WHAT REMAINS WHEN NOTHING IS LEFT
Ramón Oliveras feat. Lukasz Polowczyk
The Bunker Concert No One Heard: When Art Becomes a Koan
On February 4th, in a cold cement hallway beneath Zürich, a speaker played a single piece of music to an audience of one. This wasn't a failed event, it was the point.
What happens when you create art that almost no one experiences? What remains when nothing is left?
At precisely 14:06 GMT, in the forgotten geometry of a Zürich bunker, composer Ramón Oliveras stood alone as his collaboration with poet Lukasz Polowczyk filled the desolate space. The piece—What Remains When Nothing is Left—played exactly once, then disappeared into the cold air, leaving only memory and intention in its wake.
This wasn't concert. It was ceremony. Meditation. A Zen koan performed in sound.
The Collaboration: Where Minimalism Meets the Void
Ramón Oliveras, the Zürich-based composer and drummer best known as bandleader of minimalist post-jazz quintet IKARUS (Ronin Rhythm Records), has built his career on stripping music down to its essential bones. His work with projects like JPTR and DALAI PUMA, plus his compositions for contemporary dance, all orbit around a core question: what happens in the spaces between the notes?
Lukasz Polowczyk, the cross-media poet and spoken word artist whose 2020 project AINT ABOUT ME (produced by Jan Wagner) caught the attention of BBC 6's Mary Anne Hobbs, Lefto on WorldWideFM, and BBC 3's Verity Sharp, works at the intersection of experimental sound and linguistic deconstruction.
Together, they created something that exists at the vanishing point of perception itself.
The Poem That Split an Atom
What Remains When Nothing is Left began as a chromakey micro-poem by Polowczyk—his meditation on a Zen koan that asks the impossible question. "Try to think about it. Like really!" he laughs. "If you do it long enough you'll split an atom."
The concept draws from Tathata—the Buddhist notion of "suchness," the irreducible, singular reality of each thing. In Polowczyk's practice, this means creating art from your own bones, living and working from a place of authentic presence rather than market demands or creative trends.
"People who are attuned to their suchness—who live their life from that place—they inspire me," he explains. "This is what I'm after and what informs my daily practice both in life and in art."
The Recording: Five Descents into Stillness
The actual recording session was an exercise in meditative repetition. Oliveras and Polowczyk followed directions from a video score, recording the piece approximately five times. Each take brought them deeper into a state of concentrated presence.
"The repetitiveness of the process, and the level of concentration we had to have to follow the score, it induced a deep, meditative focus," Oliveras recalls. "With each recording we sank deeper into this state."
For Oliveras, the process connects to wabi-sabi—the Japanese Zen-inflected aesthetic centered on impermanence, the beauty of things moving in and out of nothingness. Though he doesn't practice seated meditation in the traditional sense, he's developed active mindful rituals: preparing green tea, practicing polyrhythms for extended periods, listening to minimal music, tantra massage.
Polowczyk's approach is more direct. Daily meditation became his anchor in Hamburg, pulling him out of what felt like a hazy half-consciousness. "I feel like I woke up from some hazy dream, as if I was not really there for so many years," he says. That practice spilled into everything—his relationships, his music production, his writing.
Deep Listening as Creative Practice
"With experimental work like this, deep listening and being present is absolutely fundamental," Polowczyk explains. "You have to really get inside the sound, be able to experience it at something of a granular level to be able to work with it."
This is the opposite of functional music, where the goal is emotional trigger without awareness of mechanics. In pop music, you're not supposed to notice how the magic happens. In What Remains When Nothing is Left, the magic is the noticing.
The Bunker: First Audience, First Listening
After mastering the recording in 2019, Oliveras didn't listen to the piece in its entirety until that February afternoon in the bunker. Standing alone in the cold cement corridor, he experienced his own composition as if for the first time.
"It was somehow both disturbing and very peaceful," he reflects. "It was like listening to the piece for the first time, which is a very rare experience for a composer to have, especially when it concerns their own work. In a way, it was the first time I got to be the main audience for my own music."
After a pandemic year without live performances, without that crucial exchange between artist and audience, the bunker became a space of catharsis. The piece playing to almost no one wasn't failure—it was fulfillment of a different kind.
Art in Challenging Times: The Anti-Leisure Conversation
Both artists push back against the myth that only suffering produces meaningful art, while acknowledging that challenging times mobilize the creative community in crucial ways.
"Nothing can snuff out creativity," Polowczyk insists. "Extreme conditions give purpose and direction to art. As artists, we actively use our practice to reshape reality, to make it more humane, or at least to introduce the potential of new realities into mainstream consciousness."
But he's careful to distinguish between necessary struggle and romanticized destitution: "During times of relative prosperity, art tends to become self-indulgent and stops dreaming of alternate realities. There's nothing wrong with escapism, but when it becomes the dominant voice, we stop reflecting on reality and get tangled up in having a conversation with the mechanics of the market."
Oliveras agrees: "I'm suspicious of this myth that only depressed and destitute artists can produce great art. This idea—together with the artist as genius myth—was responsible for a lot of structural misery in the artist community."
The pandemic forced both artists to reckon with their creative practices under strain. Polowczyk, juggling two kids and freelance work, learned to work in what he calls "micro-rhythms"—small, consistent units of time that add up to finished work. Oliveras initially overworked himself into a harmful cycle, creating projects with no possibility of live fulfillment, before learning to dismantle that pattern.
What Remains
So what does remain when nothing is left?
Perhaps it's this: the practice itself. The ritual of creation divorced from outcome. The sound in an empty bunker that no algorithm will ever measure, no streaming platform will ever count, no audience will ever applaud.
It's art as meditation, composition as koan, performance as presence.
In a world increasingly obsessed with metrics, reach, and scalability, What Remains When Nothing is Left offers a radical counter-proposition: What if the value of art isn't in who experiences it, but in the depth of attention brought to its creation?
What if, sometimes, one listener is enough?
What if, sometimes, the bunker is exactly where the music needs to be?
The piece exists now only in memory, in this text, in the minds of two artists who descended five times into stillness to create it. Which is to say: it exists completely.
Try to think about it. Like really. If you do it long enough, you'll split an atom.
