Dawid Kowalski

Dawid Kowalski (born 1986 in Kielce, Poland) has been a sound artist and an active member of the Polish underground music community since the early 2000s. Over the years, he has been actively performing, organizing and co-organizing live music events, releasing music and documenting the scene via electronic and traditional media. As an art activist and promoter, Kowalski has started an online community for noise music afficionados currently available at harshnoise.org. Between 2006 and 2010, the site (then known as either harshnoise.pl or harshnoise.art.pl) contained a message board which was frequented by local experimental music enthusiasts and afficionados. That message board became a significant platform for communication between artists, promoters, organizers, label owners. The site became a significant factor in the rise of a new tide of underground experimental electronic music in Poland. In 2010, the forum ceased to exist and the site was transformed to an informal collective of music enthusiasts, artists and journalists with an online outlet in the form of an electronic magazine. Apart from managing harshnoise.org, Kowalski was also reviewing harsh noise albums, interviewing harsh noise musicians and writing articles for a number of magazines, including Special Interests (Finland), M/I (Poland), Skin Yard (Poland) and Hard Art (Poland). In addition to his journalistic endeavors, Kowalski was involved in putting on over 20 live music events, ranging from small, low-key shows to three-day multi-genre festivals. He organized one of the first series of live noise music events in Poland - Noise4Cash (2006-2010) and co-organizes a multi-genre festival Make Some Noise (2011-current). He was also a co-manager of the first Polish experimental music net-label Far From Showbiz (2005-2009). He also used to run a private home label called Somnolent Shelter Records (2008-2013). In 2005, Kowalski has started to perform live with his solo industrial noise act Sleep Sessions, and up until 2013 has released 13 records on local and international labels and performed live extensively in Poland. He has collaborated on stage with numerous experimental music artists (incl. Bartek Kalinka/XV Parowek, Sebastian Harmazy/Vigoc, Konrad Materek/Rez Epo, Bartosz Zaskorski, Jakub Glinski and others). He also did an experimental electroacoustic performance with Bartek Zamarek - a well-established graphic artist/illustrator. The performance involved amplified canvas and digital re-processing of resulting sounds. In 2010, Kowalski was involved in a creative collaboration with a rock music collective Madman Project during which he recorded distorted sound textures for their upcoming debut album scheduled for release in 2015. In 2013, he has started a new solo endeavor called PURGIST. Since then, he has played 40 live shows in Poland and abroad, including a mini-tour in Poland and a recent European tour alongside a well-established industrial noise act MAAAA (Russia/Poland) and an Australian act DEAFAULT. In 2014, Kowalski began an ongoing collaboration with Jakub Gliński - a painter in a similar vein to his prior collaboration with Zamarek. Together, they performed several live shows ranging at underground music venues as well as mainstream music festivals.