Zola screams at the klezmer, Henry Miller dances with the Moomins, and the result is a melancholic intertextual carousel. Kierkegaard wrote about them: “It’s probably jazz.” Nothing could be more wrong.
Musically, the highly eclectic style of the project is based on close collaboration between guitars, post-rock violins and live-recorded loops. It all adds up to a contemporary and very specific interpretation of Slavic, klezmer and Anglo-Saxon folk, infused with a dynamic, whispering and screaming vocal duo. A trained ear will catch the influence of artists such as Fink, Andrew Bird, Warren Ellis, late Tom Waits or early Nick Cave, a trained eye will see fun with more or less classic silent movies, early SF cinema and others, and a skilled reader will see intertextual juggling with literary references in the textual layer, from Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, through Tove Jansson and Gombrowicz, to Terry Pratchett himself.
Kirszenbaum is a joint venture by Kacper Szpyrka (philosopher, bookseller and violinist, who has recorded with i.e. HellHaven) and Jakub Wiśniewski (English teacher, musician and techwriter), whose previous cooperation in the Pora Wiatru band resulted in over 150 concerts, a performance in the finals of the Must Be the Music, the main prize of the Polish edition of the Emergenza Festival, a series of crowd-funding trams concerts and a performance at the German Taubertal Festival.