If a meal is good, it’s worth making twice, right? That’s the approach taken by Krzysztof Wołek on his latest album Cookbook for the Modern Boygirl, where the song cycle is interpreted twice. The ingredients are straightforward: one girl (Agata Zubel), one boy (Chad Sloan), and a variety of electronic elements carefully assembled not simply to complement but also contradict each other. As for the recipe, that comes from poet Bunny Morris, in the form of seven texts exploring the body as a site of vulnerability and conflict.

Desire versus repulsion is the central tension running through the song cycle. Wołek accentuates this by atomising the vocal part, which doesn’t so much sing as gasp and stammer, its never-ending contortions enclosed in an atmosphere that pressurises the voice as much as it allows it to radiate.

Eruptions of sharp glitch fragments sound as both celebratory fireworks and shards cutting into flesh, playing into the songs’ continual blurring of food allusions with animalistic reflections on the body’s limbs, processes, sensations and fluids. As if to counter the challenges, the voice often resorts to overelaborate ornamentation, elsewhere receding into hissing whispers as if to hide from them.

The two interpretations are strikingly individual, Zubel leaning into frenetic histrionics, like an unhinged bird, Sloan into impassioned lyrical agonism. Though seemingly emanating from parallel universes, both versions unite in the impossibility of knowing what’s desperation or ecstasy, epitomising the fundamental instability of identity at the core of these dazzlingly visceral songs. 

We all know the simple act of care involved in placing a blanket around another person. In the installation A Room to Wait In, this gesture is made literal through textiles and song, both carrying a history spanning centuries. Nan Na Hvass has quilted together 150-year-old fabrics with her own emotional experiences and contemporary encounters with waiting rooms during fertility treatment. Her aim is to transform the clinical space in which one wakes after a procedure, drowsy and clinging to a fragile hope, into a more nurturing environment that stitches generations together. And to bring music into the experience. Each quilt bears witness to the bodies it has warmed and the hands that have sewn it.

Soprano and multidisciplinary artist Katinka Fogh Vindelev moved among us as we lay on individual beds, each covered with a quilted bedspread. »This pain is not yours alone,« came the words in her beautiful, deeply intimate voice, set to music by Hildegard von Bingen, the Italian composer Barbara Strozzi and Vindelev herself. Melancholic minor scales descended; elsewhere, small melodies emerged from an earlier musical era, without leading tones – that is, without the sense of causality found in virtually all music since the eighteenth century. Sounds that simply exist, without control or any necessary direction – much like a person living with a fragile hope of fertility.

There were only four places available – an intimate concert in every sense, in which care, expressed through song, textiles and presence, merged in an almost magical way. The person lying on the bed next to me could not stop crying afterwards. The room was anything but clinical – song and textiles had transformed it into a place of care. Thoughtful and beautiful.

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek