My bass organ pipe was a part of a nice group exhibition at >> BWA Wrocław gallery <<. While I love it to the bones and the great sound it makes, this work was meant to be a bit different, and it is a fine example of how concepts in art clash with possibilities.

For starters, it was supposed to be tuned to an angelic 33Hz. I tried simply everything, but the pipe didn't feel like it at all, instead giving a fantastic, loud sound with warbling overtones at exactly double the frequency. Stopping it (closing the end), according to all the literature, is supposed to make it drop one octave at the expense of volume—well, that didn’t happen.

I had this fixation with the Nazi plane crash site in the Czech mountains. I went up there to record the metal remnants and the audiosphere with reverb impulses, intending to include them in a quadraphonic setup alongside the pipe. The field recordings are super nice, but I considered it overkill, as the pipe itself is worth focusing on.

The wood was, in my dreams, supposed to come from dead mountain spruce, killed by acid rain. Good luck harvesting it and turning it into perfectly even planks within the budget. I was also hoping to carve onto the pipe the names of Palestinian kids under the age of one year killed by the Israeli army in Gaza. This idea was contested a bit, but I couldn’t make it happen on time anyway.

So, even though it is a solid piece of analogue, physical sound synthesis—a nice object neatly fitting the exhibition’s topic—I felt really down for a while, as I would have never aimed to make it "just" that. In the end, I guess I was being too harsh on myself. BTW, I couldn’t have known about Kali Malone’s pipe at the Venice Biennale while proposing my piece.

I'm not exactly sure what the title should be, but I'll stick with 33Hz anyway—trying to set easier goals for future projects.