TATE MODERN
Tate is delighted to announce that the winner of the Your Tate Track music competition is three piece indie band Kotki Dwa! The judging panel of top musicians Graham Coxon, Basement Jaxx, Roll Deep and Radio 1 DJ Huw Stephens selected the Kotki Dwa track Le Beau Charcutier as their favourite from the 20 finalists.
Your Tate Track was a music competition aimed at unsigned bands and musicians aged between 16 - 24. We asked unsigned musicians to choose a work of art from a selection on display at Tate Modern and then to write a track in response to it. The public voted on submitted tracks and the 20 most popular went before the judging panel.
Listen to Kotki Dwa and 20 finalists by clicking the link to their MySpace page. You can also hear the winning track via a listening post at Tate Modern next to the piece that inspired it, The Handsome Pork Butcher by Francis Picabia.
Kotki Dwa are a Buckinghamshire trio comprising brothers Alex and Tristan Ostrowski and their close friend Tom Walker. Together they preside over a happy and at times chaotic collision of guitar, bass, drums and multitude of electronic gadgetry and gizmos that fashions their beautiful and unique indie bounce-pop sound. The band are proud of their European roots and take their name from a Polish lullaby handed down through the Ostrowski family which was sung to Alex and Tristan as children.
Being inspired and intrigued by much of what surrounds them on a day to day basis and wishing to celebrate these small, secret discoveries, has the unusual effect of causing Alex’s lyrics to seem far from commonplace. Alone, doorbells; eye drops; electrical birds; noisy French toys, mario and tiny keyboards are quite ordinary and unremarkable and yet somehow when plunged into the furious and glistening beck of kotki dwa’s music, these things become quite extraordinary and almost magical.
So much inspiration has lent itself to a rapid rate of writing and thus their debut homemade album ‘nostonesthrow’, recorded in 2005, was followed quickly by their second and most recent album ‘onlyyouarenotsleeping’ in 2006. Both releases feature artwork by lead singer (and graphic design wizard) Alex and the kotki dwa posters have become a mainstay in the windows and on the walls of some of London’s favourite independent record shops. These shops, most notably Pure Groove and Rough Trade, have been an enormous help with the band’s preferred DIY approach to selling their records and they happily make trips with ever increasing frequency to the capital upon request to replenish diminishing levels of stock.
‘onlyyouarenotsleeping’ has just been given 8/10 by NME and is also starting to catch the ears of the world at large, which has caused untold excitement and anxiety for the boys. Dozens and dozens of gig requests and calls from record labels, are of course, all gratefully received, but it sometimes makes finishing their University work on time a little bit tricky. Luckily, family is a prevalent theme for the young kotkis, with the band being managed by the Ostrowski parents who are also intrinsically involved with everything from CD production and distribution to video set assembly, which seems somehow appropriately in keeping with the natural and inclusive sentiment of the music.
Highlights for the band so far include recording a live session at the Maida Vale Studios for the Huw Stephens Radio 1 show, being invited to perform with such acts as ¡Forward Russia! and Sky Larkin, and playing their first gigs in the capital to the delighted assembled audiences of happy feet. Excitement levels in camp kotki reached fever pitch recently, though, when the band were announced as the winners of Tate Modern’s ‘Your Tate Track’ contest. This has placed their music alongside that of such leading luminaries as Klaxons, the Chemical Brothers and the Long Blondes, being on a listening post in the gallery next to the painting by Francis Picabia, which provided the inspiration for their track, Le Beau Charcutier. This together with some exciting gigs has resulted in growing press coverage (NME, Fly, Time Out, etc) leading to comments including “utterly essential” – Alex Miller NME, “my favourite current new band” & “one of the best discoveries of 2007” – Huw Stephens.
Their debut single ‘Robin’s Clogs’ will be released on December 10th 2007 through Mily Records and will be accompanied by an animated video of epically miniature proportions, hand crafted and created by kotki dwa themselves. The launch party will be on 15th December 2007 at the White Eagle Polish Club in Balham and will feature live film projection and Polish food.
Previous releases already played extensively on Radio 1, XFM, 6 Music, Regional Radio and Radio Polskie. Single already being played on Radio 1 (Huw Stephens).
This is the second phase of Picabia's original work. He ripped the original collaged elements off and added combs for the hair, and painted in the head and hands of a woman
You can view Le Beau Charcutier in the Tate Collection.
French painter and writer. He was one of the major figures of the Dada movement in France and in the USA but remained as stubbornly uncategorizable as he was influential. In his rejection of consistency and of an identifiable manner, he called into question attitudes to the artistic process that had been regarded as sacrosanct and in so doing guaranteed the intellectual force of his ideas for subsequent generations of artists.
You can learn more about Francis Picabia in the Tate Collection.
