Breaking ice. ARTIFICIAL MEMORY TRACE -Slavek Kwi-
(Tentacles Of Perception 2011)
“If only, then, I had been more living out of the present–such a beautiful word…present. The sense of it being, now to me, more beautiful than ‘to look forward.”
– Stan Brakhage
For Slavek Kwi sound is clay, living, breathing, forming and defroming clay. His formal work is physical, tactile, immersive and most important changing: “Breaking ice” is about sound expressed as matter, shape and time and the formal considerations the composer has through them.
The work of Slavek Kwi, and “Breaking ice” in particular, have this approach where you sense matter, form and motion but most important you sense the will and purpose behind the incidental: you sense time expressed through things, through invisible objects whose form and matter are subdued by some force beyond reason, the force of truth.
But the work of Slavek Kwi is also about something else, it’s about time and narrative; sequences of events that occur and that we order and link through time as they appear to us.
From a scientific perspective it could be said in a speculative effort that one’s brain interprets external impulses and converts / performs them into this perceptual universe that occurs in one’ conscience.
From an artistic perspective the musique concrete composer performs his interpretations of the external impulses to the listener: the musique concrete composer mimics the process of experience, he mimics the brain and its interpretative character…but, do we need a medium between what goes on out there and what goes on inside us? We need it as much as we need to dream and imagine. Musique concrete reveals a healthy and insightful break from “reality”, a break from our perception, from ourselves. A way to scape and experience beyond our experience, a way to become universal. A way for being listened when we are are listening, a way to reach outside oneself into the “else”, into the universe that reaches inside us.
And this exactly what Slavek Kwi’s work does so effectively, it affects our perception of things, making us doubt about the veracity of our own perception and understanding one’s experience as partial, finite limited and limiting in comparison to the eternal and simultaneous experience of a potential self aware cosmos.
Little else can be said other than the work of Slavek Kwi extends new horizons and raises trascendental questions about the perceptual possibilities of phonographic based composition in terms of dealing with the sculptural, narrative and phenomenological aspects of sound based sound art.
-John McEnroe
