XIX WROCŁAW INDUSTRIAL FESTIVAL – ONLINE

The unidentified group BöN avoid describing its music. The members’ compositions are meant to speak for themselves. Enigmatic half-information direct the audience to ambient, drone-like, shamanic, and meditative sounds, which”bridging the West with the East and the North with the South, set out their own ritualistic way in the music of the world”.

A one-man act By The Spirits is briefly: vocal, guitar and backing. Individual creative output, charming with its moderation and minimalism, features the author’s incredible musical gift. At the same time, it is buoyant with its simplicity and catchiness. Spiritualism, Thanatos’ abyss is a significant source of inspiration for Michal Krawczuk.  By The Spirits is his turning towards nature, referring to the spirit of dark dense forests of Lower Silezia and mstique of the primeval mountain Ślęża (Zopten) – a songful ode to polytheism.

Existing since 1998, C. H. District is a project of Mirosław Matyasik that combines industrial sounds with contemporary productions based in intelligent electronics. Even the most picky and extravagant connoisseurs of the musical experimentation get swayed by the District’s strong, dynamic beats, recurring melodic lines and broken rhythms. Be warned though! By no means can C. H. District be associated with monotonous and simplistic versions of techno—in their compositions the familiar design elements of dance music are radically deconstructed, classic bit structures are transformed into an unconventional rhythmic concoction packed with glitches, and heavy bass lines are marked by radical tonal experiments . It is a deep, multi-layered music based on ambient landscapes and complemented with a whole range of often unexpected glitches, noise, feedback and rhythmic clicks. One can hear all kinds of influence and all kinds of elements of electronic and technoid industrial music. Although inspirations with the various fresh sounds of the past is clearly visible, the tracks still show genuine character as well as the musicians’ bravado in experimenting with rhythm—typically associated with the masters of IDM. Music of C. H. District is filled to the brim with originality, creativity, clearness and attention to every detail—every sound has its own clearly defined place. A must-hear for fans of such bands as Autechre, Aphex Twin and Black Lung or such producers as Warp, Hymen, Ant-Zen or Metropolis. From 2012 the band can boast with a new member: Adam Białoń, known from bands such as Garaż w Leeds, Nowy Horyzont and Dusseldorf.

In some cases, the environment in which the artist grew up, has a profound influence on his whole worldview and therefore on all of his works. Dead Factory—the music project of Maciej Mutwil from Sosnowiec—is precisely one of those cases. The reality of the city situated at the center of the most industrialized region in Poland strongly influences the musical creations of the project and is also reflected in the accompanying imagery and visuals. The sounds created by Dead Factory can be described as a dark, minimalistic ambient, combined with industrial elements. The sound of this project evokes bleak visions of post-industrial landscapes full of rust and dust and filled with abandoned mines, factories and remnants of the Cold War era—the abandoned military facilities, ruined hangars and monuments torn apart. Dead Factory’s music is an invitation to this world of rust, concrete, and endless wastelands. The sounds and images of the environment where Maciej Mutwil lives are projected straight into his music—the industrial ambient similar to Lustmord, based on mechanized samples and heavy keyboard backgrounds.

Düsseldorf is undoubtedly one of the pioneering projects in EBM stylistics in Poland. Started in 1989 in Katowice by a singer Adam Białoń and a keyboardist Adam Radecki, the group were an expression of their fascination with experiments in style of early Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire and Front 242. Making music was only a departure point. Later emerged ideas for happenings of typically industrial character, taking place in industrial buildings. What dominated there – apart from voice and spoken manifestos – was the music of machines, “played” live and being 100% acoustic (i.e. gears, wheels and other mechanisms that make sound). In addition to performing, the group published leaflets, experimented with photography and recorded a lot of studio music, gradually departing from the initial assumptions of primitive, spontaneous industrial rhythm and sound. In 1993 the band went on hiatus to realize themselves in different projects. After a 20-year break, Düsseldorf have been revived.

Labeling the band as EBM is an oversimplification – in their music one can hear echoes of new wave and early industrial, completed with Suicide’s synth-punk rhythm, minimalistic and aggressive beats associated with DAF, march-like energy bringing to mind works by Laibach, poesy of lyrics in the spirit of Soft Cell, and all of that flavoured with very punk motility. Düsseldorf are a synthesis ad quintessence of what was most interesting about postindustrial music of the 1980s.

FRETT is a  project by Maciek FRETT of Job Karma and 7JK, curator and director of Wrocław Industrial Festival, Wrocław Underwater, and Energy of the Sound, as well as organiser of concerts under the Industrial Art brand, active on the independent music scene in Wrocław, Poland since the mid-1990s. On the album “The World as a Hologram”  (Ant -Zen, Gusstaff Rec 2020) full-blooded old school industrial collides head-on with IDM/techno, creating a raw palette of analog sounds based on industrial and tribal dance rhythms, punctuated with soulless vocals with elements of noise and ambient. Retrofuturist synth melodies and sculpted electronic rhythms are the signals of doom and destruction.  Additional vocals by Anna Frett.

Łódź is one of the most industrialised cities in Poland. For ears it was dominated by light industry, but even after the transformation in the early 1990s, the infrastructure of the ruined industry still emitted noise. Sound coming from huge weaving plants could be heard all the time, day and night. This created something in a shape of a special sonic sphere – the city sound. And it was exactly that place, dominated by machine noise, filled with factory complexes and huge abandoned storehouses where the band Jude was formed in 1993. Its members used the industry and considered it as a source of inspiration, as well as a working material as such. This relationship between five individuals operating within a music group expanded the range of their communication to include other media, such as video, print, performance. Their visual layer was based on the language of totalitarian propaganda.

The attempt to categorise the group within established genres is pointless – Jude play fierce music of instincts and impulses, overloaded with emotions that might conventionally be described using such terms as industrial-hardcore-punk-noise. Jude treat industrial as culture and an attitude. Jude use noise, music, technology and visual arts as weapons. Jude is rooted in punk, but is industrial by vocation. [rj]

Researcher, sound artist, curator, dj and theorist of culture.

Since the early nineties he’s been involved in experimental music scene of Poland. The founder of many bands (Spear, Ben Zen, Aural Treat, Sub Spa, Quantum Vacuum Oscillator, Nonstate, Moist Hardware). He works in the field of sound art, performance, interactive installations and video art. In his solo performances he critically explores limial territory between physical activity of the body and invisible electromagnetic infrastructure of the hybrid space. He uses custom designed sound devices as well as digital and analogue electronics. In 2024, his next solo album entitled “Unheimliche Symmetrie” (Requiem Records) will be released, as well as a series of 10 albums entitled “Live_Matter” with concert recordings from recent years (Wrocław Industrial Festiwal 2020, Sanatorium of Sound Sokołowsko 2023, Digital Art Festival/Conference Gdańsk 2022, Zine Fest Łódź 2023, as well as gigs from Nantes 2018, Tokyo 2018, Chicago 2019, Berlin 2019, London 2019 and Riga 2018) released by the newly opened Łódź label Alt.Tru, which he runs together with the duo Distort Visual (alttru.bandcamp.com).
Curator and organiser of L’tronica Festival for Electronic Music and Art. Curator of Perform_Tech program at Art Factory in Łódź. Curator and co-curator of numerous events such as (i.a.): four editions of the exhibition “Die Kunst Ist Toth”, concerts by Coil, Noise Makers Fifes, Column One, Troum, Xaviere Charles, Z’ev, Zbigniew Karkowski, Aube, Tetsuo Furudate, Asmus Tietchens, Kasper T. Toeplitz, Marco Donnarumma, Ryan Jordan, Gil Kuno and many others. Between 1998-2002 he ran a record label Ignis Project dedicated to electronic and electroacoustic music. Ignis released records by: Francisco Lopez, Ultra Milkmaids, Vance Orchestra, Indra Karmuka, Crawl Unit, Origami Arktika, Chaos As Shelter, EA and Spear. Associate professor at the Institute of Contemporary Culture, Department of New Media and Digital Culture, University of Łódź (Poland). His academic research focuses on interactive art, tactical media, bio art, network society, surveillance studies and posthumanism. He has published a number of articles on aesthetics of interactive art, history and theory of avant-garde film, video art and experimental music. His book Life in a silicon cage. New Media Art. as a Critical Analysis of Digital Surveillance (in polish) was published in 2018 by Lodz University Press.

Czech noise project since 2013. Magadan represents a newcomer on the European Power Electronics/Industrial scene. Originating from Czech Dark Ambient project Stor  the two member line-up, made of of M.K.Vermin and Guldur, portrays their views on disturbing themes related (not only) to the history of political/social oppression. Persecution, misery, revolt and dissent expressed by roughness of sounds and scenes – mixing harsh industrial samples with distorted synths, broken keyboards and peculiar archival sound-voice samples.

Rites of Fall dissolves boundaries between past and future musical traditions. Originated in experiments with placing religious and folk music elements in new contexts, the project evolved into its darker and heavier form. The debut EP Truthsayer

Synapsis is a music project launched in 2009 on the initiative of Dawid Chrapla and Andrzej Turziak. Charpla was a member of such formations as Hated Bruit Kollektiv, ADTX and Abtybiotix, and performed solo under a pseudonym Nojsens. He also collaborated with such artists as XV Parówek, Arszyn or Hubert Napiórski. Turziak is responsible for projects Multipoint Injector and Wulgata. The combination of their music fascinations brought into existence a duo working on the border of their different music worlds. The music by Synapsis is a unique form of industrial, noise and dark ambient, based mainly on mechanical samples taken directly from factories and foundries. Although it is rooted in the industrial tradition, there is no space for pure noise here – it is rather focused on trance meditation. The duo’s compositions, due to their use of the whole range of aftersounds and distorted echoes, may at times appear disturbing and sinister, but as a whole they mainly present diversified, etheric soundscapes of different tones and sounds. In these pieces there is no place for excessive aggression – what we find here is a rich dose of pulsating hypodermic sound energy.

Urinatorium is a sound-project inspired by the admiration for the sound spaces and the enthusiastic catastrophism of Hubert Wińczyk. This activity, carried out since 2005 aims to search for, study and process sounds that can be considered as metabolic waste of life, human activity and the environment in which we function, and to give them new meanings.

The aim of these searches is primarily cognitive and spiritual, by analogy with alchemical practices, but the results of the work, sound productions, concerts can be perceived aesthetically – as experimental music. It’s a narrative that emerges from noise and voices.

During his performances, H. Urinator uses metal and plastic junk, tools, analog sine/square wave generator, field recordings, tapes, his own voice, various microphones, radios, toy instruments, and various electronics. During spontaneous, personal concerts, drawing on his experience in performance art, he explores the symbolics of transformation and catastrophic motifs, both sonically and with gestures, which often function on the top-bottom-top axis and the macrocosm in the microcosm.

Wińczyk works with sound in many fields: doing field recordings, composing for theater and animated films, co-creating radio plays, sound installations, conducting workshops for children. He plays in the bands like kakofoNIKT, Monster Hurricane Wihajster, Nova Reperta, Palanci, Extra Nerves, Revue svazu českých architů, WW Duo.

Vonsechsundachtzig is a duo based in Lodz that creates extreme electronic music. Inspired by classic industrial music and power electronics.

Whalesong is an experimental music collective from Poland. Since the very beginning the band has always been highly influenced by genres like industrial, no wave and drone. Over time they created their unique uncompromising style consisting of sludge, doom metal, jazz, noise rock and post punk. Notwithstanding this, Whalesong music can’t be easily described with just one genre, but one thing’s for sure – Whalesong doesn’t follow any trends and negates up-to-date fragmentary listening of music. Constantly repeated riffs and rhythms mixed with huge loudness don’t let ignore them. Whalesong also understands the great value of dynamics and uses a huge variety of instruments: gongs, hammered dulcimer, tubular bells, theremin, vibraphone and also objects like sheet metal and springs. Their new album entitled ‘Radiance of a Thousand Suns’ was recorded in collaboration with Thor Harris (Swans, Wrekmeister Harmonies, Xiu Xiu), Wacław Vogg Kieltyka (Decapitated), Aleksander Papierz (Sigihl) and with award-winning vibraphonist Tomasz Herisz.

Entrancing pulsating music of drones and repetition. The shows of Rav Kosela’s project are accompanied with monochromatic video. Solar symbols, lunar and psychoactive effects of stroboscopic lights.  In this hypnotic music one can find power words, mantras related to ancient solar-astral cult.

The beginnings of Zenial were connected with going beyond technological constraints and exploring the possibilities of the rapidly developing digital technology. Zenial’s début coincided with the explosion of the Internet, which had an impact on the methodology of all of Łukasz Szałankiewicz’s projects, including Palsecam and Zendee. At the beginning of the 90s, he was associated with the so-called demo scene, and each further step of the artist was dedicated to the penetration of the medium and the uninterrupted experiment with the very matter of his work. Zenial’s search is combined with theoretical reflection. The Audiotong brand, established in 2005, serves the purpose of popularising this kind of artistic output. Łukasz Szałankiewicz is an author of interactive installations, audiovisual performances, as well as an activist and curator of new media. In his research and creative work, he has collaborated with a number of institutions and art centres around the world. The scope of Szałankiewicz’s activity lies between academic experimental music and a variety of guises of noise and ambient.