Jakub Lemiszewski soundtracks the Home Archive

Date and time
26 September — Thursday 19:00-20:00
Location
Room: Stolica

Jakub Lemiszewski soundtracks the Home Archive

We invite you on an insane audiovisual journey back to the transition era, through the eyes of video-camera enthusiasts of the time and the ear of an artist who regards transition as a particularly vital method of creation.

The ongoing Home Archive project – for which the National Film Archive’s Audiovisual Institute (NInA) has spent years digitising home video recordings – coincided with a boom in the popularity of vaporwave. This musical and graphic genre is a nostalgic, slightly ironic nod to styles of the 1980s and 1990s. In the West, for example, James Ferraro and Daniel Lopatin released recordings in a similar vein, and in Poland one can find echoes of this fascination in the works of Wojciech Bąkowski, or at WIXAPOL parties.

Among those who have presented music at the latter is Jakub Lemiszewski, one of the most creative electronic music producers of the younger generation. His back catalogue includes albums that touch on the vaporwave aesthetic. For the Digital Cultures conference, he will premiere material produced to accompany a 40-minute film made up entirely of home archives from the Polish transition years, edited by Krzysztof Bagiński, known for films such as Wszystkie Nieprzespane Noce (“All the Sleepless Nights”).

This dynamically edited, abstract sequence of scenes torn out of context seems an ideal starting point for a sound artist whose work tends to be eclectic and spontaneous. Often blurry and unclear, the images recorded on VHS cassettes are definitely akin to the glitches contained in Lemiszewski’s tracks – sonic interference and discordant notes that break up the rhythm.