Piotr Kurek’s new album Smartwoods Out Now Via the Unsound Label Division. Unsound New York Choose-What-You-Pay Shows at Lincoln Center On Sale Today

Piotr Kurek’s new album Smartwoods Out Now Via the Unsound Label Division. Unsound New York Choose-What-You-Pay Shows at Lincoln Center On Sale Today

Piotr Kurek is a Warsaw-based musician, multi-instrumentalist and composer. For Unsound Kraków 2022, he created a new work called Smartwoods. This is now released via the Unsound label, on vinyl and digitally. Available on Bandcamp, Boomkat and in your favourite record store.

Smartwoods is a sprawling root system of tiny melodic phrases that curl around subtly evolving instrumental thickets. Kurek takes his cues from baroque music and experimental jazz, entangled with contemporary computer music fueling with sonic vapours from the near future. Made up of seven distinct segments, the album blurs its acoustic and electronic elements into an illusory hedge of abstract sound. Collaborating with harpist Anna Pašic, woodwind player Tomasz Duda and bassist Wojtek Traczyk, Kurek plays electric guitar and keyboards, twisting the music into computerised processes and synth chirps, creating an uncanny dream world where the real isn’t always what it seems. Each player is entwined with the other to create a living, breathing whole.

Like Kurek’s painterly 2021 album World Speaks, Smartwoods is also inspired by visual art - particularly the whimsical work of Algerian-French graphic designer Jean Sariano. The album cover features artwork by Polish painter Tomasz Kowalski, whose shapeshifting creatures and miniature stories aptly reflect the music’s wild fantasy. Smartwoods’ first manifestation – a live show at Unsound in Kraków in 2022 – featured animations by Italian artist Francesco Marrello, who put together a visual treatment for the single Harps.

Today is also the day that tickets to Unsound New York at Lincoln Center are available for Choose-What-You-Pay. Taking place on December 1–4, the program features experimental supergroup Osmium (Hildur Guðnadóttir, Sam Slater, James Ginzburg & Rully Shabara of Senyawa), The Caretaker, Moor Mother presents Black Encyclopedia of the Air, Robin Fox presents Triptych, as well as Polish artists Martyna Basta and Raphael Rogiński .

Unsound New York is part of Lincoln Center Presents and is presented with the Polish Cultural Institute New York, in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.