Our Saturday, 21 November performance is part of the "prestigious" (as they say) Audio Art Festival, founded and led from the beginning by Marek Choloniewski .  This is  the 17th edition of the festival and after seventeen years one would expect that organization should be flawless, shouldn't it?  Nothing of the sort.  In the morning, we appear in the concert space, called Bunkier Sztuki (The Arts Bunker), where our rehearsal and then performance are supposed to take place.  Nothing is ready.  An international photo exhibition is happening on the main floor, hundreds of people invading the space.  Our performance is in the basement, but the basement is inaccessible because there are some classes for children there.  How come this was not known beforehand?  Later, Marek tells us with disarming honesty that he gave the afternoon, MOST of the afternoon, to a French noise artist who "has a very complex setup because his set is quadrophonic, plus video played off four computers, eight machines in total."

Understandably, we become more and more livid with anger.  In the midst of it that Frenchman who fiddles with his computers — and his video partner, a Swiss woman who clearly could do with some soothing therapy.  And the minutes are ticking…  And ticking…  And ticking…  But we are nice Canadians, so good at squishing the anger within..

Tech support, in the form of two rather dreamy young men, is totally inadequate.  Had it not been for Piotr's command of Polish, it would have been well nigh impossible to achieve anything.  And the Frenchman plus his Swiss flame are still fiddling, joking, not giving a fuck.  This goes on for hours.  Ultimately, we feel we are screwed big time — and we are.  It is obvious that Choloniewski  has his priorities, and we are not on top of his list. All in all, we have about forty-five minutes to prepare a complex, challenging multimedia set — and this is happening at a supposedly "prestigious" avant-garde festival!

To give you a picture: our women, Gerry and Michelle, had to mop the floor themselves because no one was available to do it!  Gerry needs clean floors for her routines, period.  Piotr has to deal with some technical issues, thank god he has all the cords and took his Presonus audio interface as well as his largish Yamaha mixer with him!  The level of organisation is such that Piotr HAS TO LEND HIS OWN CORDS AND CABLES to the ego-manic Frenchman and the Swiss hag.  There are not enough cords provided by the organisers.  Have you seen anything like that?!  At a large international festival?!!!  Goodness gracious, it is hell.

It is still a miracle that our show went on after that forty-five minute rehearsal.  But first things first.  The evening opens with the Frenchman's set.  It is so bad and amateurish it's beyond words.  It all begins as a quasi-church service, Communist style, the possessed Frenchman playing the rôle of a leftist "priest".  To any decently educated and sensitive person cheap shite like that is just that: cheap shite.  Then he starts playing.  Playing?  It is one long, brutal, incoherent cacophony at about 130dB, accompanied by soft-porn-like video by that unsatisfactory Swiss VJ.  Right in the middle of the space, the Frenchman throws himself here and there, as if possessed by the devil (Communist devil? Capitalist devil?).  He performs a sort of St. Vitus' dance (i.e. Sydenham's chorea), screaming incongruous lines into the mic and physically abusing a guitar, which he clearly cannot play.  No kidding.  The whole thing is just ridiculous and Michelle, with her deadpan sense of humour, sums it up best: "Six-hour rehearsal for this WANK?"

No doubt about it.  The guy's a wanker and it shows.  Dude has some serious issues to deal with, yet he clearly confused vocations.  Certainly, music is not his forte.  Piotr quotes his late teacher, the great composer Edward Boguslawski: "This man loves music.  Sadly, the feeling is not reciprocated".

People begin leaving that sound inferno after ten minutes, more and more of them.  In the hall, we run into a number of Polish artists who performed earlier (we could not attend their performance because we were stuck at the Bunkier Sztuki, waiting for our rehearsal that never really materialised).  We hear some hair-raising stories from there about the organisational ineptitude demonstrated everywhere during the festival.  It becomes painfully clear that Choloniewski , himself truly an outstanding composer and a very charming fellow, took too much upon his shoulders.  Surrounded by incapable and neglectful staff, he cannot control everything by himself.  Perhaps inviting fewer acts would help in the future?

When our turn comes, every one's so tired we know it is going to be so so.  And it is.  It is a let-off and a turn-off.  Under the circumstances, we do our best, but the inevitable happens, the system gives up, sound's out and it takes Piotr about fifteen minutes to find out what the problem was (incompatibility issues) and solve it.  All credit to Choloniewski  who turned the disaster into a tasty joke, inviting the audience to create their own "experimental" music while waiting for the show to resume.  Very good guy, overall, but a bit overwhelmed by the size of the event.

From then on everything goes OK.  Just OK, but what can you do?  At the end we all feel like we've wasted a big opportunity to show something special.  However, we also feel that we've learned a lot.
Will this experience help in Warsaw, at the biggest and oldest music school in Poland?  Chopin studied there, no less.  Noblesse oblige.  Will we live up…?