FOQL - It Will Sound Different When There Are Bodies In The Room

Station to station, studio to studio.

Created partially at WORM / Klangendum studios in Rotterdam, the piece It will sound different when there are bodies in a room is a sonic essay by FOQL about the legacy of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. FOQL stands for Justyna Banaszczyk – Polish artist, author and an alumni artist of Shape platform.

A story as scattered as the tapes used in the studio’s Black Room, it centers around the ghost of Eugeniusz Rudnik, a longtime engineer and producer at the studio, who only after many tears has been finally accepted within the history of New Music in Poland as a composer of experimental music.

For FOQL, the story of Rudnik serves as a lens for her own story of fight for a place within today’s New Music, as she embraces his social background and advancement, but deconstructs the whole legacy of the Studio in terms of gender and its general exclusiveness. One must note that there were many important female engineers, and producers, as well as some female composers working at the studio. FOQL samples from one of them. A story about a complicated legacy that was discarded, only to be used a few years later to build safe monuments.

The piece was released on November 30, 2019 and co-produced by WORM Rotterdam. Also available on Soundcloud (in Polish and English).

*foto: Filip Preis