Piotr Kurek’s Songs and Bodies: Post-Rock Dreams in Motion

Piotr Kurek never breaks character. His face remains calm, almost unreadable, even as his music twists itself into strange and beautiful shapes. His sound is deeply weird but curiously soothing—uneasy listening that casts its own kind of dreamlike spell. The Warsaw-based composer builds miniature worlds where ordinary rules don’t apply: reality and illusion blur, acoustic and digital instruments merge, and the familiar becomes unrecognizable. Vibraphones shimmer beside ghostly Auto-Tuned harmonies; bagpipes seem to be made of circuitry; voices might morph into cellos or dissolve into air. For someone who often composes for theater—a medium defined by real bodies in space—Kurek has an uncanny gift for disembodying sound, turning the physical into something spectral.

After the vaporous chamber jazz of 2023’s Smartwoods, Kurek’s new album, Songs and Bodies, initially feels like a return to something more tangible. It’s inspired by the post-rock experiments of the ’90s—bands like Gastr del Sol, Labradford, and The Sea and Cake—and if you listen closely, it sometimes resembles a conventional trio record built on guitar, bass, and drums. But that stability is an illusion. Beneath the grounded grooves supplied by bassist Wojciech Traczyk and drummer Mateusz Rychlicki, strange currents ripple. The music moves like water—glowing, swelling, teeming with unknown life. This is Kurek’s most rhythmically driven album yet, anchored in groove but constantly slipping from form.

“It Used to Be a Song” rides a slow, heavy backbeat and glassy guitar lines, like Tortoise trying to freestyle over a lost Mo’ Wax record. A cut-up soul sample at the end ties it to hip-hop, evoking the textural world of Armand Hammer. The interplay of tight drums, crisp hi-hats, and elastic bass contrasts beautifully with Kurek’s vaporous guitars and glitched-out vocals. On “Nothing Holds Still,” the trio channels the meditative repetition of Oren Ambarchi, letting guitar lines coil and uncoil over a pulsing rhythm until a distorted solo—maybe harmonica, maybe not—pushes through like a transmission from another world. “Try to Be True” layers a dub-inflected two-chord loop with broken, wordless syllables that feel like someone trying to sing across dimensions. Hidden background sighs haunt the mix, giving the track an almost spiritual ache—like the Congos filtered through a fog machine.

Where Smartwoods drifted like a dream you can’t recall upon waking, Songs and Bodies feels sharper, almost catchy. The dry, fuzzy guitars on “More Than One” and the title track recall early Smog, while “The Water Is Wide” moves with the emotional pulse of early-2000s emo. Yet even when the music veers toward rock, Kurek resists clarity. His melodies twist away from the center, luring you down side paths; layers of dissonance and ghostly harmonics thicken the air. The slow, narcotic pacing amplifies the hall-of-mirrors sensation. It’s deliberate—Kurek’s way of reminding you that nothing in his world stands still or stays obvious for long.

In the end, Songs and Bodies plays like a love letter to post-rock that refuses to sit still long enough to be sentimental. It’s full of riddles and misdirections, grooves that blur into mirages, and sounds that feel like they’ve forgotten what they were. Kurek may keep his expression neutral, but his music is a maze of emotion—dense, mysterious, and quietly mesmerizing.