Smartwoods

Smartwoods

  • Piotr Kurek
  • Wojtek Traczyk
  • Tomasz Duda
  • Anna Pašić
  • Francesco Marrello

On his latest album “World Speaks“, Polish composer and multi-instrumentalist Piotr Kurek took a typically unconventional approach. Inspired by the work of US painter Thomas Cole, he wanted to consider the choreography of the natural world and the relationship between the real and the synthetic. Using vocal samples, organs and reed solos, he attempted to mimic Cole’s verdant classically-informed landscapes, playing sounds on his MIDI keyboard and unsettling the ground between ancient choral music and contemporary computer-controlled electronics. Kurek’s scope is wide-ranging, and he’s been releasing music since the late 2000s, making breakcore with Marcin Stefański as Ślepcy and “deviant Jandek house” as Heroiny for Lutto Lento’s DUNNO label. For this performance he appears alongside Italian artist Francesco Marrello, who uses digital drawing to fabricate abstractions that echo our information-overloaded digital reality, mimicking video game landscapes and grungy pixelated jpegs.