Unsound Festival Presents Sound Postcards
Opening Sunday February 7th, 2010 at 7pm. On view until 02.14.2010
During 60s and 70s communism in Poland, at a time when vinyl records hard to get, sounds postcards became extremely popular. They looked like standard postcards on the back, but on the front an analogue recording was engraved in a thin layer of laminate. Sound postcards were usually made by tiny firms, and the recording quality was low, but very often they represented the only available possibility of having access to hit songs from The West. In the late 70s, the cards were replaced by cassette technology. The designs on the front of Sound Postcards ranged from the primitive and weird, to the very beautiful.
Designer Rui Silva and Unsound director Mat Schulz have collected hundreds of cards, to curate an exhibition, which has previously appeared in Krakow and London. This exhibtion not only reveals the forgotten artistic merit of thes cards, but allows the public to listen to songs on the cards transferred into mp3 format, drawing attention to the way that sound recording technology changes across time.
The exhibition at Devotion Gallery is co-preseneted by the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. Monika Fabijańska, director of the Polish Cultural Institute will give a brief talk.
Unsound Festival New York, Presented by:
Fundacja Tone, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and the Goethe-Institut New York
In Cooperation With:
Trust for Mutual Understanding, German Federal Foreign Office, the City of Krakow, Krakow Festival Office, Romanian Cultural Institute New York, Austrian Cultural Forum, Consulate General of Finland in New York, Pro Helvetia, Netherlands Consulate-General in New York, Fonds Pop Over Zee
Anticipate Label, Beyond Booking, The Bunker, Devotion Gallery, EMF – Electronic Music Foundation, Film Comment selects, Halcyon, ISSUE Project Room, Kiss and Tell, Treehouse, Wordless Music, Communikey, Todays Art, ICAS – International Cities of Advanced Sound
Media Partners: Brooklyn Vegan, The Fader, Last.FM, Little White Earbuds, The Onion, A.V. CLUB New York, Resident Adviser, Self-Titled, URB, XLR8R
Unsound Festival is festival based out of Poland that is coming to NYC starting 02.04.2010 full line up here: http://unsound.pl/
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