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 RADOSŁAW NOWAKOWSKI spinet, bzyk łysogórski recorded in September 2025 at home on Tascam DR-07X imagined, performed, produced, designed, written, printed, bound by R.N. 
(here you can listen)  (here you can purchase .wav files) One day a spinet encountered a bzyk. By chance. Accidentally. And spoke to it, though we should have written “speaneted something”. The bzyk replied – of course, we should have written “bzyked back” or “buzzed back”. So they continued the conversation. One was buzzing, humming, grunting, swishing, groaning, moaning, whining and yelling, while the other was squealing, chirping, clattering, chattering and tingling. What were they conversing about? About chances and accidents. About randomness and haphazardness. Anyway, one of them was made by accident and tuned randomly, while the other had the Baroque mode, but surprisingly was built in the epoch chosen by chance and having no name so far. Very nice conversation it was, indeed. For them. Not necessarily it is nice for us. Bzyk łysogórski – kind of clavichord with two strings tuned to a fourth, and the keyboard consisting of the symmetric mirror like halves separated with a guitar pick-up; each half has seventeen keys and covers almost an octave; the keys are not fixed, so shifting slightly while being played they cause various interval fluctuations. Although there is only one copy of this instrument made this year by Tomasz Rozborski, a luthier by chance, it has a really voluminous bibliography, mainly in Polish, compiled by Krzysztof Żarnotal. Spinet (Colin Booth – Early Keyboard Instruments) – a copy of probably more or less randomly chosen original instrument, possessed by Sister Hanna, whom I wish to thank cordially for sharing it for this recording. |