Bogusław Schaeffer

Innovative music that pits sonoristic obsessions against jazz inspirations. Abakany gathers four soundtracks from outstanding films about art. Recorded mainly at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, the material still sounds fresh and revealing today, a slice of the immensely rich output of Bogusław Schaeffer.

Schaeffer, who lived from 1929 to 2019, was an eminent composer, playwright and theorist, and one of the main driving forces of Polish culture in the 20th century. He worked with film only occasionally, yet each of these encounters added something intriguing to the existing language of film music. This is especially audible in the pieces commissioned by the Educational Film Studio (Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych, WFO) in Łódź. Processed human voice (Władysław Strzemiński), a rich layer of percussion (Galeria El) and a jazz saxophone set against these ideas (Abakany) add up to something entirely new. Everything was realised mainly at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, the one exception being Niepokoje Wacława Kondka, made at the Electroacoustic Music Studio in Kraków.

The music on Abakany has been remastered from the original tapes in the WFO archive, and the booklet includes film stills and an essay on the composer's work. The album continues the series uncovering the rich musical archives of the WFO in Łódź, a many-threaded journey into a factory of the unexpected where artists as different as Zdzisław Szostak, Wojciech Kilar, Henryk Kuźniak and Krzysztof Komeda tested what they could do. The programme: Władysław Strzemiński (1967, tracks 1 to 4), Galeria El (1967, tracks 5 to 7), Abakany (1970, tracks 8 to 12) and Niepokoje Wacława Kondka (1980, track 13).