanging down,
something like a bull roaming about on the
loose,
an enormous fact on a pine tree,
and with shoes 

like a, b, c, d 

What consistency!

A stupid corpse was becoming a logical corpse
—though the logic was both heavy-handed
… and too much my own … 
personal 
… so …
separate … 
private 

A stupid corpse – a logical corpse.
They are like those magnetized balls,
they search for one another,
and when they’re close: pam 
pam, pam, pam, pam 
And its hanging brutality,
pam, pam, pam, pam,
was skillfully uniting with pam, pam, pam, pam,
sparrow—stick—cat,
it was like a, b, c, d,
like one, two, three, four!
What skill!
What zeal for logic.

Why couldn’t he have strangled the cat, hanged it? 
I had strangled it. 
Yes, I had hanged it. 
I had hanged it, strangled it, 
but he could have … 
He could have hanged it! 
But if he had not hanged the cat (because I had hanged it), 
he could have, in any case, hanged the sparrow …
and the stick!

Come closer,
touch,
enfold,
embrace,
and love
to the point of madness.

I began to walk across the field.

Cosmos-Cosmos [excerpt] - in French

Cosmos-Cosmos [excerpt]

Michal Libera - dramaturgy, libretto
Tomasz Nosinski - voice
Le Quan Ninh - percussion
Ingar Zach - percussion
Witold Gombrowicz - text

Fragments of "Cosmos" by Witold Gombrowicz in English (translated by Danuta Bockhardt, Yale, 2005):

Have a better look at that mark on the ceiling. 
Don’t you see anything?
It’s like that arrow, 
the one we spotted on the ceiling in the dining room.

Silence, the heat, my head lies heavy on the pillow, a feeling of faintness.

If it’s an arrow, it must be pointing to something. 

A needle driven into a tabletop. 
A pen nib driven into a lemon rind. 
A nail file driven into a box. 
A safety pin driven into a piece of cardboard. 
A nail driven into the wall, right above the floor.

The arrow didn’t point to anything in our room, we could tell at a glance, so it was necessary to extend its course through the wall, to see if it connected with anything in the hallway, and then continue the line as accurately as possible into the garden. 
Go to your own for whatever turns you on. 

We are moving. 
The horses are trotting, slowly. 
A tree. It approaches, passes, vanishes. 
A fence and a house. 
A little field planted with something. 
Sloping meadows and rounded hills. 
A rack wagon. 
A sign on a barrel. 
A car passes us at full speed. 
Shaking, squeaking, rocking, trotting, 
the horses’ rumps and tails 
objects are unimportant, the landscape is unimportant, the only thing that is left is appearance and disappearance. 
A tree. 
A field. 
Another tree. 
It passes
like one, two, three, four
between the two processions: 
of objects and of clouds. 

Inside one of the caves something was hanging. 

A stick. 
A small stick, about an inch long. 
It hung on a white thread, not much longer. 
It was hitched over a jagged brick. 
Nothing more. 

Who hanged it, 
why, 
for what reason? 

A thousand reasons – unrelated to the sparrow.
Pure chance then? Indeed. 
The hanged sparrow— the arrow in the dining room (and) the arrow in our room — the stick hanging on a thread — something was trying to break through and press toward meaning. 
We pulled our pants on.

Cosmos - Cosmos [excerpt] - In Polish

The piece is meant for live presentation which brings together sound from speakers with projection of text (in blackout). 

All recordings, edits, libretto and mix made in Napoli by Michal Libera.
Instrumental music by Luciano Cilio. 

Lethe is an acousmatic opera comprised of recordings taken exclusively in Napoli. They are inlaid with the music of Luciano Cilio, short-lived local composer. The town itself is the place where opera buffa was born in early 18th century. It favored local dialects over official language, mundane heroes and crimes over gods and myths, real voices over operatic singing. All these features still constitute the vibe of the city which seems to be an opera on its own. Being in Napoli means being surrounded by recitatives and arias or rather by the unique mixture of both. The local dialect with its phrasing and intonation turns everyday public quarrels and calls into music gestures. They point right to the very heart of an opera – a landscape of characters, as Robert Ashley famously put it. 

The conceptual and structural framework of Lethe comes from topography of purgatory. It was often represented as an underwater mountain steming out of the sea straight into paradise. It is no
surprise that the Phlegrean Fields, the land on which the town of Napoli is situated, has long been considered the place of purgatory. According to local beliefs, the latter one is in the least a transitory state. Quite the contrary: the souls of anonymous dead people remain there forever becoming traders with the living. Perhaps this commerce explains why so many of the actual local calls blasted off
into the air remain there, unanswered. Or maybe they are answered but inaudibly.

LETHE. Opera Buffa Acusmatica [Overture]

Michał Libera – composition, libretto
Barbara Kinga Majewska – composition, voice

ODMA (in Polish odma means “pulmonary emphysema”) in live setting is a tableau vivant with a soundtrack based on the late Franz Kafka’s novel "Josephine, the Singer or The Mouse Folk", one of his most visionary sonic inquiries. It is a story of highly admired, as well as controversial singing-whistling virtuoso – Josephine, a mouse in the nation of mice, who is very likely not to have ever made any sound at all. ODMA is a study of her dubious talent. It takes into account biographical facts from Kafka’s late years when he was suffering from tuberculosis which strongly affected his speech. Visually, the performance is inspired by one of the photographs taken in the tuberculosis sanatorium. It captures a patient undergoing sun treatment – an enduring, everlasting, motionless process of curing one’s throat. ODMA turns it into a tableau vivant, in which one of the actors is an exquisite Polish singer, Barbara Kinga Majewska.

ODMA [Excerpt]

Sociologist working in sound and music field since 2003, recently involved mostly in producing and staging sound essays and other experimental forms of radio art and opera which brought him to collaborate with Martin Küchen, Pete Simonelli, Ralf Meinz, Komuna// Warszawa, Hilary Jeffery, Apartment House and others; producer of conceptual pop label Populista dedicated to mis- and over- interpretation of music as well as series of reinterpretations of music made in Polish Radio Experimental Studio (Bôłt Records); curator of various concerts, festivals and anti-festivals and music programs for exhibitons; member of art group called „Grupa Budapeszt”.

Michal Libera

Popular tracks