Piotr
Composer and
multi-instrumentalist
Warsaw
Unsound
Mondoj
New album
Songs and Bodies, 2025
Management
Giulio Nocera ↗
Composer and
multi-instrumentalist
Warsaw
Unsound
Mondoj
New album
Songs and Bodies, 2025
Management
Giulio Nocera ↗
Piotr Kurek → a Warsaw-based composer and multi-instrumentalist who works with what is no longer in the room. Voices are recorded in isolation and assembled in parallel, so that singers and actors who never met appear to share a space; acoustic instruments are processed until they seem synthetic or disembodied; familiar forms — early music, jazz, post-rock — return as unreliable memories rather than quotations.
Each project begins from a premise rather than a style and takes shape around a distinct sonic body: a semi-acoustic ensemble, a live rhythm section, an early digital piano. He has released albums on Unsound, Mondoj, Edições CN, Hands In The Dark and Longform Editions. Smartwoods (Unsound, 2023) is a semi-acoustic ensemble work shaped by early music and experimental jazz. Songs and Bodies (Unsound, 2025) reworks the pacing and spaciousness of 1990s post-rock around a live rhythm section, processed voices and electronics. Greyhound Days, a joint album with saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, followed in 2025.
Kurek’s work extends across film, theatre, dance and installation. He has scored Magnus von Horn’s Sweat (Cannes Official Selection), Sebastian Mihăilescu’s Mammalia (Berlinale Forum) and Nelicia Low’s Pierce. For the stage, he has composed for Tian Gebing’s productions at Münchner Kammerspiele and, in collaboration with Ai Weiwei, at Theater der Welt. His composition How to detect ghosts was performed by Apartment House at Sacrum Profanum, while Breathing received an honourable mention at the 2023 Giga-Hertz Award, presented by ZKM Karlsruhe and SWR Experimentalstudio.
In May 2026, Kurek presented The Meeting at Kraftwerk Berlin as part of the Prelude programme to Berlin Atonal and Unsound’s The Infinite Now. Written for early digital piano and a deliberately restricted harmonic language, with stage design and visuals by Fabien Lédé, the performance leaves its separately recorded singers and actors to appear only as image, in a room they never shared. His work has also been presented at CTM, Unsound in Kraków, New York, Brussels and Osaka, and Lincoln Center, where he performed Smartwoods with Rebecca El Saleh, Nathan Bellot and Henry Fraser. Pitchfork has reviewed his three most recent solo albums, with further coverage in The Wire and The Quietus.
Songs and Bodies — Unsound, 2025
Smartwoods — Unsound, 2023
Live at Unsound New York
Piotr Kurek alone, with or without live visuals.
Four musicians: keys, drums, guitar, bass.
Four musicians: keys, clarinet/flutes, double bass/bass guitar, harp. With or without live visuals.
Also possible with local wind, double bass and harp players on their own instruments: arrival one day prior, a 3-hour rehearsal the day before, a 2-hour rehearsal on the morning of the show.
All configurations scale to the venue and its technical setup. Fees on request. Travel, transfers, accommodation, instrument rental and backline not included.
technical rider
Songs and Bodies, Kraków: photos by Zuza Sosnkowska. other credits
“Mazelike and mesmerizingly slow”
Pitchfork, on Songs and Bodies — 7.8
“Lightness and mystery, which are Kurek’s trademark”
The Quietus, on Smartwoods ↗
“A fantastical forest of ornate and uncanny instrumentation”
Boomkat, on Smartwoods ↗
Contact
Unsound
Mondoj