Curator:
T'ien Lai is a brand of cigarettes smoked by the main character in the novel "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick- freely translated from Japanese, it means "heavenly music." The group was formed as a duo of Lukasz Jedrzejczak and Jakub Ziolek, performing drone and noise musical collages using old Polish Sniezka radios. This phase of the band's development was captured on the album "Da'at" (Monotype,2013).
The duo then began to weave African and South American rhythms into their music, which became more rhythmic and largely sample-based. This period was summed up with the album "RHTHM" (Monotype, 2015). Since then, the band has grown into a quartet, with Mikolaj Zielinski (Javva, Alameda) and Rafal Kolacki (Hati, Innercity Ensemble, Kust) completing the lineup by playing acoustic percussion instruments. T'ien Lai's music came close to tribal, industrial techno combining aggressive electronics with live drumming. The band focused on live performances, became part of the Shape platform in 2016 and played at CTM (Berlin), Unsound (Krakow), Luminato (Toronto), Rocolectiv (Bucharest), Open'er (Gdynia), Phono (Odense) and other festivals.
Currently, T'ien Lai is made up of three musicians, QbaJanicki, Lukasz Jedrzejczak and Jakub Ziolek, while the musical reference point has become the club scenes of Luanda, Lisbon, Durban, Kampala, Rio de Janeiro and experiments with such genres as kuduro, gqom and baile funk, which the musicians describe as "konk."
