VI Wrocław Industrial Festival

Massimo Magrini—a talented musician and engineer of new technologies—has been leading his trademark project: Bad Sector for many, many years now. He is a person utterly fascinated by science, and any electronic sounds and instruments. With years of experience and education gained in the field of computer music, Magrini became famous for creating his very own, new instruments - digital and analog alike—which he later used in his own recordings. Compositions of Bad Sector are best described as a blend of ambient, noise, minimal and experimental music. The artist himself prefers to describe his creations as a deeply emotional, dark ambient noise. Hobbies of the artists can be easily derived from the names of his records and tracks—subjects such as microbiology, algebra, quantum physics and space exploration constitute his sources of inspiration. It is no wonder why the recordings themselves are so diverse in the choice of sounds—radio waves and signals, humming of high-voltage installations, the noises of spacecrafts such as satellites: in Magrini’s mind all of the above are valid ingredients for creating music. The way they get interwoven is masterful indeed, with the final product being a harmonious, drone-like stream of sounds. The music of Bad Sector is extremely rich in detail—shimmering with million individual pieces per minute, where every single click or electric micro-zap is an equivalent of a single molecule or atom. At times the music can lose some of its volume, almost delicate and ethereal it sheds its darkness and aggression, other times it can display some loud, ominous and dark elements.

HATI is a musical project based on acoustic instruments sounding. HATI uses ethnic istruments (Asian gongs, North African drums and clarinets, Polish wooden trumpets and horns) and hand-made instruments or find objects of scrap metal, plastic, wood. Musicians use electronic equipments to modulate acoustic sound as well. HATI connects a personal interest in modern improvised and acoustic music with ritual and meditation music. The band was founded in Torun, Poland, in 2001 by Rafal Iwanski and Dariusz Wojtas. They formed many psychedelic rock and industrial and experimental musical projects since the beginning of the 90.

Job Karma treats industrial as a starting point for artistic freedom, exploration and unlimited experiments. As a codeword which involves industrial noise, elaborate, multilayer ambient as well as dance beat. The principle behind the music of Job Karma was always: no limits. A distinctive, immediately recognizable aspect of Job Karma's music is the sound created from age-old low and high frequency generators and oscillators, sine waves. Unique sounds of devices, which were not originally designed to be musical instruments, links with modulated by timbres of old analog synthesizers. The pieces are constructed on loops, timbre spots, blends and sequences. The integral element of Job Karma's tracks are samples discovered in the archives and those recorded by the sound artists themselves, on different continents. Mostly in North Africa and Asia Minor. In trance forms, rituals of vision and sound, Job Karma's music work joins urban primitivism and reflects cyivilisation overload. The project debuted in 1997 as a duo formed by Maciej Frett and Aurelisz Pisarzewski, with permanent collaboration of a visual artist Arkadiusz Baginski, enriching their concerts with video projections of his auteur films. Musical activity comes along with popularisation activity. The members of Job Karma are also the curators of the festival we are attending now

MERZBOW was created in Tokyo in 1979 under the direction of Masami Akita, and he is the godfather of Noise as a genre. His discography contains over 300 separate releases, often in collaborations. In 2001 he released the highly acclaimed "Merzbox," a boxed 50-CD collection of many of this earlier rare and unreleased recordings. To this day Masami continues to record and release music at an unmatched rate.
"I wanted to compose real surrealistic music in a non-musical way. Surrealism is also reaching unconsciousness. Noise is the primitive and collective consciousness of music. My composition is automatism, not improvisation." Masami Akita (Interview with Oskari Mertalo)

After nearly two decades of private musical activity, Opening Performance Orchestra presented its work publicly for the first time in a performance in 2006. In the same year the seven-member group self-published its first CD, inspired by the work of Hiroshi Hasegawa, a former member of the Japanese noise band C.C.C.C. Opening Performance Orchestra's sound concept is based on so-called fraction music emerging from the creed "The world is just an endless multitude of fragments: some already present and some not yet born."

Founded in New York City in 1999 Post Scriptvm creates dark electronic music that has been described as concertedly dreamlike, mesmerizing, claustrophobic, and disturbing. The project's obsessive audio explorations of entropy and inner turmoil span a wide range of genres; incorporating dark ambient, death industrial, and experimental sounds with old school industrial aesthetics. Post Scriptvm has releases on various labels in USA, Italy, France and Germany. The most recent album "Raspad" made Post Scriptvm the newest addition to the roster of the infamous Tesco Organization record label.

Since 1985, Eraldo Bernocchi, P.NG5361.B and Luca Di Giorgio (as well as a long list of friends and collaborators) have been working as SIGILLUM S an Italian post - industrial audio project of many different natures, where concepts have led the effort and employed sound as a tool for the exploration of the forbidden areas of the subconscious: the result has been a endless paradigm of alien electronic mutations, merging concrete noise research with acoustic transmigration, while visuals and many other forms of media have been also adopted, in order to achieve maximum interaction intensity.

Born in 1977, in the heady atmosphere of San Francisco's postpunk golden age, the band soon became a central part of New York's No Wave scene (as documented in the recent "Downtown 81" film, centered around Jean Michel Basquiat and featuring performances by Blondie, James Chance, DNA and Tuxedomoon). "No Tears", their 2nd single (1979), has remained an electro punk club classic to this day.
The band went on to sign to The Residents' Ralph Records, and released two seminal albums, "Half Mute" and "Desire", which soon got them overseas exposure.

Fleeing Reagan's America, Tuxedomoon moved to Europe in the early '80s, and stayed there throughout the decade. Although their ability to crystallize a certain dark and romantic zeitgeist quickly turned them into one of the most influential bands around, their music transcended all genres and included impossibly wide parameters - rock, electronics, minimal music, classical, jazz, Gypsy music and pop were all simultaneously consumed and transmutated into a quasi-prescient blend.
After releasing a string of albums on CramBoy (the imprint they set up with Brussels-based label Crammed Discs), the band stopped recording together in 1988, and the various members pursued solo careers, becoming as disparate geographically as sonically, with Steven Brown (vocals, keyboard & saxophone) living in Mexico, Peter Principle (bass, electronics) in New York, Blaine L. Reininger (vocals, violin, guitar) in Greece, and Luc Van Lieshout (trumpet) & Bruce Geduldig (films/visuals) in Brussels.

Many years later, Tuxedomoon got back together to write and record the awesome "Cabin In The Sky" album (2004), which found them in absolute top form, as romantic, rebellious and boundlessly imaginative as they ever were. "Cabin" featured contributions by a carefully hand-picked selection of guests such as Tarwater, Tortoise's John McEntire, Nouvelle Vague's Marc Collin, Aksak Maboul (aka Crammed founder Marc Hollander and Konono N1 producer Vincent Kenis) and DJ Hell.

Shortly after finishing "Cabin In The Sky", Tuxedomoon traveled back to San Francisco, the band's birthplace, in order to start writing material for their next album. But the local atmosphere had unexpected effects on them, and drove them to record a series of "spontaneous compositions" (as Mingus would have put it) instead, which soon formed the basis of a side project entitled "Bardo Hotel Soundtrack", loosely connected to Brion Gysin's novel The Bardo Hotel' set in the Paris hotel where he and William Burroughs invented the radical cut-up/fold-in technique.

Both "Cabin ..." and "Bardo Hotel ..." were warmly welcomed, and a wildly eclectic, almost surreal array of references sprang from the pens of reviewers trying to describe Tuxedomoon's music (Charles Ives, Radiohead, Philip Glass, Miles Davis, German electronica, Tom Waits, John Cage, Kurt Weill, Tortoise, Can ). If anything, these two recent albums revealed that Tuxedomoon were never connected to a particular period: they had become '80s cult figures simply because that's the period in which they happened to develop and rise to fame... but the band have always been evolving in their own space, and their music is as relevant and fresh today as it was then. An impression to be further strengthened by their upcoming new album "Vapour Trails".