During 60s and 70s communism in Poland, at a time when vinyl records hard to get, sounds postcards became extremely popular. They looked like standard postcards on the back, but on the front an analogue recording was engraved in a thin layer of laminate. Sound postcards were usually made by tiny firms, and the recording quality was low, but very often they represented the only available possibility of having access to hit songs from The West. In the late 70s, the cards were replaced by cassette technology. The designs on the front of Sound Postcards ranged from the primitive and weird, to the very beautiful.
For Unsound in 2007, Rui Silva and Mat Schulz collected hundreds of cards, to put together an exhibition. This exhibtion not only revealed the forgotten artistic merit of thes cards, but allowed the public to listen to songs on the cards transferred into mp3 format, drawing attention to the way that sound recording technology changes across time.
This installation has led to the vision of an expanded project, supported by Unsound. It is not only intended that further sound postcards exhibitions will take place in other countries, but also that a collection of cards and songs are archived on the Internet, to help raise public consciousness of this unique part of Polish culture.