The 69th edition of the Warsaw Autumn Festival, directed by Jerzy Kornowicz, explores the theme of signs through a multidisciplinary approach that blends instrumental and electronic music with theatre, performance, multimedia installations, cinema, and choreography. This year’s program unfolds across multiple venues in Warsaw, offering a rich tapestry of contemporary artistic expressions. One of the festival’s highlights is the Spółdzielnia Muzyczna, a leading Polish ensemble dedicated to modern music, which presents a program where the concept of signs—both literal and metaphorical—plays a central role. Russian composer Elena Rykova’s Quest # (2013) is an "open score" for 6 to 9 unspecified instruments, allowing performers freedom to interpret the piece in real time. The piece emphasizes gesture and color within a dynamic space, highlighting the interplay between sound and movement. Similarly, Polish composer Barbara Zach’s Conocybe filaris combines ensemble performance, fixed sounds, and video, drawing inspiration from the natural world. The piece balances visual and auditory elements, maintaining a continuous tension between the flow of images and the accompanying music. Ukrainian composer Yana Shliabanska’s Divisi for ensemble and electronics questions the performer’s identity on stage, while American composer Jessie Marino’s YiQzljvluFQ, with its barcode-like title, reinterprets the concept of "Table Music" by Thierry de Mey. In this piece, three musicians perform on the skin of an amplified timpani, their movements captured by a camera and projected onto a large screen. The performance becomes a visual and auditory puzzle, where the audience must decode a secret language through both sound and image. At the Nowa Miodowa Concert Hall, Polish composer Tadeusz Wielecki’s How sould I put it... presents a "radio drama in progress" that follows a train journey, weaving together music, speech, theatre, and video. The piece explores the difficulty of expressing emotions through language, testing various forms of expression through spoken and sung texts. The performance, led by actors and a singer, invites the audience to reflect on how to convey feelings when words fall short. The piece is accompanied by a visual flow of images and a rhythmic structure marked by four stops, adding to the sense of a journey that is both fantastical and deeply existential.