Baskak (Antoni Beksiak)

Music critic, editor, art curator, composer, vocalist, and computer freak. Initiator and animator of Polish folk music phenomena (cofounder of Dom Tańca / House of Dance, Tupot Niedźwiedzia/Niewte), modern composition and avant-pop (Turning Sounds), sound art in the city space (Fryderyk Chopin. Personal Gazebo in the Warsaw University Library Gardens), improvisation (Ad Libitum), theatre (performer in the Requiemachine of the Women’s Choir, collaborator of Michał Borczuch in Stay. Stay), and film.

For twenty years, he has practiced extended vocal techniques, postulating a new model of the universal vocalist, increasingly so as a performer himself. He can be considered one of the unknown pioneers of beatbox in Poland. Between in 2006 and 2011, he run the festival cycle Gębofon, presenting various phenomena of unconventional vocal music, from beatbox through sound poetry to scream art, leading the way notably to the introduction of beatbox into modern music at Warsaw Autumn. He leads the ephemeral vocal ensemble Gęba, and has cooperated with Yuval Avital on the Warsaw performance of Reka.