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Time. Rhythm.

This is the tenth year of the Sanatorium of Sound Festival. The upcoming edition is presented under the theme Time. Rhythm.

 

Time. Rhythm. Time. Rhythm.

Time. Rhythm Rhythm. Time. Rhythm Rhythm.

 

All these years, we have tried to present a programme rich in experimental artistic activities, which will once again revolve around the issue of time. This edition, we will focus on the organisation of time in music–rhythm. It orders, subjugates, and sometimes also surprises, confuses.

We also see rhythm as one of the fundamental concepts to describe contemporary culture. The word ‘rhythm’ itself comes from the Greek rhythmos (ῥυθμός), which means coordinated movement, and is also related to the verb rhein (ῥέω)–’to flow’, ‘to move’. Etymologically, therefore, it refers to an organised, repetitive movement. In music theory, the rhythm of sounds gives meaning and order to a composition. But it also plays a key role in community building and the transmission of cultural values. Defined more broadly, still as an organising force, it affects both the functioning of individual entities and the structure of whole societies. At present, rhythm seems to be a concept undergoing intensive exploration and innovation, especially in the context of socio-cultural changes and the dynamic development of technology, as can be seen, for example, in computer algorithms, data processing and analysis processes or machine learning, which are based precisely on the rhythm of computational cycles.

 

At the same time, rhythm remains an effective tool for redefining one’s own corporeality and learning to carefully observe and embrace the changes taking place in the postmodern world. Henri Lefebvre wrote that one should listen to one’s body in order to be able to recognise the different kinds of rhythms surrounding us. Pauline Oliveros taught a similar practice. It is the body that serves as a metronome.

 

Time. Rhythm Rhythm Rhythm. Time Rhythm Rhythm Rhythm.

 

During this year’s Sanatorium of Sound Festival, we will discover new and surprising rhythms of musical expression. Sometimes they will be bold and tangible or mechanical, sometimes barely perceptible, subcutaneous or dreamy. At other times improvised, as if scattered or hypnotising with the same quality. We will see what happens to the metre when few rhythms are juxtaposed. The music will also pulsate in the rhythm dictated by the algorithms. Finally, we won’t forget the movement of the body through which the rhythm will be flowing by DJ sets.

We will hear and see sound works by such artists as: Marja Ahti, Jessica Ekomane, Hania Rani, Thomas Ankersmit, Marcin Pietruszewski, Piotr Peszat, Aleksander Wnuk, Hanna Grześkiewicz, Julian Rieken, Aleksandra Chciuk, Joanna Dreczka, Natalia Kędzierska, Alicja Pangowska, Paweł „Paide” Dunajko, Józef Robakowski, Paweł Romańczuk, Hubert Zemler, Jakub Knera, Gerard Lebik, Biuro Dźwięku Katowice.

 

 

Time.                                                               Rhythm.

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Program

Friday 02/08/2024

Opening of the festival

Cinema
18:30

Dj set

Park
22:00
Park
23:00
Park
00:45-08:00
Saturday 03/08/2024
Installations 10:00-18:00
Park
00:45-08:00
Brehmer Sanatorium
10:00

Curatorial tour/opening of exhibitions

Brehmer Sanatorium
10:30

Nobody is ever missing | Curatorial tour/opening of exhibitions

Brehmer Sanatorium
11:00

Watertime | Curatorial tour/opening of exhibitions

Brehmer Sanatorium
11:00
Park
10:00-12:00

Talk Program - The Organization of Sound. On the Performativity of John Cage's Works

Park
12:00
Brehmer Sanatorium
19:00
Cinema
20:00

Premiere - festival composer commission

Cinema
21:00

Dj set

Park
22:30

Dj set

Park
23:30
Park
00:30
Sunday 04.08.2024
Installations 10:00-18:00

reConvert: Roberto Maqueda/Mikołaj Rytowski- (ex)tension by Fabrizio di Salvo in collaboration with reConvert produced by Flor Medina

Brehmer Sanatorium
10:00-18:00
Brehmer Sanatorium
10:00-18:00

Nobody is ever missing | Installations

Brehmer Sanatorium
10:00-18:00

Watertime | Installations

Brehmer Sanatorium
10:00-18:00
Park
10:00-12:00

Talk Program - Taming Space. About silence and its illusions in music and everyday life - Paweł Szroniak, Hanna Grześkiewicz, Hubert Zemler

Park
12:00

Browner 20:07 (2020) | A Y U, aka "as yet untitled" 21:11 (1999) | EXPLORATORY II 30:00 (2019)

Gerard Lebik / Piotr Ceglarek - ambisonic specialization

Park
15:30
Park
17:00

One-hour visual and sound session

Cinema
18:00

The Sanatorium of Sound is a festival dedicated to experimental music and the broad spectrum of sound art. Its main aim is to present the widest possible range of phenomena related to the development of musical forms in the 20th and 21st centuries. Thus far, the festival has showcased works by approximately 250 artists from around the world, many of which were created specifically in the context of the place during artistic residencies in Sokołowsko.

The sonic mystery is revealed through acts of subtraction, as the full orchestra moves in sync with the electronics, but with each shift comes a reduction of live elements, letting the audience figure out what's happening by taking parts of the sound away.
The Wire 09.2023 (Issue 476)
As tuberculosis patients used to soak up the fresh air here a century ago, no people now soak up the music. After all, now we are getting healed here in a different way.
The Quietus 08.2023
A Sanatorium in the Central European border village of Sokolowsko plays host to a festival celebrating and interrogating healing vibrations and sounds of the body.
The Wire (Issue 429) 11.2019
Organized by Gerard Lebik, Zuzanna Fogtt and Michał Libera, it's a warm and intimate yet firmly international festival devoted to an array of sound artists with often contrasting perspectives.
The Wire (Issue 404) 09.2017
Po raz pierwszy w życiu miałem wrażenie, że uczestniczę w festiwalu, w którym nie istnieją już żadne granice między koncertem a instalacją, między improwizacją a kompozycją, między elektroniką a akustyką. A może te granice dopiero teraz przestały istnieć w mojej głowie?
Glissando 09.2016
Zasadniczym celem muzyki eksperymentalnej jest pogłębianie refleksji na temat słuchania, jak również próba ukazania licznych modalności tego procesu. Spośród gości Sanatorium Dźwięku chyba najbardziej konsekwentnie zajmuje się tym Peter Ablinger.
Magazyn Szum 09.2019
At one point, [Lucio Capece] played very soft and extremely beautiful tones on his slide saxophone, enhancing the ambient tones wonderfully. The setting was fine, the weather excellent and the sounds compelling.
olewnick.blogspot.com 08.2016
(...) mission to reposition Sokołowsko as one of Europe’s best-kept cultural secrets by putting together an unusual and curious festival focusing on sound art and noise.
Hyperallergic.com 09.2016
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Financing
Funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund under the "Music" program, implemented by the National Institute of Music and Dance
The project is co-financed by the governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.
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It's a matter of the body
Robert Piotrowicz

The first time I said the word 'body', I felt it, I heard it, and I understood it. All of this happened in the very same moment, though only later, when I saw people running toward me, did I grasp the meaning of that process. Were they carrying themselves in my direction, or was it merely their image reaching me? Or perhaps it was the noise they made, pounding their shoes on the wooden bridge, shouting at me. What they were doing, I didn’t know. But I felt it in such a way that it couldn't be more.

 

When we observe qualities — those phenomena and ideas that surround us — we work hard to come to know them. We try to grasp them, assign them meaning, understand their presence. We move in cycles, where experience always precedes the accumulation of knowledge. With each step, we uncover further layers of pulsating elements that surround us, and yet often (perhaps always) we remain unfulfilled — though kindly embraced by what we hear.

It might be an oversimplification, but it concerns those dominant modes of knowing that societies readily adopt — quick, efficient, the kind of attitudes content with superficial perception. And yet, this is often the source of constant frustration. Or excitement. This process has no end. We move, shift directions, always searching — to experience, or to know? Does this question even make sense? Perhaps it’s in this very uncertainty, in the constant motion, that we are closest to ourselves.

One can — and this happens constantly — attempt to domesticate and organize experience. To subordinate it, control it, restrain it. Including that which is audible. The entire theater of sonic events can be subjected — clarity and precision tamed, ready to be repeated, to be performed again. But experience is always here and now, singular, full of affect. We are not merely collectors of data, arrangers of libraries, but just as much — subjects of sensual resonance.

We cannot look both ahead and behind us at the same time — that is obvious. Evolution has given us another tool for spatial control: by being in sound, we listen all around ourselves. We distinctly perceive depths, distances, the complex structure of auditory reality. Is this not clear evidence that sound, existing all around us, is a body — not a flat phenomenon projected onto an invisible dome?

Yes, we are accustomed to associating sound with the image of our surroundings, a landscape with its own kind of horizon encircling us. But sound is like an invisible, mobile architecture, or rather, a sculpture in motion unfolding around us. And in fact, it is we who inhabit the space that it occupies, tracing its structure with moving air.

How does this omnipresence of an active sense, one that constantly scans our surroundings, shape our humanity? We function within this material, though invisible structure, immersed in vibrations — we breathe and move within it. What, beyond the corporeality we share, further enables us to comprehend the world?

Will our virtues benefit from practicing perceptual sensitivity? Will it make us more rational? Will deeper understanding help us become fully aware? Or perhaps becoming more sensitive to sound will instead pull us away from this order of the world — so that our virtues might be released, even for a moment — and push us into that phenomenon impossible to express in words, the phenomenon of sound.

So often we must assign it meaning, compare it to natural phenomena, to familiar practices coded into reality. In doing so, we strip it of its autonomy, because it is — sometimes, though not always — so difficult to treat sound as an element in its own right. We feel compelled to consume it with additions, with other ingredients of reality.

Training the virtues of the body, the qualities that allow one to make space within oneself for another body, may sound like some ultra-esoteric mindfulness. But let us allow ourselves a bit of room for actions that seem senseless!

Does caring for cognitive virtue not expose us to a certain confusion of those virtues? Perhaps an excessive intensification of sensitivity to sound doesn’t benefit other virtues at all — on the contrary, it may sabotage our dispositions.

Will our expanded boundaries of grasping this element help us better orient ourselves in traditional Euclidean space? Does awareness of a new presence around us support us — or does this excess disorient us, over-poeticize our surroundings?

It happens — and I claim it happens almost always, at least for a person even minimally sensitive to sound — that the simplest, most distinct sound (not necessarily a loud one) takes hold of the listener in a way far more significant than any corresponding visual element.

Would the white facade of a garage in a housing estate make the same impression as an equally distinct, self-contained sound — as simple as that expanse of white? This is an idealistic assumption. I have no ambition to arbitrate the dispute between the visible and the audible. I’m only trying to grasp how much, through its corporeality, sound differs from the visual environment.

For sound to begin to distinguish itself, to allow itself to be noticed, silence is sometimes needed at first. In many of our experiences, darkness also heightens this perceptual sensitivity. Do we need a background whose meaning fades with the onset of sound — and is that, for us, a necessary condition? Here, I want to draw attention to that crucial moment — the appearance of sound and the change in status of the environment in which we find ourselves — both in a perceptual and affective sense. This is the moment when space acquires a new dimension, and our presence within it is reformatted by the emergence of a meaningful presence. This change may be barely noticeable, or it may be dramatic and radical. Do we perceive these changes the same way we do changes in light? Likely so, in terms of volume — “it became quieter.” Attentive listening is surely one of those practices that enrich our perceptual virtues — capacities that shape not only our sensitivity, but also our way of being in relation to our surroundings — our perception of ourselves in the world. We are in motion.

In this configuration, the orientation of pleasure — for I do want to think of it decidedly as pleasure — can be understood as occurring in at least two directions. The performing person, depending on the medium they engage with, always attains a certain bodily pleasure; the sound that carries their presence on stage brings satisfaction to the one performing — who, most likely, also wishes to extend this to those who listen. Their bodies, in one way or another, also experience pleasure. This is, of course, a description of a model — of how potential delight might circulate — rather than a guarantee of its presence and distribution during a sound performance. It is precisely this dispersal of pleasure that leads us to ask about its directions and dynamics — about how the body of sound operates simultaneously inward and outward.

What stands out is the duality of the corporeality we are considering — not so much stretched between what is inside and what surrounds, but rather simultaneously rooted in both orders, without the need for paradox or exclusion. Resonating within one of the participating bodies, sound simultaneously spreads outward — permeating space, creating relation. The intensity of this dynamic depends on the listener’s activity — on their readiness to absorb and let pass through themselves that which is materially immaterial.

If we look at this process as an energetic field encompassing the concert space, we see one objective, corporeal being of sound, and around it bodies immersed in the same vibrating cloud — clusters of separate yet resonating centers of tension.

Despite its seemingly esoteric character, this description is grounded in real, bodily experience — it is empirical, even rooted in common sense.

Does somatic experience belong to “higher” aims? Perhaps the everyday experiencing of the body is ordinary, prosaic. And yet — it happens that precisely then, during exercise, running, tension — corporeality exceeds us, becomes something more. Personally, I cannot fully appreciate the pleasure of thinking if it is not accompanied by a physical passage through the body — that marked trace.

so — what does the performer do now?
What position do they occupy?
Are they merely the one who manages the cloud of bodies?
Or rather, should we place the sounding performer
at the center, which instantly disperses, becomes one —
pulsing outward toward resonating participants,
only to receive their returning energy moments later.

This movement in time is so imperceptibly variable
that — giving in to a wave of enthusiasm —
I’ll risk the claim: the center unravels.
Its outer amniotic waters become a shared body —
a single vibrating body is born.

The whole situation ceases to be a spectacle.
It becomes a state.

A state of experience shared by many at once,
each simultaneously feeding their private, trembling affects.
This pre-religious focus
sends us back to the origins of need,
to its rudimentary quality —
archetypes
which, even if we do not immediately recognize them within,
we nonetheless live with
in a constant alchemical process.

This is voluntary, declared participation.
The body of the community can then become saturated with political togetherness —
not through manifestos or agendas, but through the very act of presence.

This symbolic agency — to be together in sound —
creates a space for nurturing values, for being with one another in concord,
for integration that does not need to explain itself.

It’s not only about boundary-line catharsis.
It’s also about subtler forms of how the affective field operates:
a temporary suspension of defense, the resonance of support,
or even — under the right conditions — quiet forms of resistance.

Because shared listening can be a political gesture.
A body that demands nothing — and yet changes everything.

Perhaps it is sound, as a non-representational medium,
that allows us to act together before we even think to do so.

After all this, something remains — and it isn’t always something you can call a memory. Sometimes it’s a tension in the neck, a quiet impulse in the body you don’t recognize, but you know it’s been there before. Something has been inscribed — maybe not the sound itself, but its presence. A vibration that continues to pass through you long after everything has dispersed. Because that community — though it no longer exists — still resonates somewhere. In the background, in the body, in the rhythm of a day suddenly thrown off course. It doesn’t have to be a visual memory — it’s more like a splinter of energy, a fragment of that state that hasn’t gone out. And even if everything has scattered, it still was — and that was doesn’t let go. Sometimes all it takes is a muscle tightening, a sonic afterimage, and it returns. Not the whole, but the phantom. And we, after all, are composed precisely of such traces. A spectral community still trembles within us — as trace, as micro-empathy, as something that cannot be explained, but is known to have been there.

Sometimes memory disperses the community. At other times, the community remains in the body — as a trace, as somatic memory. It is not about history or precision. It is about an imprint in the tissues, a shadow of experience that doesn’t vanish. It stays — like a soft rupture in breathing, like a tension that evokes something more than a memory. This does not need to be understood.
The memory of bodies that once resonated together transforms into symbolic agency. For a wave — even if it has long gone silent — does not fade. It is from this wave that we can draw: to nurture values, to cultivate integration, but also to sustain micro-resistance. The quiet kind — sensuous, untranslatable into any manifesto.

The emotions that were born there do not end with the concert. They spill into everyday life, expand within the body, flow through gestures. The micropolitics of emotion operates beyond declarations — precisely when the community has dissolved, but left behind a radiating transformation. Then the body remembers, even though everything else has long since changed.

Perhaps it is not always necessary to entangle oneself in resistance, choosing instead a freedom beyond the compulsion of constant conflict. This is not an escape — it may rather be a gesture of self-determination, a replenishing of spirit, a cleansing of the body from social toxins. A readiness for more. Our bodily autonomies deserve more.

Almost at the very end, I would like to speak once more about the power of the phenomenon this text revolves around. Not about its meaning anymore, but about its overpowering presence — the kind that draws one in without asking for consent, yet receives immediate consensus. It happens beyond an act of will, and yet it is accepted — often with great joy. This permanent state of bodily susceptibility does not require conscious consent — it is, as it were, already inscribed in us (excluding here, of course, any deliberate acts of sonic violence, torture, or other forms of oppression).

When I lose control and go blindly, carried by its enthralling energy, I drift through a dream taking place in my tangible reality. In the unconscious lies all the power — an immediate reaction, a bodily response of the flesh-envelope, which allows me to feel. This somnambulistic paradox — dispersing presence — blurs the boundary between the ecstatic sensing of the here and now and the oneiric unreal. It is a state in which we move from conscious declaration, from the will to participate — into an almost hallucinatory introspection, where boundaries no longer serve separation but rather a merging into unity.

This regime may seem somewhat violent — I surrender without a chance to respond, without a way to convey the peaceful assent. But isn't that precisely the process of consensual domination, which I myself postulate, aspiring to threshold experiences — not only transitions I undergo alone, but those traversed together with others? It is the response that becomes the reason preventing me from seeing the sonic experience as anything other than a goal shimmering somewhere on the cognitive horizon of the background, always seducing — even when I’m not thinking about it. That is desire. That is the affirmation of somatic courage.

Notice — not once in this text has the word “ear” appeared, nor “ears.” Even “listening” barely slipped through. That was no accident. I haven’t forgotten the process that makes this entire experience possible — the physical qualities of our bodies that allow us to live through sound.

I deliberately avoided that realm — not to exclude it, but to shift the focus. I spoke of perception through space, through air, through our bodies. Through the experiences inscribed in them, through the body’s readiness to experience. This creates a specific image: the image of performing, trembling air. And that is precisely why — at the very end — I can gladly say: sound is also visible.

This is not a metaphor. Not a conceptualization. Not a symbolic transference. It is a description of ongoing physical processes — each with its own volume, shape, and range.
We are surrounded by forms of agitated gas particles. Let us not forget solid bodies, or liquids — everything that can become a medium for the propagation of an acoustic wave.

This physicality of sound is real. It is part of reality. It is objective. It is not a representation — it is a presence. It is here, with us.

And if someone says: “this is unclear”, you may answer:
because the experience of sound isn’t clear either. It is bodily, it trembles, it is momentary.” So is my text.

Zdjęcie: Szymon Szcześniak
Curatorial text
Artists​