In the year 1931 in the Cracovian quarter of Podgórze a new street band came into being. Far from ordinary, it was a group of defiant musicians who decided to use their song to denounce the corruption, violence and iniquity of interwar Poland, a reality far more complicated than one could imagine today.
The Rebellious Street Band Hańba! [‘disgrace’] is a musical and literary fiction, designed to convince the audience that punk-rock was not born in the noisy seventies on the British Isles, but goes way back to the Second Polish Republic, a period marked by extraordinary cultural, artistic and economic growth, but also systematic destruction of democracy, the authoritarian rule of Sanation and its imperialist impulses. With the support of street instruments (banjo, drums, accordion, tuba) and a bunch of interwar poets (Tuwim, Brzechwa, Broniewski), four Cracovian performers impersonate imaginary characters and combine musical inspirations (punk, folk, klezmer) to tell their own tale about the most poetic period in the history of Poland.
Read moreTheir debut long-play album released in a CD and a vinyl format on 7th of February 2016 (or 1936, as they would have it) was produced by a legendary Polish independent record label Antena Krzyku (www.antenakrzyku.pl) in cooperation with Karoryfer Lecolds (www.karoryfer.com).
The first song to be accompanied by a video clip is “Gmachy” [‘edifices’]. https://youtu.be/Aui13gGzk0Q, created by Michał Sikiewicz and Gabriela Szewczyk, artists engaged in a collaborative project collodion.pl, who also designed the album artwork. It features classic wet plate collodion photographs, taken in such locations as the former St Michael’s Prison in Krakow.
In 2015 Hańba! performed at a number of festivals, amongst others the Off Festival in Katowice and the 36. Euroradio Folk Festival – EtnoKraków. Their concert in Nikiszowiec was recorded by KEXP. In 2016 the band will not slow down, it will gain momentum!
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