What to do when your favorite dish starts tasting like tap water? In the current digital age, many music enthusiasts could perhaps relate. The music has lost its identity-forming significance, stopped providing its original thrill, and listening to it has become much like watching television. The digital overdose of music has created a reality in which it is not the album, nor the song, nor even the artist, but the festival – an inherently celebratory and unique event – that is the primary carrier of meaning and a source of the original excitement in today’s music world.
Serving as an antidote to the cultural abundance crisis, music festivals have also eventually fallen prey to the problem of overproduction. They try to solve it by diversifying their offer more and more, which has been the case for the last 15 years and has only gained strength in the post-pandemic era. With sporting events, NGOs’ presentations, book events, workshops, specialist seminars, discussions, film programs, and activist themes, festivals are no longer merely a sum of their line-up and their headliner, but are moving towards a comprehensive experience.
In the shadow of other monumental events, our own, modest Silent Movie Festival stays true to its initial formula by hosting unique concerts accompanying silent film screenings. We are, however, constantly seeking new inspiration. This year, we focus on the scientific, cosmic, dystopian, and utopian themes, which turn out particularly rewarding in the musical dimension.
Technological threads in music stretch as far back as the recorded sound itself: they were put into words for the first time in Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises, as well as his Intonarumoris installation, marking possibly the earliest noise composition in history. Smuggling futuristic threads and reflections on technological development in music gained momentum in the era of space travel. With their idealism, they constituted optimistic, bold, sometimes dystopian or hippie-like visions. The visionary sounds could be heard in experimental radio studios scattered throughout the post-war world, including Warsaw’s SEPR – the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. Their echoes resonate in the cosmic muzak, the soundscape of elevators and cafés, in the musical tradition of new age and musique d’ameublement (later known as ambient), in Kraftwerk’s techno-utopian odes to highways and computers (haunted by the sublimated trauma of the Nazi era), in the afrofuturist jazz visions of Sun Ra dreaming of space exploration and liberation of the Black community, in Flying Lotus, in the noise and industrial post-punk currents, in the Black teenage music from Chicago and Detroit raised on James Brown, clichéd sci-fi, and European synth-pop, whose sampler and drum machine experiments have reshaped dance floors across the globe.
The musical program of this year’s Silent Movie Festival stands on the shoulders of giants. The artists joining us represent many of the themes and traditions mentioned above. Emerging from the post-punk school of blending philosophical themes with radical sounds, the creations of Kuba Ziołek and Łukasz Jędrzejczak, working together as T’ien Lai, explore the tensions between technological civilization and nature, as well as the insatiable greed of contemporary capitalism. These very issues are addressed in our opening film Algol (1920, dir. Hans Werckmeister), with its disturbing, Faustian motive of released energy, which the duo’s music will accompany. The dark figure of Dr. Mabuse (1922, dir. Fritz Lang) will be faced by the Kosmonauci band, the Warsaw producer Krenz, as well as kIRk and Bastarda, presenting a multi-threaded narrative of a swindler and a hypnotist while attempting to capture the 1920s vision of the city as a stifling, dark space – a modern labyrinth of desires and obsessions.
It is our goal to shift from viewing the soundtrack of a silent film as a loose, improvised jazz or possibly neoclassical formula and invite artists from various backgrounds. The 20th Silent Movie Festival will have something for everyone – whether you’ve been to Nowa Muzyka (Krenz), Lublin’s KODY (kIRk), the Unsound Festival (T’ien Lai), Warsaw Autumn (Bastarda), Open’er (with Rysy performing alongside High Treason, a riveting work of political fiction [1929, dir. Maurice Elvey]), or the Przemiany Festival (Voices of the Cosmos accompanying the popular science film Our Heavenly Bodies [1925, dir. Hanns Walter Kornblum, Johannes Meyer, Rudolf Biebrach]).
In the morning family section, the crazy inventor movies will be accompanied by the top artists among educators and the top educators among artists, including Asi Mina, Ola Bilińska, and Ola Rzepka, whose sense of humor and creativity charm audiences of all ages.
As a warm-up, to mark our festival’s twentieth anniversary, we have prepared a screening of The Mystery of Room No. 100 (1914, dir. Unknown), inviting some of the stars of the festival’s history – Macio Moretti and Bartosz Tyciński. As Mitch and Mitch, they became a sensation of 2007 with their big band performance for The Lost World (1925, dir. Harry O. Hoyt). Now they will perform in a smaller group as Ovni Trio – with the support of Miłosz Pękala. Finally, I should add that the screening of the first Polish feature film will be peppered with a few nice surprises. After all, a proper festival should be like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get!