The Polish duo SzaZa and acclaimed Australian/Icelandic artist Ben Frost will perform at the infamous Tjarnarbíó theatre, Tjarnargata 12 in Reykjavík on November 26th. The event is held in colaboration with Unsound and is supported by a grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA Financial Mechanism and the Norwegian Financial Mechanism.

SzaZa is a collaboration between two Polish artists Pawel Szamburski and Patryk Zakrocki, both multi- instrumentalists, improvisers and promoters of culture who have been active on the Warsaw improvised music and independent art scene since 1999. Szamburski and Zakrocki create music for theatre, film, silent movies and contemporary dance. They are members of the Warsaw-based independent music label Lado ABC and the Lado cultural association, whose activity over the last ten years has contributed a great deal to the dynamic development of new music in Poland. Their music is a unique blending of seemingly opposite extremes - of noise and silence, pop and contemporary chamber, beauty and ugliness, of sophisticated wisdom and pure, naive thoughtlessness. Using clarinets, violin, analogue loopstations, subtle effects and interaction with the audience, the musicians seek to collapse those oppositions, attempting to free both the stage and the audience from the bonds of rules and cultural expectations.

The piece that SzaZa will perform is called “Roman Polanski: Shorts”, but as the name implies, this is a musical accompaniment to a series of shortfilms made by the great master of filmmaking, Roman Polanski. The shorts are made at the very beginning of Polanski's career, most of them while he was still studying at the renowned Polish Lodz Film School. These films reveal Polanski’s dark style, his masterful storytelling ability and the restless search for the truth about human nature, however crooked and evil it turns out to be. The grotesque and often disturbing world of his short films, and his meticulous, clean direction are traits that would later be developed in such cinematic masterpieces as "Rosemary’s baby”, "Chinatown” and "The Pianist”.

The artist Ben Frost was born in Melbourne Australia, but he has been living in Iceland since 2005. Frost is a founding member of the Bedroom Community label along with fellow artists Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurðsson. The music of Ben Frost is about contrast; influenced as much by Classical Minimalism as by Punk Rock and Metal. His throbbing guitar-based textures emerge from nothing and slowly coalesce into huge, forbidding forms that often eschew conventional structures in favor of the inevitable unfoldings of vast mechanical systems. Frost has bred a new and visceral approach to sonic and cinematic experimentalism. His flowing compositions brim with howling wolves and distorted string sections, haunted clavichords and sustained guitar that all add up to fearsome melee that grabs the listener “By the Throat” as Frost aptly titled his much-admired 2009 album.

Doors open at 20:00 and the show starts at 20:30.