„Rock & Roll Globe honored to premiere the latest video from Poland’s rising dream rock outfit.
Five years after the release of their auspicious debut Headache, Gdansk, Poland’s Trupa Trupa has survived the hellscape of 2020 relatively unscathed and in good fortune.
Though the pandemic prevented them from performing in front of audiences, the band– Grzegorz Kwiatkowski (vocal, guitar), Wojciech Juchniewicz (vocal, bass guitar, guitar), Rafał Wojczal (vocal, second guitar, keys) and Tomasz Pawluczuk (drums)–were able to play a remote Tiny Desk Concert for NPR’s Bob Boilen over the summer. They’ve also seen them gain fans in Iggy Pop, whose management company picked up the band as clients, and saw such superstar radio jocks as Mike Watt and Henry Rollins keeping the quartet’s music in steady rotation on their respective shows.
Rollins, in particular, has been particularly keen on Trupa Trupa, playing every song from the group’s latest EP, entitled I’ll Find, on his KCRW show this year. And today, Rock & Roll Globe is honored to premiere the video for the mini-album’s final track, the haunting “Invisible Door,” which finds guitarist Wojczal taking on lead vocals for the first time on a song he also penned himself. As a follow up to last year’s Of The Sun, I’ll Find continues to watch this young band expand and evolve their voice within the scope of the dynamic sound they’ve been woodshedding for the last five years–seeking inspiration more from film and literature from fellow countrymen Joseph Conrad (born Konrad Korzeniowski) and Andrzej Munk.
The video was directed by the 30-year-old multidisciplinary artist Aleksander Makowski, whose work revolves around fields such as animation, video art and graphic design and currently working on his graduation film at the Graphics Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. If his final school project is anything like this mesmerizing fusion of pantomime and cinema verite on display in the video for “Invisible Door,” starring Japanese animation dancer Marten O’Clock, he’s getting an easy A.
“I’m interested in the collision of oneiric and abstract images that in some way depict our modern lives,” the director explains. “The majority of us are constantly living in their own, cyber, swipe-me-right self-love-story. Probably thirty years ago the video I directed would be treated as a science-fiction movie and now what it takes to be there it’s just to take a look in the mirror. The Japanese animation dancer that I collaborated with on this video is sort of a niche, avant-garde genius android-mime. Some time ago I stumbled upon his work on instagram and asked him if he would be interested in performing in one of my upcoming videos. It turned out that at that time he wasn’t fluent in English so we spoke using Google Translate. I was fascinated not only by the pristine quality of his work but also by the certain aura of mystery around his persona. The same kind of serene aura that reminds me of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation – the movie that made a pretty big impact on a 13 year-old me. What amuses me most in any artistic undertaking is when a certain piece of work depicts the given theme in ways that are surprising and unusual.
“For me ‘Invisible Door’ is quite psychedelic but I wanted to run away from the 60s acid-trips images and the outcome, thanks to Marten’s talent and his iPhone 11, is exactly what I imagined.”
Meanwhile, Trupa Trupa just put together songs for a new album which will be recorded at the beginning of 2021. They are looking for the record to be released in september 2021 by Lovitt Records and Glitterbeat Records. And the band is confident they will be able to tour Europe and in the USA after a safe vaccine goes public.
“Invisible Door,” along with the rest of the excellent I’ll Find EP, is out now on BandCamp and other fine retailers across the globe.”
Ron Hart, www.rockandrollglobe.com
