Łukasz Szałankiewicz
[PL]
Łukasz Szałankiewicz aka. Zenial is a sound designer, musician, curator, and historian now based in Poznań. A fixture in Poland’s experimental and electronic music scene, Szałankiewicz was involved with early iterations of Krakow’s Unsound Festival, and co-founder of net imprint, AudioTong.
As a producer Szałankiewicz is fiercely independent, working in a range of genres from noise to ambient. He concentrates on sound explorations, audio-visual performances and interactive installations, imbuing them with a sense of the grotesque, using horror tropes and making bizarre connections between the digital and the occult.
Szałankiewicz has been active as Zenial since 2005. He is active in the group Palsecam, and the duo AABZU with Maciej Szymczuk. He has also been part of Dizzy Kinetics with prof. Marek Chołoniewski, and involved with a project called Zendee created by Szałankiewicz and experimental audio artist DJ Dee from Hong Kong, known for his albums on Tzadik Records (as Li Chin Sung) and Noise Asia label.
Committed to promoting Polish artists abroad, Szałankiewicz is a member of the Polish Electroacoustic Society and has taken part in festivals in Europe and Latin America as well as in the USA and China. He is engaged in various music curatorial activities including the “In Progress” series, presenting new electronic music and improvisations at the Centre of Contemporary Arts Łaźnia in Gdansk and, a similar series called “Vibration Palsecam” in Poznan Cultural Centre Zamek. He has participated in several festivals on the organizational level, and was cofounder of the AudioTong label/platform for experimental music and sound art operating out of Krakow since 2005.
The early 90s were Szałankiewicz’s formative years, and he spent them immersed in the metal scene and as a member of the ‘demoscene’—an early computer subculture based around transcending hardware limitations. The multimedia nature of demoscene output has remained a constant element of his solo activity, where sound is often combined with visuals or augmented by a conceptual framework.