The erotic dimension of new music, driven out by the avant-garde, was the starting point of this year’s edition of the Sacrum Profanum Festival. On the stage of the Nowa Huta Cultural Centre, the pianist Małgorzata Walentynowicz and ”the Hamburg Queen of the Avant-Garde” Frauke Aulbert presented some audiovisual perspectives on sexuality in music, and in this way we passed the threshold of the Zone of Discomfort.

The first part of the concert Série Rose was a combination of voice and electronic music with the shadow theatre in the composition (your name here) by the Irish composer, the creator of a “new discipline” –Jennifer Walshe. In the screen we could see an outline of the slender silhouette of the performer, combined with the voice of a girl talking about her first kiss. At that very moment the artists asked the question about the role of the composer and the performer on stage and about the idea of acousmatic listening to music performed live. The project’s dynamics and complexity on the sound and visual levels, undoubtedly go in line with the composer’s manifesto – ”everything is important”.

The initial vocal/electronic stories about the first experiences of one’s sexuality soon turned into a kind of erotic-sound poetry (on top of that, in a club-like context). Immediately after the slightly comical Sonata Erotica – a vocal interpretation of an orgasm, performed seriously with great professionalism – time has come for Johannes Kreidle’s performance. Videos found on the Web, showing the fetishization of the woman’s body were shown against the noise background. No doubt, Série Rose stirred up high emotions, dividing the audience.

The next two duos: Vanessa Wagner with Murcof, and Barbara Kinga Majewska with Bartek Wąsik, played the concerts not-so-obvious in the context of this year’s leading theme of the festival. Their interpretations of canonical compositions by John Cage, Erik Satie and Philip Glass gave the audience a few moments of respite. Murcof, a Mexican electronic music composer, with the pianist Vanessa Wagner, took us on a long journey, judging by the number of the musical worlds visited. They jointly built the landscapes, sound and repetition microtextures, returning motifs produced by the piano, synthesizers and modulators had a soothing effect, similarly to the combination of the vocals, the piano and electronic music in the concert by Bardo duo – Barbara Kinga Majewska and Bartek Wąsik. Their songs captivated us with their subtlety, sophistication and economy. We can’t wait to see their debut record released.

The final piece - The Voice of Trees by the legendary creator of continuous music Lubomyr Melnyk and the tubaist Melvyn Poore offered an intensive experience of the micro- and the macro-cosmos. Repetitively tingling composition that we could hear in its full instrumental version for the first time after 30 years – two pianos and three tubas (one part each instrument played live, and other recorded earlier in Krakow) poured a cascade of sounds on the audience. The artist strongly senses the power of sounds of nature , encouraging the listeners to reflect on the nature and the complexity of biological processes which take place in the forest ecosystem, rendered by the cascades of sounds Melnyk played on his piano (he can play as many as 93 thousand notes per hour!). The conclusion is simple: let’s listen to the trees as long as they are here.

Four By Two is just the beginning of this year’s edition of Sacrum Profanum, but we have already visited the regions of sound ranking from the erotic experiments in the shadow theatre, to the rhythmically pulsating sound of the heart of the woods. But we have only started a trip along the festival’s musical paths.