ZAMEK Culture Centre

OPERA 2025 is a multi-day event focused on contemporary experimental and electronic music. It is brought to you thanks to cooperation between ZAMEK Culture Centre in Poznań, one of the largest cultural institutions, and LAS, an independent promoter of experimental and avant-garde music.

During the three-day event, we are going to showcase contemporary music in comfortable surroundings, so that our audiences may take it all in thoughtfully and without hurry. The programme is not about quantity but relies on a carefully crafted order and arrangement of individual events. In effect, you will be able to enjoy each of them better and more deeply.

Once again, we offer an experience that explores a variety of genres, as we look forward to welcoming open and curious audiences.

Origin, gender or religion do not matter—what really counts is opposition to war, disinformation and lies. This is the kind of attitude we also look for in those who create the programme.

In addition, we have chosen to reduce the price of the pass (200 PLN until the end of July, 249 PLN from August 1st, 2025), as we do not wish for the cost to prevent anyone from attending.

Drew McDowall (UK) live * One Leg One Eye (IE) live * Piernikowski (PL) live * Robert Curgenven (AU) & Kat McDowall (IE) pres. AGENESIS live AV * Pavel Milyakov (DE) live * Brodinski (FR) dj set * Mike Majkowski (AU) live * Katarina Gryvul (UA) live * Saint Abdullah (IR), Eomac (IE) & Rebecca Salvadori (UK) pres. A Forbidden Distance live AV * emptyset (UK) & MFO (DE) pres. Dissever live AV * Dis Fig (US) dj set * Selvhenter (DK) live * Krenz (PL) live * szkoda (PL) dj set * clickbait b2b furrori (PL) dj set * JOMO pres.submetallic whispers (PL) perfo

LINE-UP

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Drew McDowall (UK) * Drew McDowall’s works are sacraments to alterity. An artist who has refused to conform in music and in life, McDowall mines the hallucinatory spaces that exist between reality and celestial otherness. His meditative compositions are haunting and spiritual, melding intricate modular soundscapes with cut-up samples, and deconstructing sounds into their most basic shuddering structures and shapes. The disorienting ambient mirages that result elicit terror, tender melancholy, and heavenly flickers of expansive beauty. McDowall creates music of immanence and alchemy, attuned equally to the sacred and the profane. His backstory reads like a primer of psychedelic fiction woven into statements of the unbelievable, superhuman, and outright insane. Growing up in the gangs of 1970’s Scotland, McDowall-fatigued by years of daily violence and the chaotic madness of that life- sought self-expression and sanctuary in punk and found a home in Glasgow’s rich underground music community. After a stint with The Poems, a band he started with his then-wife Rose McDowall, he joined the ranks of UK avant-gardists Genesis P-Orridge, David Tibet, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, John Balance, and countless others who would come to define the industrial music’s blossoming experimental vanguard. McDowall eventually collaborated with Psychic TV and became a full-time member of the hugely influential cult outfit Coil, where his influence shaped the group’s later output: exercises in magical practice and music-as-psychoactive effect. While McDowall has had a strong affinity to electronic music throughout his career, he has avoided making music confined to any one genre and in his most recent works has used string players, brass, pipe organ and harp. This diversity of approach is reflected in his collaborations with Kali Malone, Caterina Barbieri, Robert Aki Aubrey Lowe, Hiro Kone, Varg, Puce Mary, Shapednoise, Rabit, James K, Elvin Brandhi and LEYA amongst others. He has toured a live AV reinterpretation of Coil’s seminal drone work, Time Machines, at festivals across the world including CTM, Berlin Atonal, Dark Mofo, Unsound, Le Guess Who, Semibreve, WOS and Ambient Church. Dais Records released his first solo album in 2015, Collapse, 2017’s Unnatural Channel, 2018’s The Third Helix, and 2020’s Agalma. These four studio albums were collected in the CD box set Lamina, which includes demos, and two bonus discs of rarities and live recordings. 2024 saw the release of A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, which continues McDowall’s lifelong interest in the elegiac solo bagpipe style “pibroch” (ceòl mòr in Gaelic). This form, often traditionally used for laments and for tributes to the dead, fuses modal drones with flickering dissonance and plaintive melody evoking an ancient, solemn mood. The album incorporates and transforms these elements via exploratory electronic processing, weaving an electro-acoustic tapestry of strings, shudders, voids, and voices, alternately disembodied and displaced.

One Leg One Eye (IE) * One Leg One Eye is the project of Ian Lynch (founding member of Irish group Lankum) that explores submerged leylines of music and song, drawing on the raw aesthetics of black metal, noise and drone, while also being deeply embued with a sense of Irish history and myth. Debut album …And Take The Black Worm With Me (released on Nyahh Records in 2022) is a slow burning suite of five expansive songscapes that has found its audience largely by word of mouth. Partly recorded in an abandoned Dublin factory where his father worked when he was a child, Lynch’s harrowing vocals are underpinned by vast pillars of uileann pipe drones, overlaid with effects and field recordings to conjure up a sound that is at once dark, mysterious and ultimately transcendental.

Piernikowski (PL) * Piernikowski is a versatile artist connected to Poznań - composer, music producer, vocalist and rapper. He has significantly influenced the Polish music scene as a co-founder of projects such as Syny and Napszykłat. His unique approach to music and deep, reflective lyrics set him apart from other artists. His contribution to culture and the arts has been recognised with a nomination for the prestigious 'Polityka' Passport for 2019. He breaks out of genre patterns and stuns with his impressive vision.

Robert Curgenven & Kat McDowall pres. AGENESIS * AGENESIS (noun) - a partial or complete absence. AGENESIS unleashes a polyrhythmic phasing in light and sound - a collapse in depth perception to bring the collective bodies of the audience and the surrounding room into a physical constellation of head-wrecking quasi-synaesthesia. The 1:1 relationship between the sound driving the light via custom-made lighting software draws from Edwin Land's work with light shadows following his invention of Polaroid photography and sunglasses - themselves processes which eliminate to allow us to see differently, a new whole from a partial or complete absence.

Pavel Milyakov (RU) * Having achieved certain recognition with his dancefloor-oriented project buttechno, the Berlin-based artist is currently focused on sonic experiments and artistic collaborations under his birth name. Pavel uses his work as a means to acknowledge the true historic and cultural context, delving into sociopsychological issues that haunt the society, and addressing memory — both collective and individual — and its potential to change our visions of the future. Working in a variety of musical genres he created collaborative works with such artists as Martyna Basta, Bendik Giske, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Yana Pavlova, Perila, Jasmine Wood, Richie Culver. With releases on Smalltown Supersound and AD93, Pavel also runs and curates the "psy x" record label — a platform for sonic and visual works by like-minded artists, as well as for 'non-format' records of his own.

Brodinski (FR) * Brodinski is a French DJ and producer. He was a long-time resident of the Social Club, that emblematic basement that shaped a whole generation of Parisian clubbers. A friend and collaborator of DJ Mehdi, and the producer of multiple EPs, Brodinski has since launched an international career. In 2012, he co-founded the Bromance label, developing links with a selection of artists from across the world. In 2015 he released his debut album Brava, which brought together techno production with American rappers : a plunge into his iconoclastic musical world. After ending the Bromance adventure in 2017, Brodinski continued his evolution as an artist. He's been working on a series of projects that focus on mixing trap and electronic music, splitting his time between Paris and Atlanta since 2018.

Mike Majkowski (AU) * Australian double bassist of Polish descent, based in Berlin for years. He composes, improvises, and explores sound and time as a performer, composer, and organizer, both solo and in numerous collaborative projects. Mike Majkowski has played in groups led by Oren Ambarchi, Hailu Mergia, is a member of the trio Lotto, has collaborated with the likes of Jules Reidy & members of The Necks. His solo music ranges from purely acoustic to electro-acoustic to electronic.

Katarina Gryvul (AU) * Katarina Gryvul is a professionally trained composer, violinist and music producer. After completing her formal studies, she transitioned her focus to electronic music, blending her classical training with avant-garde sounds to develop a distinctive sonic identity.Gryvul’s compositions revolve around timbre as a primary element, fusing her classical roots with innovative approaches to sound design. During her studies, she specialized in ambisonics and multichannel composition, employing a holophonic approach. Her work often incorporates live electronics for instruments and voice, alongside modular synthesizers, creating immersive and textured soundscapes. In addition to her artistic practice, Katarina is the founder of Gryvul School, an initiative dedicated to sharing her expertise with musicians worldwide. The school supports students and professionals, encouraging their growth and exploration of new possibilities. Her pieces were performed at festivals such as: Warsaw Autumn, Ars Electronica, rewire, CTM, ZKM, l.e.v. matadero, musikprotokoll, mixtur, gaudeamus, nuits sonores, MA/IN, Skaņu Mežs, Sanatorium of Sound, nuit blanche, Klangzeit, Hyperreality, Tremplin de la création, Audio Art Festival and many others.

Saint Abdullah (IR), Eomac (IE) & Rebecca Salvadori (UK) pres. „A Forbidden Distance” * A Forbidden Distance weaves intimate narratives of displacement into a mesmerizing audiovisual dialogue. Through the convergence of three distinct artistic voices, the work explores the profound tensions between separation and connection, illuminating universal experiences of displacement across continents. A Forbidden Distance is a collaborative audio-visual work that explores the profound relationship between self-identity and displacement. This unique performance piece brings together Iranian-Canadian brothers Mohammad and Mehdi (Saint Abdullah), Irish sound designer and musician Ian McDonnell (Eomac), and London-based Italo-Australian video artist and filmmaker Rebecca Salvadori in their first artistic collaboration, embodying the very transcendence of borders their work examines.

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OPERA 2025 is the soundscape of the 21st century, with Its weaknesses, fears and challenges. Its unnatural pace of change, development and hope. It invites you to a delicate, immersive, absorbing experience that requires concentration, while at the same time showing the energetic, furious face of post-club DJ sets.

Graphic design created by Tomasz Łochowicz.

Graphic design. The caption “Opera” is written in large, stylized letters against a collage of musical instruments. The font is elegant and artistic. Below, in smaller letters, there is another caption: “created by CK ZAMEK & LAS’”. The whole image is in shades of purple, with the text in light yellow. The image has a grainy texture, giving it a slightly retro look. In the centre of the image are the dates of the event: 19 – 21.09.2025, enclosed in an elliptical shape. In the bottom left corner of the image, there is information about passes and tickets. In the bottom right corner, there are the logos of the promoters: ZAMEK Culture Centre, LAS, and the City of Poznań. On the right , there is an caption with the website address ckzamek.pl and the Instagram handle operafestival.