Why did the sounds carry so far down the corridor? Rudnik was in the habit of listening to his work at full blast with the door open. He’d go out into the corridor to sit and smoke in an armchair placed specially by his studio door – at that point, the frontier between corridor and smoking area was vague – to him, at least. People couldn’t just walk by without stopping for a moment, listening, and giving their opinion. This was Rudnik’s form of conversation with his environment, his dialogue with the world. On the strange stage of that corridor, he was the leading man.
I finally entered Eugeniusz’s studio ‘cave’ on 16th December 2003. I knocked just as he was leaving. He lived no more than a quarter of an hour’s walk away. I introduced myself, saying I was a fan of his work (although I hardly knew any of it back then). He invited me in, even though he was due to leave. I was installed in an armchair inside the studio, next to a huge analogue mixing console, and we started listening to music. Rudnik called his wife, Daniela, to say he’d be back later.
That day, I started keeping a notebook to document all of our subsequent meetings. On its cardboard cover, I drew a plan of the whole studio, showing the layout of the montage suite and loudspeakers. On the walls were a clock, a portrait of Józef Piłsudski, a little picture of John Cage, and a photograph of Rudnik’s great friend, Andrzej Markowski, his arms outspread in a conductor’s gesture. There was also an… unopened bar of Czech chocolate nailed with a big nail to the chic wooden panelling so typical of the middle-Gierek-era Woronicza Street TV studio interiors. Along another wall was ‘Rudnik’s rake’ – hooks for lengths of cut tape. There were solid metal filing cabinets (designed by Oskar Hansen for the PRES’s former premises at the Polish Radio centre on Malczewski Street), and stacked-up heaps of brown envelopes filled with pieces of cut tape wound onto metal reels. The floor was strewn with whorls of tangled tape, like carnival streamers. Half the studio was taken up by the legendary Fonia mixing console – designed by Warsaw engineers and built meticulously with ‘top-of-the-range’ Japanese components. Along the wall stood four huge Telefunken reel-to-reel tape recorders, and the bottle of rectified spirit standing on the shelf was used only for cleaning tape heads, of course.
I was stunned and delighted at the honour of being in the master’s workshop. Once he realised he was dealing with a serious devotee, he took down more tapes off the shelves and put them onto a tray. We’d drink cola from the vending machine (the only beverage that was constantly available) and Rudnik would chain-smoke in the studio, despite the bans screaming down from the walls. In some mysterious way, he managed to avoid the guards patrolling the Woronicza building. He would also play music at nigh on full volume through powerful, specially constructed speakers, to hear all the details, and I’d sit with my notebook, listening, taking notes, and calling my wife from time to time, to tell her I’d be just a bit longer…
I also met Bohdan Mazurek, whom I knew by sight from Warsaw Autumn’s night-time electronic concerts. He’d show up occasionally at the music academy’s concert hall, straight off a train back from the mountains he so loved. He’d be dressed in outdoor gear, a parka, his trousers tucked into thick mountain socks. Later, I visited him at home as well, and he was a mine of information and anecdotes. I even recording him singing a Hutsul [folk] song! Sadly, Mazurek never lived to see the release of a CD of his work, which we had compiled together for Bôłt Records.
FL: Polish Radio released an album of Eugeniusz Rudnik’s compositions that you compiled in 2009, and only then were wider audiences able to discover his music.
BB: During our meetings, we started to catalogue the material he’d produced in the course of several decades. On my own initiative, then at his request, and finally when commissioned by the head of the radio archives, I put together a kind of catalogue. We inventoried individual boxes of tapes, some unlabelled, some with incomprehensible, handwritten abbreviations. We attempted to describe their contents, which wasn’t easy. Some recordings were source material, another archive contained separate tracks for mixing compositions, others were later versions, then there were the finalised MW (Main Works). Up until mid-2004, no one foresaw the sad turn of events that was to follow, namely the PRES’s closure. Then Rudnik wrote the piece Agonia Pastoralna (Pastoral Agony), describing the slow death of the studio to which he’d devoted almost his entire life.
FL: I’d be hard-pressed to name any tracks that the PRES produced in the 21st century…
BB: As far as production was concerned, the studio had been dying for years. Commissions were dwindling. Once the first windowsill-sized synthesizer keyboards appeared in Poland, people soon started to use personal computers for editing; laborious analogue procedures faded into history, and the PRES was just taking up space. People’s homes gradually became musical production studios, including professional composers of electronic music. So the PRES stopped resembling a laboratory, workshop, or place for discoveries and meetings between people from various fields, and its experimental nature and spirit vanished irretrievably.
Live musicians were no longer in demand at the time, for it was believed that Japanese plastic toys could create much more attractive sounds. Sound generation and processing equipment was miniaturised, and people tended to despise unwieldy, heavy cupboards full of expensive equipment. The production process began to accelerate at an insane rate, which unavoidably affected the quality of the music, since production was so quick and cheap.
Suddenly, it transpired that Rudnik, Krzysztof Szlifirski and I (Bohdan Mazurek no longer worked for Polish Radio) needed to salvage whatever we could from the dusty archives, as it had been decided that they were to be struck off the inventory. The management gave Rudnik a deadline to move everything out of the premises, which had been reallocated for a vital new purpose. Eugeniusz predicted his studio’s new fate almost exactly – as a storeroom for buckets, broom-handles and quilted workwear. Rudnik had nowhere to move his archives. His flat was small, and he was already over 70 when we met. Teams soon showed up to carry the studio’s materials out to the rubbish bins in the inner courtyard. We needed to act fast.
I started to help physically. My hands were black from tapes that hadn’t been rewound for years –the ferromagnetic particles on magnetic tape wear out and scatter. And something much worse – unplayed tapes stick together, causing sounds to print through, so you hear superimposed ‘ghosting’ of what will be played next. Rudnik kept tapes that had been commissioned internally for theatre and films. He was never asked to archive them, but simply filed backup copies in a fireproof metal cabinet, and handed the commissioned material to whoever had ordered it. This led to some illustrative pearls, music that stands alone nowadays and still shines when detached from its raison d’être (the play or film), sounding incredibly relevant. One example was Krzysztof Penderecki’s soundtrack to The Saragossa Manuscript (directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has, with sound by Mazurek), found in a cardboard box in the corridor near the toilet. We joked that it was ‘The Watercloset Tapescript’. Among other rescued treasures were the electronic soundtrack to Andrzej Wajda’s The Wedding, and the original American tape of Tomasz Sikorski’s famous Samotność Dżwięków (Solitude of Sounds), composed at Princeton.
FL: What happened with the equipment from the PRES?
Everything that was left still functioned until 2012. The studio had been formally closed, but the space still hadn't been adapted for anything else. Eugeniusz simply kept coming to work and nobody was brave enough to stop him at the gate. It even turned out that some of the guards commuted to work from Wyszków where the composer lived. They were friends with him. He would chat with them, joke and high-five, then pat them on the back and walk in. He couldn't function any other way, he had been doing it for so long that even in retirement he had to come to his post in the morning, put his key in the door, switch on the recorder, wind the tapes, listen to something, record a sketch. Although he did stop smoking, and now avoided caffeine.
After a while, any spare tape started running out, as it wasn't being sent from its German factory anymore. Rudnik's existence remained as a creator who had to have contact with his material, but who created less and less. A few commissions appeared during this period, including the soundtrack to Stanisław Lenartowicz's last film Ruchome Okno (Moving Window), put together using a long, painstaking and exhausting process typical of Rudnik, and the music to Vivat Academia, Vivat Profesores by Jerzy Kalina, the film made for the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw's jubilee.
I bought equipment from Polish Radio that had been taken out of use: several Mechlabor and Lyrec tape recorders, as well as a Brüel & Kjær generator which emitted a wide range of tones, from the lowest thuds to pitches higher than humans are capable of hearing. I also took some modulation devices home. But most important were the tape cuttings, the 'samples' recorded and cut by Eugeniusz's hand. It's precisely from these, these found materials, that he really built his sonic world. He decided to make new pieces in a new place, at my home studio in Nadkole. That's how the album Erdada for Tape came about, made from pieces recorded away from Polish Radio. In the studio he made music, and in Nadkole itself he rested in the quiet of our wooden home, among the fields, the forests, close to the slow flow of the River Liwiec.
I was with Rudnik during his last sad goodbyes to Józef Patkowski and Bohdan Mazurek. He did try to treat those moments with humour though, to get the mourners talking and inspire a ray of hope.