A live radio-style lecture exploring the theme of this year’s festival: improvisation as real-time composition. Psikuta takes listeners on a journey through the history of improvisation – from early music to modern times, from oral traditions to scores, from classical music to jazz and Keith Jarrett.
Ido Bukelman
Born in Israel in 1981, currently based in Berlin, Ido Bukelman is a guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, composer-performer, and poet.
Since the age of twelve, he has been exploring how to extract an increasingly rich and dynamic spectrum of sounds from his instruments – from the delicate to the fiercely expressive. His work blends elements of contemporary music, free jazz, and blues with an oriental folk sensibility. He constructs and deconstructs rhythm and form, reaching into dissonance and constantly expanding the sonic possibilities of his instruments.
www.idobukelmanmusic.com
Grzegorz Tyszkiewicz – music popularizer.
In the 1980s, in Włocławek, together with guitarist Tony Kinsky, he formed the post-industrial duo Marchlevski. Since 2010, he has been running the music label Bocian Records. Active online, he hosts the YouTube series Muzyka z Oddali (Music from Afar), where he talks with artists and fellow publishers, as well as records audio essays on the classics of experimental music. To date, nearly 100 episodes of these podcasts have been released. His main fields of interest include experimental music of non-academic origin, improvised music, and the relationship between music and 20th-century art movements, including Fluxus. Between 2017 and 2023, he ran the music blog Z dźwiękiem (With Sound).
He occasionally performs as a DJ, using in his sets mispressed or deliberately damaged records – so-called test pressings. He has collaborated with festivals such as Musica Genera, Avant Art, Unsound, Sacrum Profanum, and Muzyka z Mózgu.
That night, Przemek Psikuta will host his show “Jam Session w Dwójce” from the studio of the local Radio PiK station, which will be broadcasting live on the national airwaves for 1.5 hours. The program will be an extension of the event taking place at 5:00 PM at Młyny Rothera, and both will focus on the theme "Improvisation as the art of composing in front of an audience."
The broadcast guests will be Sławek Janicki and Qba Janicki, who are responsible for the program of the 21st Mózg Festival. Expect plenty of music and conversations about the festival ’s concept and the invited artists of this year.
Improvisation goes far beyond jazz it plays a key role in experimental, electronic, noise, and rap music. In his talk, Jakub Knera will explore the creative strategies of artists like John Cage, Fred Frith, Moor Mother, and Robert Piotrowicz. Topics will include live coding, algorave, and feedback-based performance. Improvisation will be seen as an open, context-sensitive practice.
Jakub Knera – journalist and curator; founder of the website noweidzieodmorza.com. He writes for The Quietus, Polityka Weekly, Dwutygodnik, and the Folk Culture Radio Center. Co-founder of the Palma Foundation and co-organizer of the Sea You 3City Music Showcase.
Tomaž Grom is a Slovenian double bass player and composer. For him, music is primarily a medium of communication rather than just a source of aesthetic pleasure. It is a form of exploration, asking questions without ready answers. Composition is improvisation for him, and improvisation provides space to lose oneself. He has performed across Europe and North America and composed music for numerous theater performances, contemporary dance, puppet shows, and films.
Karolina Głusiec / Sławek Janicki / Qba Janicki
A core element of the Mózg spirit: abandoning habits, seeking the unknown, breaking form. In this festival edition, a trio of sound and image creators come together, not limiting themselves to familiar tools. They venture into radical improvisation, driven by trust, risk, and the joy of creating something new on the spot.
Michał Kostrzewa / Patrycja Pączkowska / Piotr Kikta
“Chinese whispers”: Three Simultaneous Solo Performances with Speaker and One-Way Inspiration”
Three soloists perform simultaneously on separate stages. Each reacts to sounds from a speaker – unaware that what they hear is a processed echo of another’s improvisation. An exploration of one-way influence, without feedback or control. Like the children’s game of broken telephone, but in sound.
Michał Osowski / Michał Kostrzewa
Performative Sound Installation
An experiment in feedback and distortion. The saxophone becomes a resonant tube—played without breath—connected to a computer instrument that processes sound in real time. The boundary between the source and the transformation dissolves, revealing a new sonic dimension.
Dalai Lama. Through Wisdom to Happiness
Dir. B. Miller, P. Delaquis | USA, Switzerland 2024 | 91 min
Nearly 90-year-old His Holiness the Dalai Lama shares his reflections on the challenges of the 21st century, offering practical advice and spiritual support in difficult times. The film is crafted to feel like an intimate conversation—viewers feel like guests in his home.
It is a meditative journey toward inner balance and happiness, in which the Dalai Lama reminds us that each of us has access to our own key.
An experimental composition for two percussionists and 48 solenoid motors, exploring the relationship between percussive impulse, space, and movement. In (ex)tension, the performers create an analog, three-dimensional sound system using custom-designed industrial components. The impulse – shaped and shifted in time and space – becomes the core musical material. The concept is developed by Fabrizio di Salvo and the reConvert collective: Roberto Maqueda and Mikołaj Rytowski – percussionists who fuse contemporary music, electronics, sound engineering, and performative practice.
https://www.reconvert.org/extensions-disalvo/Can you stop a thought? In a world oversaturated with stimuli, the question “What is your brain thinking right now?” becomes an invitation to pause and look inward. This installation by Grodzki and Urbańska encourages self-observation: a mirrored object prompts passersby to write down their current thoughts. The collection of spontaneous entries may reveal a hidden sense of community—or a tangled web of unconscious connections between strangers.
The second element is a symbolic performance: two people trapped in garbage bags, representing the clutter of modern minds—polluted by excess, consumerism, and information overload. Their emergence from the bags marks a rebirth of thought: a moment of clarity and regained freedom.
Piotr Aleksander Grodzki – interdisciplinary artist working with sculpture, painting, ceramics, and performance. Based in Koronowo, Berlin, and Greifswald. Graduate of Ernst Moritz Arndt University.
Agata Urbańska-Krasowska – graphic designer and ceramicist, graduate of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Founder of the Kurza Chata studio, where she blends painting, ceramics, and upcycling into emotionally resonant art objects.
Ela Jabłońska is a visual artist whose practice engages in a critical and ironic exploration of assigned social roles and institutional art mechanisms. Her work is often situated within the context of feminist and postfeminist art.
She creates installations, photographs, performances, and time-based spatial actions, treating the artwork as a relational object – open to negotiation and reinterpretation. In recent years, Jabłońska has focused on artistic gestures that encourage collective engagement, build ephemeral communities, and create fields of mutual communication – often foregoing material production or even authorship.
She is a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and the president of the W788 Foundation. She is a recipient of the prestigious Spojrzenia Award (2003) and the Katarzyna Kobro Award (2023). Her works have been exhibited widely in Poland and internationally.
Julien Desprez is a French guitarist and performer whose solo concerts are immersive, multisensory experiences. Centering the body in his musical practice, he treats guitar and electronics as extensions of physical movement. At the festival, he will present “Agora” — a trance-like composition for guitar, electronics, and foot rhythms, blending electric tension, motion, and communal energy into a vivid exploration of the here and now.
https://www.juliendesprez.com/
Teoniki Rożynek is a composer passionate about sound design, drawing inspiration from everyday sounds. She collects sonic waste and found objects to create electronic and electroacoustic music. She plays violin, electronics, and unconventional instruments. Working solo and in collectives, she collaborates with artists across disciplines on films, performances, and multimedia installations.
Piotr Kikta – klarnet
Grzegorz Pleszyński – trąba wężowa
Adam Gwizdała - saksofon
Maksymilian Gwinciński – klarnet
Tobiasz Mullai - saksofon
Sławek Janicki – kontrabas
Patrycja Pączkowska – gitara basowa
Wojtek Więckowski – gitara
Mateusz Lubiewski – gitara
Antoni Majewski - wiolonczela
Katarzyna Golla - wiolonczela
Wiktor Francikowski - wiolonczela
Remi Vein - elektronika
Piotr Grygor – elektronika
Sławek Pieniak - eletronika
Maciej Karmiński – perkusjonalia
Marcin Karnowski - perkusja
Jacek Buhl - perkusja
Qba Janicki - elektronika
An experimental composition for two percussionists and 48 solenoid motors, exploring the relationship between percussive impulse, space, and movement. In (ex)tension, the performers create an analog, three-dimensional sound system using custom-designed industrial components. The impulse – shaped and shifted in time and space – becomes the core musical material. The concept is developed by Fabrizio di Salvo and the reConvert collective: Roberto Maqueda and Mikołaj Rytowski – percussionists who fuse contemporary music, electronics, sound engineering, and performative practice.
https://www.reconvert.org/extensions-disalvo/
Perforto is a string-based duo for electric guitar and prepared piano, formed by Ola Rzepka and Łukasz Marciniak. Their improvisations explore the physical qualities of sound – timbre, pitch, intensity, and temporal flow – by preparing instruments with wood, metal, paper, and other objects. With subtlety and intensity, they search for sonic sensitivity amid the chaos of their surroundings.
Their 2023 album Uragano, released on Australia’s Ramble Records, was met with critical acclaim.
Ola Rzepka – pianist, percussionist, composer, performer. Creates theatre and contemporary music, and has performed at major festivals in Poland and abroad. Founder of the bands Drekoty and DEAE. Voted among the top jazz drummers in Jazz Forum’s 2024 critics’ poll.
Łukasz Marciniak – guitarist, improviser, composer. Member of Trio_io, El Topo, and Attack of the Mugatu. Composer of music for film and performance. In solo and improvised projects, he develops his own language of articulation.
An Australian composer, pianist and sound artist whose work spans contemporary classical, film, improvisation and electronics. He has written over 90 pieces combining instruments, electronics, notation and improvisation in highly personal ways. He co-founded groups like Thymolphthalein, North of North and tētēma, performing globally across diverse sonic contexts. From acousmatic textures to avant-garde hip-hop, his music seeks focus, friction and intensity. He lives and works in Castlemaine, Australia.
https://www.anthonypateras.com/
https://anthonypateras.bandcamp.com/
The Slovenian-based duo Czajka & Puchacz debuted in July 2020 with their predominantly acoustic album Bivališča. A year later, under their alter ego Kiebitz & Uhu, they released the retro-avant-pop single Entschuldigung, delving into experimental songwriting marked by existential themes and daily life abstraction.
Since then, the duo has been exploring ways to merge instant songwriting with the aesthetics of the European school of free improvisation and the musique concrète idiom found on Bivališča. Their sound is a blend of prepared piano textures, electronics, vocals and layered percussion—balancing between raw emotion and playful abstraction.
Kaja Draksler (SI) – prepared piano, keyboards, vocals, percussion
Szymon Gasiorek (PL) – drums, vocals, electronics
A percussionist and sound artist based between London and Hong Kong. She works with sounds that aren’t meant to be – sweet, raw, uncomfortable – using them to tell stories of the living. Her practice explores sonic activism, self-love with a bitter aftertaste, and the physical resonance of sound in the body.
In her own words: “Feeding back with my own heartbeat... It’s like falling in love but we are stuck in the falling part.”
https://angelahuiwainok.com/about/
https://angelahuiwainok.bandcamp.com/
Edyta Gepard is a duo from Toruń that blends free improvisation with post-punk energy and a yass-inspired aesthetic. The band consists of:
Patrycja Pączkowska – bass guitar, flute, vocals
Maciej Karmiński – drums, wheelbarrow
Their music explores experimental territories within noise, rhythm, and sonic storytelling. The duo delves into themes such as love, death, life, transmutation, and transcendence.
https://edytagepard.bandcamp.com
PÖ is a voice artist and sound producer whose debut album Cociage (Hakuna Kulala, 2023) constructs an entire universe using nothing but her voice. Through layers of electronic manipulation, she travels across noise rap, industrial beats, West African folk echoes, ambient, and post-punk. Her live shows invoke an entity – a vessel of raw human emotions, seeking interaction and resonance with the audience.
DJ, promoter and co-founder of the Sfora festival.
A member of Berlin’s Fraktion Nimmersatt collective. Her sets move across a wide emotional spectrum – from experimental techno and footwork to IDM and ambient – shaped by tension, release and unexpected turns. As a promoter, she bridges music, activism and community care, exploring sound as a tool for transformation and collective regeneration.
https://soundcloud.com/goscinska/sets/here-and-now
Michał Szota (offline 1982-1996).
https://instagram.com/michalszota/
An experimental composition for two percussionists and 48 solenoid motors, exploring the relationship between percussive impulse, space, and movement. In (ex)tension, the performers create an analog, three-dimensional sound system using custom-designed industrial components. The impulse – shaped and shifted in time and space – becomes the core musical material. The concept is developed by Fabrizio di Salvo and the reConvert collective: Roberto Maqueda and Mikołaj Rytowski – percussionists who fuse contemporary music, electronics, sound engineering, and performative practice.
https://www.reconvert.org/extensions-disalvo/
We invite you to the premiere of the radio play “John Citizen in conversation with Mira Awen”,
which will take place on September 20 at 2:00 p.m.
This time John Citizen – already known to the festival audience from his installation MAKE ART
NOT WAR, previously presented in front of the Mózg club as well as in Warsaw and in
Sokołowsko – returns in a completely new form: as a voice.
The radio play takes the form of a conversation between John and the mysterious thinker Mira
Awen.
Their dialogue moves through questions about the meaning of contemporary art, about the role of
unconventional music and improvisation, about presence and attentiveness, reaching the final
question: is a human being necessary for art to exist?
It is a meeting of two voices that do not offer ready-made answers but open a space for the listener.
A dialogue that captivates and resists easy classification — blending philosophy and musical
sensitivity, the traditions of Cage and Suzuki with the experience of the contemporary scene.
It is an invitation for the young, who may discover that contemporary art is much more than
decoration, and for adults who seek something beyond what they already know.
Mira Awen is an elusive figure, present for years in the fields of art and philosophy under this
pseudonym.
Little is known about her — sometimes she appears in short essays published anonymously, at other
times in conversations circulating without authorship.
Her name combines two sources:
•Mira — from the Latin mirari, meaning “to marvel,” “to look with wonder,”
•Awen — in Welsh bardic tradition, “inspiration,” the poetic current that flows through a
person but does not belong to them.
Some see her as a philosopher fascinated by Zen, others as a sound artist, still others as a conceptual
construct, a literary alter ego. Yet no one can point to a clear biography.
The online premiere of the radio play will take place on Saturday, September 20 at 2:00 p.m.
The link, QR code and full instructions will be available on the festival website and on Facebook
the same day at noon.
Dutch percussionist and improviser based in Cologne, Etienne Nillesen redefines the snare drum as a harmonic and melodic instrument. Using techniques such as friction, circular motion and controlled pressure, he creates resonant textures, overtones and microtonal fluctuations. His work explores the space between composition and improvisation, focusing on resonance, timbre and acoustic environments. He has performed with artists including Michael Vatcher, Nate Wooley, Philip Zoubek and Audrey Chen.
Mikołaj Rytowski is a drummer and multi-instrumentalist exploring the intersections of improvisation, composition, and sonic experimentation. His practice pushes beyond traditional performance, seeking new sound possibilities in both percussion and electronics. He performs solo and in ensembles such as iipm, understanding of skinning, Ensemble Lemniscate, and reConvert project. Based in Basel, he graduated from the Hochschule für Musik and is an active part of the city’s artistic scene.
At the festival, he will present Snare Drum – a spatial composition for twenty prepared snare drums that blends elements of sound installation and live performance.
https://www.mikolajrytowski.com/
https://mikolajrytowski.bandcamp.com/
Shepherds of Cats is an experimental audiovisual collective combining free improvisation with real-time visual art. The group—Aleksander Olszewski (ethnic drums), Adam Webster (cello, voice), Dariusz Błaszczak (modular synth), Jan Fanfare (guitar, daxophone, looper), and VJ Pietrushka (live visuals)—crafts immersive, unpredictable performances where sound and image intertwine.
Alto saxophonist, composer and improviser, born in New York, now based in Berlin. His music moves across experimental jazz, noise, new music and free improvisation. Known for his radically expanded solo language on the saxophone, he explores its full expressive and formal potential. He leads the CP Unit, co-creates the electroacoustic project Irrational Rhythms and Shifting Poles, and has performed with artists such as Otomo Yoshihide, Keiji Haino and Chris Corsano. He is also active as a curator and co-founder of the Berlin-based space Richten25.
https://chrispitsiokos.bandcamp.com/
Composer and sound artist Robert Piotrowicz is a key figure in the European experimental music scene. His work combines modular synthesizers, microtonality, and alternative tunings with acoustic instruments, creating immersive and genre-defying sonic landscapes.
His albums (Lasting Clinamen, Euzebio, Lincoln Sea) explore sound as a physical and emotional experience. He also composes for film (Walser), theatre (Opera for the Deaf), and TV (TVP Kultura), treating sound as an integral narrative force.
Piotrowicz has performed in nearly 40 countries at festivals like CTM, SONAR, LUFF, Unsound, Aural, and Sacrum Profanum. He is also co-founder of the Musica Genera label and festival.
His work continues the legacy of Schaeffer and Penderecki, while forging a highly individual path in contemporary experimental composition.
IFS MA is a trio composed of two producers – Krzysztof Ostrowski and Mateusz Wysocki (Fischerle) – and Japanese avant-garde rapper and poet MA. What began as a footwork-inspired project soon evolved into a complex sonic and poetic laboratory, where rhythmic intricacy meets radical experimentation. Their album REIFSMA and its remix edition dismantle and reassemble club music, noise, and contemporary classical influences into an uncanny, compelling narrative. Wysocki (aka Fischerle) is a prolific producer and founder of the Pawlacze Perskie label, involved in numerous experimental collaborations (Mech, Porcje Rosołowe, Bouchons d’Oreilles). Ostrowski, based in Bydgoszcz, is an instrumentalist and producer deeply tied to the alternative scene around Mózg Club, and co-founder of Clinamen. MA brings the fiercely poetic voice of the Tokyo underground – his performances (e.g., Berghain, Unsound, Terraforma) blur the boundaries between rap, noise, and ritual.
A selector with a singular sensitivity – drawn to the weird, the wistful, and the whisper-quiet. mi-el’s style is a masterful balancing act, weaving between sung soundscapes and explorations of her heritage to contemporary bass, electro, and cutting-edge electronics.
A former booker at cult London venue MOT and now an NTS resident, she blurs the line between DJ and sound artist. In just a few years, she’s lit up some of the most exciting nights, clubs and festivals around: Panorama Bar, De School, Boiler Room, Field Maneuvers, FOLD, Big Dyke Energy – to name a few. It’s become something of a scene truth: mi-el is absolutely killing it.
https://soundcloud.com/miellllllll
Michał Szota (offline 1982-1996).https://instagram.com/michalszota/
Admission to all festival events is granted upon presenting an invitation.
You can obtain a free invitation on link below.
https://tickets.mozg.pl/
The received electronic invitation should be shown at the festival entrance.
The International Festival of Contemporary Music and Visual Arts “Mózg Festival” is a gathering of artists working across all areas of contemporary music, performance art, and audio/video installations in which music plays a vital role.
Artists from all over the world are invited to participate, since one of the festival’s core principles is multiculturalism, along with presentations that foster an understanding of the multifaceted nature of cultures. The festival showcases the latest performance techniques and interdisciplinary connections, always within a context that respects tradition. Both outstanding personalities of the art world and young artists whose work already bears the marks of uniqueness are invited to take part.
All artistic activities are treated as a means of gaining deeper insight into the reality that surrounds us, into the transformations taking place in the world, and into personal growth — for both the creators and the audiences of the festival.
To make the ideological framework clearer, each edition of the festival is given a theme. The themes of successive festivals emerge from one another and complement each other, defining the core ideas of the festival’s creators.
The editions of the festival from 2016 to 2021 addressed issues directly related to contemporary social problems, accompanied by the themes: COME DOWN TO EARTH, SPIRITUALITY IS UNIVERSAL, MAKE ART NOT WAR, and ART AS A WAY TO UNDERSTANDING.
We believe that art — especially contemporary art — is a tool for activating the brain’s hidden capacities for perception and comprehension of the world around us. In other words, we assume that art is not an end in itself but a means of reaching other, deeper goals. Throughout history, different forms of artistic activity have fulfilled various social functions, and the same is true for our present times. Art possesses a powerful social role.
From 2022 to 2025, the festival takes place under the motto “DO NOT FORGET TO KEEP YOUR MIND CLEAR.”
We believe that in today’s world — when we are bombarded with an excess of often contradictory or false information, when many values collapse, when the meaning of good and evil becomes blurred, when millions of people live in uncertainty due to ongoing or looming wars and the threat of ecological catastrophe — it is extraordinarily important to make the effort to maintain clarity of mind. Only people who think clearly and independently are capable, as a society, of meeting the challenges of the contemporary world on personal, local, and global levels.
Presenting carefully selected artistic projects and placing them in the right context can significantly enhance the perception of audiences attending performances, lectures, and discussions that are part of the festival. Expanded perception means a clearer mind, capable of making independent and wise decisions.
An individual who engages daily with contemporary art, while also being aware of the cultural diversity of the community around them, gains the chance to live consciously within that community — without fear, with understanding of others’ needs, with the ability to take responsibility for themselves and their fellow citizens, as a member of a developing multicultural civil society.
This year’s festival activities will take place across several venues: Teatr Polski, BWA City Gallery, Rother’s Mills, and the Mózg Club.
In 2025 we are introducing an additional part of the festival — PRELUDE, held a week before the three main festival days. This will be a three-day program of lectures, workshops, and concerts under the title: “Improvisation as Composition in Real Time in the Presence of the Audience.”
The more attentive observers of the festival surely notice our sympathies with the philosophy of Buddhism, in which the practice of clearing the mind of unnecessary thoughts is fundamental. In Buddhism there also exists the practice of repeating certain sentences of varying length — a practice called MANTRA. One possible effect of repeatedly reciting a mantra is a deeper understanding of its content. Hence the idea of repeatedly using the current motto.
This year, however, it has undergone a slight change, taking the form: DO NOT FORGET TO KEEP YOUR MIND CLEAR. Here another Buddhist term comes into play — KOAN, a kind of riddle or paradoxical question used in Zen Buddhism to stimulate intuitive insight and to cultivate wisdom beyond the limits of logical thinking.
Let the festival motto in its present form thus become such a KOAN for those willing to solve it on their own. Upon solving it, one may — but does not have to — share the answer with others.
Admission to all festival events is free of charge, but requires an invitation, which can be obtained by sending an email. In carrying out the festival, we declare our intention to implement accessibility principles for people with special needs. Most of the festival’s events will take place in venues adapted to the needs of people with physical disabilities. At the Mózg Club, where we do not yet have facilities for people with reduced mobility, participants will have the possibility to submit a request to attend. Upon receiving such information, staff will be present to assist wheelchair users in entering the building and participating in the event. Printed materials will include a QR code redirecting to a website with accessible versions of the content. Participation of people with hearing impairments should be announced at least 7 days before the event at: fundacja@mozg.art.pl
