Discography
Warsaw Village Band released 5 albums (4 studio and 1 remix album)
Here they are:
First time an album of „WVB“ features not traditional music, but compositions by Wojtek Krzak and Maja Kleszcz. For the ones having not seen the ensemble the voice of Maja is a hugh surprise. Following a one-year maternity leave „Infinity“ shows us a matured Warsaw Village Band with incrediable compostions and several Polish guests.
All musical concept & arrangements: M. Kleszcz/W. Krzak, incarNations.pl for WVB
More info
Inafinity - Jaro 2008.
Following a one-year “maternity/paternity leave”, Warsaw Village Band is returning to the world of CDs and concert stages with two new albums. The first to appear will be the remix CD “Upmixing”. In response to countless requests from the world’s DJs, this CD was produced with the consent of the musicians. The band’s only condition was that it should be a Reggae remix album on the basis of their last studio CD“Uprooting”. The Warsaw Village Band wanted to avoid a mix of mutually incompatible styles. They also stipulated that several of the pieces were to be produced in various versions.
Upmixing - JARO 208
Folk music is going back to its roots – dancing and fun. But now it’s not in a village, but a club, not roots musicians but DJs, not a wedding party but a sound system.
This is the brainchild of Warsaw Village Band – joyful, inventive, danceble. The fruit of much research, hundreds of distant journeys, various fascinations, extraordinary meetings and invaluable friendships.
These are the sounds of Warsaw Village Band presented from the perspective of other creators that they met and connected with along the way – Polish, British, French and Jamaican. The International success of their „Uprooting” album and BBC World Music Award opened up many varied opportunities for the band worldwide. Valuable Polish music business awards - Fryderyk and Machinery as well as other Polish and foreign awards confirmed the Warsaw Village Band’s special place on the musical map. „Upmixing”, is the futuristic realisation of the band’s latest studio album – „Uprooting”. It‘s a meeting with the best producers and DJ’s in Europe. You can hear here the work of UK giants - Trans-Global Underground, Zion Train and Love Grocer, French global dancefloor stars - Dj ClicK and Recycler. Unreleased and forgotten from the „Uprooting” recording sesssions was a track by Warsaw Village Band which was fortuitously found and beautifully re-arranged by Louis Beckett of On-U Sound/Asian Dub Foundation fame.
Many other spiritual masters also took up this apparently distant sound material of nuroots music and worked their magic.
Listen, get up and dance!
The new CD Uprooting is the Warsaw Village Band’s boldest venture yet. On the one hand, the ensemble invited representatives of traditional Polish folklore to join it in the recording studio; on the other hand it forged contacts with two dub-sound and scratch specialists. In view of this unusual blend of elements and epochs, the band had every reason to borrow the old Reggae hero Burning Spear’s words of wisdom as the motto for Uprooting: “Remember the past, but keep it livin’ in the future.” A perfect description of the Warsaw Village Band’s chief intentions.
Uprooting - JARO 2004
 Fryderyk - best polish folk album 2005 |
 Final 10 nomination Grammy "best folk album" |
What is special about – and characteristic of – the band are the trance-like rhythms of two drums and the so-called “white voices” – near-screams, primeval, clear and wild, combined with the szuka (knee-violin), cello, dulcimer, violin and hurdy-gurdy. The WVB experiments with its roots, creating an entirely new, suspense-charged relationship between the traditional and the modern. Its great love for its national musical heritage and the will to preserve the old musical traditions are the chief ingredients of its success. For the WVB, however, preservation does not mean restoration but – as in the case of “The Pogues” and “Les Negresses Vertes” – reanimation, the conveyance of the songs’ spirit into the present. So Polka gets a shot of Techno. And even if it is produced by acoustic instrumentation, the sound of WVB comes across with the force of E-powered music. Structures of minimal music are as detectable here as contact to certain rock formats. The result is a sound young people identify with, a sound that has mesmerized audiences all the way from America to Japan. While the Americans refer to it as “New Folk,” the band itself emphasizes the trance-like quality of its music.
“From village to metropolis, from untuned violins to scratch, from generation to generation, from uprooted musicians to the latest vibes, from soul to soul.”
Warsaw Village Band, August 2004
"Anyone who attempts to defend music against the ravishment of showbiz deserves our vote, and this is the stated goal of the Warsaw Village Band. They are six young musicians playing traditional Polish instruments but not averse to a spot of experimentation en route. With this, their second release, they enlist a raft of collaborators, including a DJ and a choir, and the result is a fine rendition of contemporary Polish folk music with a modernist touch to the arrangements and orchestrations. Great harmony vocals backed by plucked cello, hurdy-gurdy and dulcimer, for example - some lovely ideas articulately executed."
World Music Charts Europe
On PEOPLE'S SPRING, you can hear string instruments sounding like French horns, furious drums, trance, improvisation, and elements of roots music. And above all you can hear the enthusiasm and passion of six young musicians, who love to travel their country to find and keep the musical skills of the old ones for their own generation. The middle generation not being interested in the archaic sounds and instruments, the old village people recognised the WARSAW VILLAGE BAND as the only possibility to keep tradition alive.
Jaro 2001
Using music as the soul's best drug, as an inspiration and trance medita- tion, like it used to be during the centuries. It’s the rhythm, and it's fun - let's dance
"Booming drums, bowed bass, a tish of cymbal, sheets of scratchy fiddles, and bawled female vocals in the style of the traditional rural 'white voice'. It's a surging exuberant noise as this bunch of young Poles dig into the songs and dance music of their country's villages, in an approach the sleevenotes describe as "bio-techno". It's a mass of churning organic acousticity, emphasised with some well-integrated use of echoes and effects; none of your old-hat techno thud-tick here, except possibly for a hint in the dancier of the two remixes at the end of the album, which has a driving grainy groove slightly reminiscent of the acoustic-writ-large approach of Sweden's Hedningarna" Andrew Cronshaw, fRoots Magazine May 2001.
BBC Radio 3 Awards
for World Music "Best Newcomer"
Their first album is an invitation to "Hopsasa Classic Polo", featuring only traditional songs from the heart of Poland. The record was considered the folk album of 1998 by the listeners of Polish Radio 3 and the rebellious magazine Brum. No wonder as the album presents the modern, dynamic bio-techno style and, at the same time, is so Polish and "wellseasoned" as old, good and strong wine. The young people discovered in the land on the Vistula River the native, shamanic layers, which wake up the remains of the surviving Polish genetic code and hypnotize crowds to exhaustion until daylight (as during the first major concert in 1997 "Przystanek Olecko").
They are favorites of the audience and receive prizes from both the audience and jurors of numerous competitions, begining from "New Tradition '98" organized by the Polish Radio.
They are ultra rebellious, playing the so-called "hard core from the barn" on traditional Polish instruments and singing in the dialect of "white" peasants from our "farms and plantations". As if that was not enough, they are invited to established musical events, such as Probaltica '99 that is the 6th Festival of Music and Art of Baltic Countries or Toru®? Meetings with Chopin. They got second prize of German "Folk World 2000" scene.
Kamahuk 1997/ Jaro 2005