As you may know, we at tQ are teaming up with Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz Institute for a competition in which we’re asking for brand new music using an archive of samples from the pivotal Polish Radio Experimental Studio.
There’s a €2,000 prize on offer for the best entry, and you can find out how to send us yours here, along with a little history on one of the most important, although often overlooked locations in the history of 20th century music.
The archive of sounds which you can download to create your track bristle with possibilities, and to show you just what’s capable, it’s our delight to be able to share a few specially commissioned pieces from some of Poland’s finest modern producers.
First up is Wojciech Kucharczyk’s composition ‘Bolero La Rave’, which builds from disparate thuds and clanks into a chaotic, glitchy masterpiece of a track.
Speaking in an interview with our partners at Culture.pl (full interview here), the longstanding Polish producer says of his sampling: "I used many samples in my composition, probably around 30. They provide wide and undiscovered possibilities. Imagination is the limit. And they don’t necessarily have to work with retro-stylised recordings, the effect can be completely modern and up-to-date."
Next, take a listen to a banger of the highest order in the shape of ‘SEPRENATION’ by A_GIM, aka Polish producer, keyboard player and fixture of the Wrocław scene Agim Dzeljilji.
In his interview (in full here), he describes his first contact with PRES: "When I was a schoolboy, my mother gifted me Bogusław Schaeffer’s Mały Informator Muzyki XX Wieku (A little compendium of 20th Century music). I didn’t understand much of it, I was probably 6 years old. But the charts, the photos of advanced sound-generating tools and the magical-sounding names of great composers such as Stockhausen and Xenakis must’ve programmed my brain strongly enough that I put all my attention as a kid and teenager into experimental and electronic music."
And finally, multi-instrumentalist Bartosz Weber has presented just how forward thinking the PRES’ archive can be in the right hands, with a glitchy and deconstructed track called ‘In The Garden Of Press Pack’.
Of his favourite PRES artists, he says in his interview: "For a long time it was Eugeniusz Rudnik, he’s one of the flagship composers of the PRES. I really like the composition ‘Ptacy i Ludzie’ [Birds and People]. I recently started to really appreciate Witold Szalonek and his combined sounds, his preparation of wind instruments."
To download the archive of PRES samples, and to enter our competition to win €2,000 by remixing it, please click here, where you can also find all the info you’ll need.
