Wesoła Immersive New Media Art Center, Krakow, November 22, 2025

One cannot draw too many conclusions from the evidence of one concert, of course, but from the rich wealth and diverse array of live electronics, multimedia, sound design and improvisation presented at Wesoła Immersive New Media Art Center in Krakow on November 22, 2025, it appears that the Polish new music scene is undergoing something of a creative resurgence.

In the presence of a packed and enthusiastic audience, Teresa Virginia Salis’s Natural Paths, for alto flute, electronics and video, took the listener out of the performance space and deep into the natural world. I was fortunate enough to catch a presentation by Salis earlier in the day at the Krzysztof Penderecki Academy of Music on Listening Soundscapes. The Sardinia-born musician talked at length about an aesthetic approach rooted in residual spaces and sonic environments, where sound mapping, bioacoustics, and ecological memory intermingle and coalesce.

Salis originally trained as a flautist, and one can see how the instrument’s associations with nature, wind, breath, and pulse has led the composer to explore soundscapes that often go unnoticed, but which nevertheless exert their own haunting, living presence and beauty. As Gilles Clément’s concept of the ‘third landscape’ suggests, such sounds resonate with the undetermined fragments of a planetary garden. Salis cites Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, Max Neuhaus and Ryoichi Kurokawa (among several other names) as influences, but her evocative and alluring soundscapes inhabit unique qualities of their own. Natural Paths made me want to hear more from the Italian composer, which is always a positive litmus test for musical durability.

A very different kind of immersive experience belonged to percussionist Adam Gołębiewski’s live extemporisations. On one level, his thirty-minute Untitled, for drums, objects, and electronics, was an assault on the senses: viscerality cranked to the max. Gołębiewski’s Jackson Pollock-esque sweeping and circling hand-cymbal movements across the diameter of an upturned bass drum generated a series of loud cloud-like sound masses, evoking Helmut Lachenmann’s instrumental musique concrète style. Some in the audience struggled to cope with the sonic bombardment, shielding their ears during much of the performance.

Grappling with the raw physicality of sound, Gołębiewski’s performance practice was striking and original, suggesting comparisons with a latter-day Han Bennink. During a short intermission that followed Gołębiewski’s piece, I quizzed the percussionist about his frame of reference. He paused, signposted me to an interview he gave with Claire Biddles in The Quietus earlier this year, and uttered one name: Xenakis. Perhaps the key to the new music of today can be found in Pléïades, then…

With Gołębiewski’s large-scale sweeping gestures still ringing in my ears, Anna Jędrzejewska’s Talkativeness of Trees, for live electronics, inhabited a very different world: tiny timbral fragments placed underneath a sonic microscope. Kamil Kowalski’s accompanying video did much to guide the listener’s gaze in similar ways. Its impact was gently subversive. Perhaps the devil is in the detail after all.

The evening ended with Krakow-based R2 (Kuba Rutkowsi on drums and Redink Thomas on live electronics), whose music seemed to take the patterns and pulses of electronic dance music and feed it through something akin to an interplanetary recycling cyberpunk machine, resulting in something that sounded strange yet familiar.

I didn’t stay on for the Audio Art Festival’s closing afterparty at 11pm. The concert itself had overrun and it was getting late. Walking back to the hotel as the snow fell steadily on Krakow’s picturesque buildings and quiet cobbled streets, I reflected further on today’s new music scene in Poland. With rock musicians such as Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield acknowledging the influence of composers such as Lutosławski, Penderecki and Bogusław Schaeffer, perhaps now is the time to look forward to new generations living and working in Poland who push musical boundaries. Having been established for over thirty years, the Audio Art Festival under the guidance and leadership of composer, sound artist, performer and mentor Marek Chołoniewski, remains at the centre of new music innovations in this country. It will be interesting to see how things develop during the next few years and decades.