Glissando #23 (June 2014)

The mobile cassette recorders was often used as a part of non-institutional practics in everyday life as the tactics of resistance to regimes of power and symbolic violence (as a cultural memory, tactical medium or dissident activity). In Poland and Eastern Europe during the communist era a cassette tape was a part of „second circulation”, mixing an art, the political speeches, the political satires and underground music in one circulation out of the censorship. Today cassette tape still produces the cultural dreams, phantasms and memories: recording process as a metaphor; cleaning the tapes, erasing the memories, deleting the history; tape hiss and „the uncanny”. MC is the new, old thing. Authors include: Dariusz Brzostek (editor), Paweł Bohuszewicz, Maciej Byliniak, Olga Drenda, Rigels Halili, Antoni Michnik, Tomasz Misiak, Radosław Sirko and Justyna Stasiowska. All texts in this focus are in English (Polish versions will be available at www.glissando.pl) and an extra is anthology cassette The Sounds of Deep Poland, produced by Noisen Records especially for „Glissando”. Other two topics are: New Music in Eastern Europe and Middle Generation. In frames of the first one we continue to present Polish composers, this time: Dominik Karski (interview by Ewa Szczecińska and Jan Topolski), Artur Kroschel (portrait by Ewa Fabiańska-Jelińska), Sławomir Wojciechowski (Blind Spot manifesto and interview by Adrians Borowska, Paweł M. Krzaczkowski and Jan Topolski) and Dobromiła Jaskot (her new piece Slejpnir is being examined by five authors). In the latter one authors write about most fascinating phenomena in neighbouring countries: Ukrainian Ensemble Nostri Temporis (Monika Pasiecznik), Russian label Fancy Music (Matej Kratochvil) and Romanian composer Corneliu Dan Gergescu (Tomasz Kamiński). That’s our new opening into East and English, will be continued!