Schaeffer was one of the most productive composers to work at PRES through the 60s and 70s, but as his career developed alongside the technology, he found himself travelling internationally and spending less time in Poland. Even artists from further afield, such as Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim, travelled behind the iron curtain to Warsaw in order to work at PRES. At that time, the radio station was the only place in Soviet-controlled Poland where you could efficiently produce electronic music. Schaeffer’s relationship with PRES began in the 1960s. Those recordings are this amazing tour of techniques.” Listening to stuff I go, ‘Okay, so it's backwards speech going into a pulsing reverb with, maybe, a vocoder, or is it just filtering?’ for every sound. And it gave me this very real experience of old tech, and what people had to go through to get the sounds they got. There was an old vocoder, an EMS, I think, that was this monstrous, desk-sized machine. “We’ve spent time at the GRM poking around in their basement where they keep the old gear. “I have the tendency to try to reverse engineer technique from listening,” admits Schmidt. “Compositions from that period with that technique, that are very labor intensive they're often highly wrought, highly abstract, and they have an otherworldly sonic quality to them because of the combination of how they were made, and when they were made.” “Any time we hear about work that combines electronics and concréte and acoustic instruments, for us that's often a touchstone,” says Daniel. Surprising at every turn, prolific and arguably polymaths with their sidelines in performance art and higher education, Matmos are the perfect explorers for Schaeffer’s seemingly impenetrable oeuvre.
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With access granted to Schaeffer’s archive of sounds recorded at PRES, who better to extract a sample pack from such a voluminous and idiosyncratic body of work than Matmos? Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt have spent more than 20 years charting an imperial course through concepts and sonic processes with surgical fervour, no more so than on 2001’s A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure, on which they crafted a full album of material out of samples of medical procedures.
The sample pack is based exclusively on recordings of Bogusław Schaeffer's electroacoustic pieces created at the Polish Radio Experimental StudioĪdam Mickiewicz Institute gives general authorization to anyone who would like to use the samples in any manner, including their unlimited processing or adaptation
Please note: Live 10 Suite is required to make full use of the devices included in the Live Project On the other hand, he was very experimental, open for improvisation and chance actions.”ĭownload includes a folder of audio WAV files and an Ableton Live Project. “Technically, he produced between 400 up to 800 works. “ was, on one hand, as productive and systematic as Stockhausen,” explains Mendyk. Michal Mendyk from Adam Mickiewicz Institute, who has helped co-ordinate the access to the PRES archives, suggests part of the challenge facing Schaeffer’s legacy is rooted in his attitude towards creativity. In the legacy of Polish classical and experimental music, Schaeffer is eclipsed by the more notorious and name-checked Krzysztof Penderecki and Henryk Górecki. A prolific, polymath composer who straddled classical tradition and avant-garde experimentation in parallel, Schaeffer did some of his most groundbreaking work at PRES during the 1970s before moving on to other studios due to the old-world analogue limitations of the equipment. Of the artists, scientists and experimenters attached to PRES, Bogusław Schaeffer is one of the most significant. Now, we’re returning once more to Warsaw in the 1960s and 70s to explore the visionary palette of a composer as overlooked as the studio he did some of his most important work in. You can learn more about the history of PRES and access the original sample pack here. This overlooked but important European musical institution was the subject of a unique sample pack pulled together in 2018 to help bring a new life to sounds created in a specific way in a specific moment in time. The Polish Radio Experimental Studio is not a household name in the history of electronic music, but its legacy is rich with 20th Century musical innovation.
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