Sound Art · 2026-08-07
Girls with Recorders — headphone sound works on the banks of the Vistula
The series Girls with Recorders begins in Warsaw on 9 August: audiences can listen to sound works on headphones while walking along the bank of the Vistula.
The Polish name for the event — silent słuchowisko, 'silent audio drama' — refers to the fact that listeners hear the site-specific pieces on headphones. The idea originates in the silent disco, where participants hear the music they are dancing to on headphones, once a noise curfew is in force nearby. The Polish event is a particular form of open-air audio drama. A sound walk can also be taken alone, downloaded to your own phone (the paid 'urban audio dramas' of Budapest's Jurányi incubator house are of this kind), but here no phone is needed: the special headphones, which receive the broadcast by radio, are handed out free by the organisers. 'Instead of taking a seat in the audience, you choose your own way of listening — walk along the river, sit on the steps, lie down in the grass.' You can join the listening at any point.
The series Girls with Recorders (Dziewczyny z rekorderami) runs over four Sundays. Its title alludes to the 2020 American documentary Sisters with Transistors, about the pioneering women of electronic music; this selection focuses on women artists living in Poland who work with field recordings of soundscapes and use the recorded material as raw matter for audio dramas and compositions. The programme features works by Justyna Banaszczyk, Edka Jarząb, Zoi Michailova and Agata Dyczko. Edka Jarząb's piece, built on fungi and tarot cards, is twenty-two hours long and was part of the 2022 project in which a Luxembourgish community radio station broadcast day-long sound-art works by a hundred artists over a hundred days, showing that a radio station can be completely different every day.
The first session, on 9 August, is Justyna Banaszczyk's Bug Poems. The sound artist and composer from Łódź is known as FOQL; she co-founded the label Pointless Geometry and the community station Radio Kapitał, and her work moves between experimental music, sound art and radio forms. Bug Poems was released as an album in November 2025 and premiered live at the Museum of Art in Łódź; this June it also appeared as a sound installation at Cricoteka in Kraków. The Vistula version was prepared specially for this occasion.
The work's poetics bear directly on the future of radio drama. According to the official description, the album 'grows out of years of research into the audio-drama form — a reflection on what radio was, what it has ceased to be, and what it might become'; the artist is interested in the space after radio, in what remains of its intimacy once the institution disappears. And it treats the audio drama 'not as a genre from the archive but as a living possibility — a form still waiting for its new languages'.
The series is co-funded by the City of Warsaw.
Cast & Crew
- Artist Justyna Banaszczyk (FOQL)
- Other artists in the series Edka Jarząb, Zoi Michailova, Agata Dyczko
Sources: waw4free — the official event listing (2026-08) · Anxious Musick Magazine (2026-08-04) · Pointless Geometry — the Bug Poems album (2025-11-06) · Cricoteka — the sound installation in Kraków (2026-06) · Radio Art Zone — the series programme page (2026-08) · Radio ARA (Luxembourg) — Radio Art Zone, Esch2022 (2022)
AI involvement — Research: partly · Writing: partly · Verification: partly. The article is based on machine translation of original texts in Polish.