Karkowski was born on 14th March 1958 in Kraków and died on 12th December 2013. He moved from Poland as a teenager. He lived, studied and worked in several countries including Sweden, the Netherlands and France. In 1994, he settled down in Tokyo. In an interview by Marcin Barski for Glissando magazine in 2013, Karkowski said:
I left Europe many years ago. One of the reasons was that I did not want to live and work in a creative environment based on government subsidies (which is very common in Europe). I wanted to be independent and earn a living from my work without the support of institutions, because I believe, one cannot have a totally free mind when being constantly dependant on something. And without a free mind, you cannot create good, heavy stuff.
In Sweden, Karkowski studied composition and musicology. He examined music aesthetics and discovered artistic uses for new media. Then he started studying sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in the Hague. He participated several times in summer composition courses organised by the Music Institute in Darmstadt and the Centre Acanthes. He worked under composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez and Georges Aperghis. He received a classical education, but he could not find a place for himself among the academics dealing with contemporary music. His views were radical – he saw falsity, inconsequence and injustice in many of the mechanisms working in the music world:
When I graduated in composition studies (at the end of the 1980s), the whole contemporary music scene seemed to be dead and boring – it was very conservative and pseudo-intellectual. I remember that I often visited music stores and noticed that contemporary music sections included Schönberg, Webern and Berg, but were dead for years. It's funny that when you enter a music shop today, nothing has changed. You will find the same artists on shelves of contemporary music as you would have 30 years ago, and I often feel déjà vu when I see this. And most (however, not all) of the music created back then sounded very dry and academic. Most of it was written in the manner and style that was thought proper back then.
Karkowski above all created electronic music, working with many artists representing various genres: noise, musique concrète, and free improvisation including Masami Akita (Merzbow), Daniel Menche, Francisco Lopez, Robert Piotrowicz and Antoine Chessex. Karkowski's music was performed by the Ensemble Phoenix Basel, Göteborgs Symfoniker and Zeitkratzer amongst others. He wrote his first vocal piece (accompanied by electronic music) after a request from the Polish festival Gębofon.
Final works in his discography
- Horology, Lars Åkerlund / Jean-Louis Huhta (Monotype Records), 2013
- Processor, + Xopher Davidson (Sub Rosa), 2013
- Nerve Cell_0 - For Cello And Computer , Anton Lukoszevieze (Sub Rosa), 2012
- Argosh, Julien Ottavi (Uzusounds), 2011
- World As Will IV, Tetsuo Furudate (OHM Records), 2011
- Infallibilism, Kelly Churko (Herbal International), 2010
- Bisskraft, Helmut Schäfer (Ytterbium), 2010
- Form & Disposition (Van Dieren Éditeur), 2008
- Unleash, Daniel Menche (Alien8 Recordings), 2008
- World As Will III, Furudate, Zeitkratzer (Sub Rosa), 2008
- 9 Before 9, Damion Romero (Blossoming Noise), 2008
- Switch, Lin Zhiying (emd.pl/records), 2008
- Elasticity Of Time (Raw Special Effects), 2007
- Divide By Zero, Antimatter (Antifrost), 2007
Sources: Culture.pl. Written by Agnieszka Grzybowska, Dec 2013; translated by ND, Sept 2015