A concert is a ritual, pertaining to a sum of various behaviours, social usages, aesthetic expectations, and a sense of satisfaction or unfulfilment. This concert is just the case in question, however there is a hidden meaning to its ritual. The featured field recordings and electronic compositions will take us to widely different acoustic environments of Wrocław, including Przejście Świdnickie [Świdnickie Underground Passage] before it was revitalised. Przejście will continue to recur throughout the programme, and we will bid it farewell in the last piece. The farewell Requiem was inspired by and created on the basis of an utterance by Monika – a florist who used to work in Przejście Świdnickie before its revitalisation. The recording will be presented as an original soundscape, alongside other recordings from Przejście Świdnickie as it was before the refurbishment. In between the subsequent soundscapes from Przejście Świdnickie we will visit various places in Wrocław, deemed extraordinary by blind people. The recordings were produced by Maciej Bączyk as part of the ‘Invisible Map of Wrocław’ project. Electronic compositions are intertwined with soundscapes. Each composition uses sounds drawn from Wrocław’s acoustic environment. Works by Lidia Zielińska, Rafał Zalech and Mateusz Ryczek use the sounds of Wrocław as raw material, whereas the work of Kamila Staśko-Mazur is at the boundary of composition and reportage – built on a choice of soundscapes and citizen’s accounts of the city’s acoustic environment.

Mateusz Ryczek