The Zone of Discomfort occupies two theatres in Nowa Huta – Ludowy and Łaźnia Nowa. The festival audience could hear musical stories from two completely different world of excluded artists.

The festival evening began with a meeting with the Viking of 6th Avenue, which was made possible thanks two French ensembles — Dedalus and Muzzix. Moondog’s musical pieces performed in the year of the 100th anniversary of his brith still surpise us with a special and visible fascination with the sounds from the composer’s surroundings. Owing to the rich set of instruments in the hands of skilful and conscious French musicians who appeared on the stage in Ludowy Theatre, we had the opportunity to listen to his stories in the form of madrigals, and to experience a multitude and complexity of the landscapes of sound. Storytelling composition mixed with the sounds of New York streets, the song of birds, and at times even African rhythms. Expressive drums, the trimba – an instrument of Moondog’s own invention – and countless rattles accompanied practically every piece. It seemed that musicians in playing the percussion instruments sometimes needed an extra hand (or leg) to enrich their performance with yet another rhythmical line. On the other side of the stage, four artists met at the piano. The bassist and the saxophonist were standing behind the mikes. A great enthusiasm and good energy shared by Dedalus and Muzzix, combined with their deep insight of Moondog’s compositions resulted in the concert which ended with an enthusiastic standing ovation.

S.E.M. Ensemble with its leader Petr Kotik already awaited the audience in Łaźnia Nowa Theatre. The first piece which transported us to the ”Night from the past” was Jullius Easteman’s composition Joy Boy. It turned out that the great artist, an Afro-American gay activist and rebel, showed various images in his art, including a calmer one. However, it was but a light warm-up before the next pieces on the programme. The Czech composer Petr Kotik, a friend of Eastman’s, presented his own stylistically broken vocal composition which he wrote having Eastman as a vocalist in mind – There is Singularly Nothing. Initially the combination of vocals with instrumentation seemed a not-quite-obvious choice. The text showed that as a whole the piece was conceived as an experiment with time. The musicians toyed with the category of ”beauty”, ironically commenting that the compositions ”are obviously beautiful”, but ”they are beautiful because they are difficult” but during the performance ”nothing changes”, except perhaps ”the composition itself and its duration”. At the end of the first part we heard Joseph Kubera in Eastman’s Piano 2, demonstrating a skilful use of silence in-between clearly articulated sounds.

After the intermission John Cage’s compositions reminded us that the 1970s, to which we moved back in the evening, were the period of Fluxus. And as the performers were faithful to Cage’s ideas, no one in the audience could know how the performance would end. Song Books I, II, if understood literally, should contain the entire array of pieces. The initially melodious story on the acoustic condition, professionalism, relaxation, and government (”best form of government is no government at all!”) was soon distorted. The voices of S.E.M. Ensemble were muffled and glitches used. The artists howled, moaned and wailed, and generated loudspeaker sounds drifting from drone, white noise to aliquot singing. They played not only the piano, the flute and the trombone, but also used some specific objects — suddenly a balloon burst out, someone banged away at a typewriter, Charlotte Mundy scattered grass around. One musician put an apple on a chair at the rear of the room. All of the sudden Petr Kotik appeared on the stage wearing a pig mask, and soon left the stage.. Fluxus - the wave of art ”in process” left the task to put the symbols appearing during the performance in order to the our own resources.

The final Eastman’s Macle was a perfect continuation of the earlier presented project. Were there anything like a world sound library of humanity, one might say that S.E.M. Ensemble covered its entire catalogue. Onomatopoeic fragments dynamically alternated with words, gestures and symbols, dense or sparse. After around twenty minutes, at the culminating point, the vocalists dispersed in all directions in panic, wandering around Łaźna Nowa for a good while. Petr Kotik sank to the floor and ended the project lying on the floor. At the very end, as an encore, we heard Eastman’s charming miniature, one of his last compositions, Our Father, revealing yet another face of the composer – was he looking up to God?

The diversity of Julius Eastman’s output still surprises us, and yet one of his best known pieces – Evil Niger – is still ahead of us.

Today at Sacrum Profanum:
Tribute To Moondog – Cricoteka – 7.00 pm
Drone – Museum of Municipal Engineering – 9.00 pm