A concert & sound installation by Aleksander Kolkowski aka Recording Angels

“There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy…I am a graphophone and my mother was a phonograph.”

Charles Tainter’s first recorded words on his newly developed wax cylinder Graphophone, the successor to Thomas Alva Edison’s tinfoil Phonograph, in 1881.

Horatio Oratorio is an audio-visual exploration through the history of recorded sound. The earliest sound reproducing technologies and rare mechanical-acoustic string instruments are combined with vintage and custom-made electronics in a unique liaison between the contemporary and the obsolete.

The Jubilee library will play host to a multitude of antique wax cylinder phonographs, gramophones, stroh violins and a cornucopia of ornate horns. The sound installation, featuring the machines and suspended horn constructions, will run autonomously throughout the day.

The afternoon solo performance will feature the stroh violin combined with specially made wax cylinder and disc recordings, including recreations of some of the earliest speech and music transcriptions known to exist.

Aleksander Kolkowski’s work combines instruments and machines from the pioneering era of sound recording and reproduction (wind-up gramophones and wax-cylinder phonographs) to make live mechanical-acoustic music. In 2002 he founded Recording Angels, a project that examines our relationship to recorded sound in performances, workshops and installations.