Band’s bio – Culture.pl
A band that merges poetry and psychedelia. As the artists call it: ‘a combination between circus at the cemetery and funeral rites in the circus’.
The band consists of Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, Tomek Pawluczuk, Wojtek Juchniewicz and Rafał Wojczal, musicians from the Tri-City. In 2010 they recorded their first EP (MP3, 2010), and slightly later they issued their debut album (LP, 2011), which was received warmly, but without much attention. The breakthrough came with the album ++ (CD, 2013) recorded in the New Synagogue in Wrzeszcz, which attracted the interest of the press (both in Poland and abroad), and most importantly became popular among listeners with its cabaret-circus character. The band’s rock emploi was refreshed by guest musicians: the trumpeter Tomasz Ziętka and the saxophonist Mikołaj Trzaska, jazz legend of the Tri-City and Europe.
Few Polish rock albums have aroused my curiosity lately, and I have hardly any criticism for this one, though some tracks would have certainly profited from more expensive production. Instead of disintegrating, Trupa Trupa are becoming bolder and carefully putting together their musical world, – wrote Bartek Chaciński in his blog. Death and the associated helplessness is the main theme of the album. It sometimes acquires a grotesque face like in Grochowiak’s poems, and sometimes sounds frightfully true, said Marcin Bieniek (T-Mobile Music) about the lyrical content of the album.
In March 2015 their third album entitled Headache (CD, MC, 2015) was released by the British label Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records (earlier albums were issued by the band). Trupa Trupa’s next CD was this time created in a normal studio, recorded by Adam Witkowski, and produced by Michał Kupicz.
Kupicz had never been in our concerts. He didn’t know how we sound and perhaps this is why he was able to take a fresh look at our music. To our pessimistic works he added something of his own, he added a few more guitar chords, he muted the piano a bit, and it was then that it all began to make sense – said Grzegorz Kwiatkowski about the creation of Headache – The head of Blue Tapes David McNamee runs the website 20 Jazz Funk Greats, where he reviewed the album ++ [he called his review ‘Too Strange For Humans To Like’]. And he liked it so much that he offered us to release new material. But he wanted it to be something quite different than the previous one. He generally likes very niche and experimental things.
The musicians from Trupa Trupa draw inspiration from The Beatles (‘After listening to Headache a friend of the band concluded that it was a bit like the dark side of George Harrison, and I think there is something about that’ says Kwiatkowski ), Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, and Fugazi, as well as classical music such as works by Bach and Schubert. Added to this is the aura of the Tri-City (‘the Wrzeszcz quarter in particular, due to the presence of very good areas for drinking and walking’), poetry (after all Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is also a successful poet), and the works of Werner Herzog (the early ones, such as Stroszek , Fitzcarraldo and documents from the 90s. ‘What is happening to him recently is sad and the relocation from Munich to Los Angeles probably did not do him any good’, said Kwiatkowski).
The band’s music has not gone through a revolution, it is the result of development, write reviewers about the album. Trupa Trupa still venture into unexplored areas of guitar anxiety, they still like rough sounds…Despite the fact that the band is led by a poet, as I need to mention once again due to my personal poetic inclinations, the texts are not overly intellectual or stagnant (both singers write them). Words function like keys, stimulating and enhancing the mood created by the sounds, wrote Rafał Krause on the pages of Screenagers.
In the past few years, the band took part in the OFF Festival (2013), the Ars Cameralis Festival (2013), the Open’er Festival (2012) and the Soundrive Festival (2014). The musicians twice won Gazeta Wyborcza’s STORM OF THE YEAR cultural award for LP and ++. Trupa Trupa was also nominated for the Aktivist award in the Artist of the Year category. The song Take My Hand from their first full-length album was included in an album by the Third Programme of the Polish Radio (Offensywa).