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1. Preprepre-performance 25:37
2. No opus 6:15
3. Coverture to the opera Mistache 1:00
4. Libretto 0:44
5. Visiting musicologist 7:34
6. Small concert for clarinet and battery 4:55
7. Presto, andante, adagissimo 4:02
8. Diabolus in musica 7:30
9. R'ain 0:43

Personnel:
Paweł Grzęda - violin (1,2,8)
Grzegorz Mędza - harmonica (1,8), accordion (2), bass (7)
Zbigniew Reszka - guitars (1,2,5,7,8)
Robert Szczerbowski - percussion (1,2,5,6,7,8), clarinet (5,6), flutes (1), MIDI (3)
Monika Weiss - piano (7)


Improvised music - next to electronic music and its forerunners - is the most important musical phenomenon of the end of our century. Both these movements, in their most creative form, have a common premise. They put into practice the idea of music freed from the mind's rational plans and the illusion of experience.
Improvised music is a child of the times in which everything in art is allowed. A simplistic understanding of this notion results in a feverish, chaotic, splashy eclecticism. But those who accept this challenge in its most radical form create improvised music, which attains its own order: that of an intimate ritual.
The political aspect of improvised music was stressed from its inception. It was supposed to free creativity, performance, form and content from the mechanisms of the capitalist music market. Today, in face of the hypermedial aestheticization of reality, the freedom of improvisation becomes even more important. Improvisation penetrates worlds shackled by the laws of consumption, which regulate the modern functioning of art. Simultaneously, by creating works dynamic in form, fleeting in character, and ruled by indeterminacy, they perfectly portray the spirit of the information age.
American jazz and postmodern music have for long clouded the horizon, obscuring the existence of a whole movement of improvised music. AMM, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Tony Oxley, Derek Bailey, Faust, Henry Cow, Jacques Berrocal, This Heat, Nurse With Wound and many more - this is where the borders between chamber music, jazz and rock, between nature and technology, between the avant-garde and the traditional, between the flights of intellect and the irrational inklings of the miraculous all disappear at one go.
Warszawska Jesionka bands with this European trend of improvised music. It expresses the soul of these strange times in which the techno avant-garde has embarked on a voyage towards the once hermetical discoveries made by concrete and electroacoustic music.


Rafał Księżyk (August 1999)