Monolith Cocktail Blog

SINGLE REVIEW/NEWS/PURVIEW: DOMINIC VALVONA

Photo Credit: Adam Plucinski

Becoming a near yearly dispatch of announcements from our dear friends in the famous Polish port of Gdańsk, the city’s most notable and self-coined “psychedelic post-punk” band of recent years, Trupa Trupa, are full of encouraging news and exciting prospects.

Hopefully you will have read my previous posts on their ttt (released as a limited cassette run), B Flat A and Of The Sun albums. But if not, in short, the band’s sound could be described as an intense and cerebral psychodrama, dream revelation, hypnotic, propelled and industrial post-punk, art and psychedelia locked-in conjuncture of East-European intelligentsia and abrasive wiry Gdańsk industrialism.  

Their music, filled with a psychogeorgaphy, travails and activism, goes further than just sonically. Trupa Trupa band member and spokesman of a kind, and my first port-of-call, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is not only a musician but a published poet/writer, academic and local activist: all three of which are channelled into the band’s unique sound.

Just last year, Grzegorz was involved in petitioning for a memorial to mark Gdańsk’s former Jewish ghetto. Housed as it was in the Old Red Mouse Granary on Granary Island in the city, this stain on the city’s reputation was eventually bombed by the Allies in 1945. The grandson of a concentration camp survivor himself, Grzegorz campaigned with others towards building a permanent link, reminder to a mostly “forgotten” part of the Polish city’s history.

The Jewish Chronicle published a piece on this achievement, interviewing Grzegorz, who commented at the time upon the proposed site as “…one of the last empty places [on the island] not full of luxury apartments”. For, as if to pile drive over such a heinous crime, this once final stopping point for the city’s remaining Jewish population before being cattled and sent to the death camps, is now rapidly becoming gentrified: a chapter, forensic scene, closed and paved over, as if nothing had ever happened. Just in time, a marker will now act as a point of remembrance and education, and prescient reminder. You can still read about that campaign in the JC here…

As featured in The Guardian, Kwiatkowski also helped uncover half a million shoes left to decay near the infamous Stutthof concentration camp. In a secluded, marshy, and wooded area 34 km east of the city of Gdańsk (or Danzig as it would have been known at the time) in the territory of the German-annexed Free City of Danzig, this camp was originally used to imprison Polish leaders and the intelligentsia, and was the first such camp constructed outside Germany itself: and the last to be liberated by the allies. Roughly 65,000 poor souls died there, either through murder, starvation, epidemics, extreme labour conditions, brutal and forced evacuations, or lack of medical attention. A third of that number were Jews. Many were also deported from that heinous crime scene to other death camps (estimated to be 25,000). Kwiatkowski has fought to have it preserved and recognised officially as a site of memory, which at this point in geopolitical turmoil, with antisemitism at record levels not only in Europe but across the world, and the increasingly depressing divisive nature of politics and activism in the X/Twitter/tiktok sphere, is needed more than ever.

Continuing the roles of activist-academic-poet, Kwiatkowski’s fortunes look very favourable over the next year, with workshops planned for both Harvard and Oxford, and an artist’s residency spot at Yale. The latter is an incredible opportunity, and furthers his poetic and musician roles, tying them together with his chosen speciality in amplifying the voices and testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Combing research and archival accounts from the University’s famous Fortunoff Video Archive, Kwiatkowski will fashion new poems and bring in his foils from Trupa Trupa to create new art. The results will be exhibited both at Yale and in his home city.    

2024 going into 2025, Kwiatkowski and his foils build upon a burgeoning reputation as one the most dynamic and intelligent bands to emerge on the world circuit. Certainly, one of the most creatively exciting prospects to emerge out of the famous Polish city of Gdańsk; its geography and history of “old ghosts and hope” (as Kwiatkowski puts it) integral to their sound. In fact, so interwoven is that sense of place, of attachment, and what it means to walk a both catalyst and imposed history that I feel we need a very brief overview.

In a perpetual tug-of-war for dominion with its Prussian, then German neighbours, Gdańsk strategic and commercial position as Poland’s most important port has seen the famous city become a sort of geopolitical bargaining chip over the centuries because of its gateway to the Baltic. After one such episode in a “convoluted” legacy, the city and much of its surrounding atelier of villages were turned into the Free City state of Danzig after WWI; partly a compromised result of the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Under Nazi German control two decades later, it acted as a transportation point to the death camps for the city’s Jewish community.   

Its famous luminaries include the present prime minister and former EU negotiator Donald Tusk, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer – credited as a major influence on the band -, and, although not strictly born within the city limits, the infamous madman of cinema Klaus Kinski – his most wild-eyed legendary role as the obsessive loon opera impresario, Brian Sweeney “Fitzcarraldo” Fitzgerald is also cited as a major influence, used as an analogy for Trupa Trupa’s own journey from the city’s underground to international favour. Can’s walrus mustacho maverick, Holger Czukay, was also born there: or rather Danzig as it was known at the time. Interestingly the video for their latest single ‘Sister Ray’, featured below, was shot in the band’s own Wrzeszcz studio, a stone’s throw away from Czukay’s own courtyard.

In what could be said to be a second chapter for the group, as they now par down from a quartet to the settled trio of drummer Tomasz Pawluczuk, co-vocalist and bassist Wojciech Juchniewicz and co-vocalist and guitarist Kwiatkowski, Trupa Trupa are set to release the first single from next year’s Mourners titled EP, ‘Sister Ray’. Borrowing both that title and a lo fi hardliner rock ‘n roll, bordering on post-punk, spirit from the Velvet Underground the band’s echoey repeated “towards the horizon” line is beefed-up with a broody dose of snarled trebly bass and a shot of growled throbbing sinewy knotted impetus. The now stripped-down, determined, and raw trio channel The Killing Joke, The Fall, Elastica, Banshees, Archie Bronson Outfit and Wire (especially the band’s Colin Newman and his solo work) on this slab of surreal attitude.

The accompanying video, shot once more by the Polish audiovisual artist, painter, musician, video and installation artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, Adam Witkowski, features visual expressive marks, brush slashes of painting and flipped through art journals inspired by the iconic genius Basquiat. It’s hardly surprising, given that two-thirds of the trio graduated in fine art, and continue to paint and practice graphic design.

Whilst notching up two sessions already for 6music, and with the invitation to perform on NPR’s Tiny Desk sessions, Trupa Trupa have attracted a lot of support and attention over the last eighteen months. Rivalling my own cheerleader support, Iggy Pop has raved about the band’s last couple of albums in true fandom style. And so, it’s hardly surprising, and considering their Syd Barret meets post-punk rawness, that they’ve attracted the talents of the acclaimed and very much in-demand British producer, composer and engineer Nick Launey to produce both this single and their newest EP, Mourners.

Based in L.A. for some time now, Launey’s prowess and vast experience has come in handy. Able to draw from a vast resource of helmed and steered productions from such notable talent as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Anna Calvi, BRMC, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Arcade Fire, and before that, at the centre of the UK’s post-punk explosion in the late 70s and early 80s (you name it, he was there, whether it was PiL, Gang of Four, the Killing Joke or The Slits) the enthused veteran motivator really grabs hold of the Trupa Trupa sound and pushes it in a taut, tight and raw direction of energy.

The five-track Mourners EP is set to be released at the end of February next year, preceded by the title-track at the start of that same month, and once again released on Glitterbeat Records. ‘Sister Ray’ meanwhile is out now and will be followed by a UK tour. A world tour proper, starting in California, will begin straight after the release of Mourners in 2025.

In all its artsy glory, premiered today on Youtube by the band, ‘Sister Ray’: