Karkowski, polemic
Saturday, June 28th, 2008A friend recently hipped me to Zbigniew Karkowski. He related that at one of Karkowski’s performances the music was so extraordinarily loud that the only way he could get into it was to listen from the parking lot outside, and even then the volume was uncomfortable. Karkowski studied with Xenakis, and the sense of weight and density in his improvised work reminds me of Xenakis’s large, sprawling orchestral pieces. But Karkowski is more destructive, willful, polemic, maybe evil.
From an essay by Karkowski written in 1992:
When an artist creates a new work, whether it’s a new book or poem or painting or piece of music, he presents new information. And what follows with it – new ways to process information. This is a social function, we create options and we have to take responsibility for it. It’s very simple, you either have something to say or, if not, you just create more information pollution. And if there is one general thing that one can say about most of the modern composers, it is that they may write well but they often have nothing to say. All good art has only one purpose – to show man his own true face, and its only prerogative must be the necessity to find out the truth at all costs. The truly evolutionary art must be concerned more with living than creating and must realize that the despair of our culture and civilization can only be defeated by acts of total honesty and a faith in the true condition of all men – perfection and the state of Godhead.
Noisejihad has two live sets by Karkowski up in their space on archive.org:
You’ve got to listen loud to get the full effect. There are a few moments in that second one which are really startling.