Zbigniew Karkowski/Aube

Tonight on A Different Nature we pay tribute to Polish composer/musician ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI, who passed away in mid-December 2013. We'll listen to both solo works as well as collaborations, including selections from the multi-volumed "World As Will" that he did with Tetsuo Furudate.

And we'll also spend a little bit of tonight's program on another experimental musician who died late last year, Akifumi Nakajima, who performed under the name of AUBE.
 

From Wikipedia:
Zbigniew Karkowski (born March 14, 1958 – December 12, 2013) was a Polish experimental musician and composer.

Karkowski studied composition at the State College of Music in Gothenburg, Sweden, aesthetics of modern music at the University of Gothenburg’s Department of Musicology, and computer music at the Chalmers University of Technology. After completing his studies in Sweden, he studied sonology for a year at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague, Netherlands. During his education, he also attended many summer composition master courses arranged by Centre Acanthes in Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, France, studying with Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez and Georges Aperghis, among others.

He worked actively as a composer of both acoustic and electroacoustic music. He wrote pieces for large orchestra (commissioned and performed by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra), plus an opera and several chamber music pieces that were performed by professional ensembles in Sweden, Poland and Germany.

Along with Edwin van der Heide and Atau Tanaka, he was a founding member of “Sensorband.” In performances by this electroacoustic music performance trio, Karkowski “activated his instrument by the movement of his arms in the space around him; this cut through invisible infrared beams mounted on a scaffolding structure” (Tanaka 2012).

Karkowski lived and worked in Tokyo, Japan, for the last years of his life and was active in the underground noise scene there.

Karkowski died of pancreatic cancer in December 2013.

And:

Aube (1959 – 25.09.2013) was the name used by Japanese musician Akifumi Nakajima (中嶋昭文 Nakajima Akifumi?) for his experimental noise records. He had released many CDs, LPs and cassettes since 1991, and was regarded as one of the most important noise musicians working of his time. He did not like to term his work "music," preferring the term "design": "I don't think of myself as a musician or an artist. I'm a designer. I therefore consider my sound works to be designs as well".[1] The essential element of his Aube project is that each record is composed with only a single material source, manipulated and processed using various types of electronic equipment. Examples of sources he has manipulated include water, fluorescent lamps, voltage-controlled oscillators, voices, pulmonary sounds, the Holy Bible's pages and sounds made with steel wire.

Akifumi Nakajima was born in 1959 in Japan. He was interested in sound work since the 80s, but had not released anything until he was asked to create music for an art installation in the early 90s. Since then, he has created an enormous amount of work - most of which is based on one sound source. Anything is used - from glass to oscillators and even pages from the Bible. His early work was noisier, while his new direction leaned toward ambient.
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