Monolith Cocktail Blog

NEWS/TRACK
DOMINIC VALVONA

Announcement time from our dear friends in the famous Polish port of Gdańsk, with the city’s most notable band of recent years, Trupa Trupa, full of encouraging news and prospects.

If you’d read my previous posts on the quartet’s ttt (released as a limited cassette run), B Flat A and Of The Sun albums then you’ll have some idea of context for this band of psychodrama, dream revelation, hypnotic, propelled and industrial post-punk, art and psychedelic rock deep thinkers. Their music, filled with a psychogeorgaphy, travails and the cerebral, 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 and local activist: all three of which are channeled into the band’s unique sound.

Grzegorz recently notified me of one such piece of positive activism, with the official go ahead for a memorial marking Gdańsk’s former Jewish ghetto. Housed as it was in the Old Red Mouse Granary on Granary Island, this stain on the city’s reputation was eventually bombed by the Allies in 1945. The grandson of a concentration camp survivor, Grzegorz campaigned with others towards building a permanent link, reminder to a mostly “forgotten” part of the Polish city’s history.

The Jewish Chronicle recently published a piece on this achievement, interviewing Grzegorz, who commented upon the proposed site: “…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 last 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, education.

You can read more abut that campaign in the JC here…

Second on the agenda, Trupa Trupa have confirmed a spot on the idiosyncratic Rockaway Beach Festival lineup next year. A sort of unique and close-up multimedia experience down on the Southern Coast of England, in the holiday camp dominated Bognor Regis; they’ll be sharing the bill with the Sleaford Mods, The Vaselines, The Cribs and The Selector. Visit the site for more details and tickets here...

Lastly, ahead of what could be a future album perhaps, Trupa Trupa release there newest and most ‘Syd Barret’ in spirit single, ‘Thrill’. In a ‘broken world of psychedelia’, the signatures of a madcap laughs – the pre dirge-y progressive and humourless incarnation that appeared in the wake of Syd’s chemical trip death – version of the Floyd manifest in a dreamy meander turn climatic vortex spun cycle of The cure, Ty Segall, Crispy Ambulance and post-punk hallucination. The “thrill” in question is “artificial”, the titular mantra sent down the rabbit hole before surfacing, pressed and increasingly deranged. This truly is Trupa Trupa at their most uniquely psychedelic; as tripping as they are disturbing, making sense of a senseless world.

The band had this to say about the video that accompanies it:

The video was directed by Adam Witkowski (1978), a Polish audiovisual artist, painter, musician, video and installation artist, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. As a visual artist, he co-created several hundred exhibitions, and as a musician and sound engineer, he released several dozen albums (e. g. Nagrobki, Wolność, Gówno, Langfurtka, etc.). He creates music for films and theater performances.

Witkowski talks about the video: “My assumptions when working on the video clip for the song “thrill” was to integrate the image with the music as much as possible and to refer picture to the style of early music films from the late 1960s. I wanted many dimensions to permeate the image, hence the parallel use of several techniques of analog animation (plasticine, colored paper, printing) and digital animation. The photos we took at the Pomeranian arboretum were made using several different recording devices, and we obtained deformations by passing the image through glass filled with water. In the background, there are echoes of gnostic tales from the early films of Derek Jarman and the book “Valis” by Philip K. Dick – a ray of knowledge sent from outside the labyrinth penetrates the chaotic reality, gives a potential opportunity to catch it, tune in to its vibrations and understand the essence of all things.”