A conservatory-trained composer who became a terror of extreme noise: punishing computer and electroacoustic sound, built from single sources, networked across three continents.
Zbigniew Karkowski was the Polish composer and noise musician the Bureau files at Tier III as a major bridge between the conservatory and the most extreme end of noise. Born in Kraków in 1958 and active until his death in 2013, he spent his last years in Tokyo, working within the underground scene there, and across his life he built one of the more singular bodies of work in European experimental music.
His grounding was thoroughly academic. He studied composition at the State College of Music in Gothenburg, the aesthetics of modern music at the university there, computer music at Chalmers, and sonology for a year at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. That training he then turned against, becoming best known as a noise practitioner and an especially brutal one, a legend of anti-academic music and, by repute, the terror of sound technicians wherever he performed.
The method was reduction pushed to violence. Karkowski tweaked, twisted and layered processed sound and field material into punishing shapes, frequently constructing an entire piece from a single source. His half of Whint, the split with Francisco López, is exemplary: a hurricane-force slow-motion mass built from white noise alone, the brightness and contrast spun to their extremes, rising to a floor-shaking crescendo before cutting abruptly off. It is computer noise as a physical event.
He was also a restless collaborator. He founded the electroacoustic trio Sensorband with Edwin van der Heide and Atau Tanaka, activating his instrument by moving his arms through infrared beams, a gestural approach to performance, and worked in a long list of joint projects: noise-techno with Peter Rehberg as Pop, a duo with Merzbow as mazk, and recordings with Jim O'Rourke, Helmut Schaefer, Tetsuo Furudate and López among many others, dozens of albums in all.
The Bureau files Zbigniew Karkowski at Artists · Tier III as the clearest case in the archive of the conservatory turned toward extremity, and as a key connector whose work tied the European, American and Japanese noise scenes together. His catalogue closed with his death in 2013.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar · last revised c. the Anthropocene