The Hospital Club Sessions: Kotki Dwa Interview

Kotki Dwa is a fitting name. It conjures images of afrobeat outfits, of syncopation, perhaps of the Graceland sessions.

In fact it’s Polish, but that doesn’t really matter. It encapsulates pretty perfectly the trio’s sound; one of jolting guitars, tightly wound rhythm sections, and louche-but-literary vocals.

The Hospital Club is not the strangest place in which the band has played. Staycations, Kotki Dwa’s second album, was recorded in National Trust properties around the country and released in conjunction with the charity, providing the LP with a bit of establishment lustre.

We spoke to the band after their Hospital Club session to find out more.

Watch Kotki Dwa’s Hospital Club Session here.

How do you find these sorts of events? They seem to be half performance, half recording session.

I suppose it’s kind of weird in that there’s nobody watching…but there is…but there isn’t. The 3D thing sounds delightfully futuristic. We’re trying not to pay attention to them, but there are these strange alien prong things looking at us!

Tell me about the genesis of the album. What came first, the songs or the National Trust idea?

The idea for our album came from the title we gave it, Staycations, which suited some of the new songs which mixed dreamy idealistic things with basic everyday reality. Then we had the idea that ‘Staycations’ was a word that means something to the National Trust — so we approached them to join up with us for the project and explore together using that word. We recorded in a lot of their places and some of the atmospheres and stories we found did influence the songwriting. We also started to shape songs in our heads which required a certain feeling of space, which we would then seek out in the National Trust’s places.

And did the spaces influence the recordings?

We recorded as much as we possibly could using mics, in spaces of different shapes and sizes. Even keyboard stuff — we amped it up and used mics to bring that back into our mixes, picking up the room ambience, church ambience, forest ambience, depending on where we were. You can definitely hear that. We hardly used any digital ambience, because it was all there in our recordings and we could bring it up or down using our mix. We also found instruments in these places. There’s some harpsichord stuff, some rattling of railings.

How has your relationship been with the National Trust?

Very healthy and surprisingly chilled out. Surprising, because we just approached them out of the blue as an independent band – no PR company, no label, just an idea – and they listened to us. Maybe that’s surprising. Well, it definitely is. But then, if you hang around in water gardens and abbeys then I guess it does chill you out. They’ve been really helpful and really open minded.

There’s a definite afrobeat influence in your work. Do you identify with the resurgence in afrobeat that seems to be going on in the UK at the minute?

We’ve never discussed this, so if it’s an influence then it’s an unconscious one. We listen to quite a bit of stuff that has a fun feeling, a lightness. Orange Juice for example — probably quite a bit of danciness coming from there. But we’re not on any kind of afrobeat mission in a Vampire Weekend way to be honest.

What’s next for Kotki Dwa? How do you follow making a record in some of the country’s most beautiful buildings?

We’re taking a break… even though we’ve been on staycation… to think about what we might do next. Always good to leave it for a bit, get hungry to do more again until you’re famished — then make more music.