One and Many

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Editor's info:
Zbigniew Karkowski studied composition at the State College of Music in Gothenburg, Sweden, aesthetics of modern music at the University of Gothenburg's Department of Musicology, and computer music at the Chalmers University of Technology. After completing his studies in Sweden, he studied sonology for a year at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Den Haag, The Netherlands. During his education, he also attended many summer composition master courses arranged by Centre Acanthes in Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, France, studying with Iannis Xenakis, Olivie Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, and Georges Aperghis, among others. He works actively as a composer of both acoustic and electroacoustic music. He has written pieces for large orchestra (commissioned and performed by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra), plus an opera and several chamber music pieces that were performed by professional ensembles in Sweden, Poland and Germany. He is a founding member of the electroacoustic music performance trio Sensorband. Karkowski has lived and worked in Tokyo, Japan for the past eight years, and is active in the underground noise scene there. Professionally active in contemporary, industrial, rock and experimental music for the last 15 years, Karkowski has presented works in over 30 countries in Europe, North America, Australia and Japan. For him, nowadays, it is the artist's responsibility to travel, to work and to settle down all around the world, in order to learn and understand cultures and traditions, and to find the truth about ourselves and our planet. This geographical, political and social exile is necessary to achieve true creation.
These life conditions lead to a radical conclusion: the traditional definitions of music are irrelevant and music theories and music as a cultural concept must be destroyed. That is what we find in Karkowski's latest works, in which his main concern is to produce pieces out of electronic sounds and acoustic walls on scores developed from the architecture of ruins. His latest opus is the exact development of years of theories and practices. As many of Karkowski's pieces, this is a highly delicate yet physical work, which can be seen as an ode to loudspeakers.