BBC - Cut and Splice 2006 - Zbigniew Karkowski

Zbigniew Karkowski

Listen to Mazk (Zbigniew Karkowski/Masami Akita)

Zbigniew Karkowski is a Polish-Swedish composer/musician currently resident in Japan. Though he undertook formal musical training with figures like Xenakis, Messiaen and Boulez, he has declared that composition "has lost contact with reality" and that "notation and graphical aspects of the scores have become more important than the sound of the music itself". Karkowski's work has encompassed orchestral pieces, opera, electroacoustic explorations and more, and his collaborators have included Aube, Merzbow and Kasper T.Toeplitz among others. He is also one third of Sensorband, an electroacoustic group who bring 'a visceral physical element to interactive technologies', using their bodies to control electronic sound sources.