Robert Świstelnicki is a songwriter, poet, philosopher, composer, multi-instrumentalist and a lyricist. Born and raised in Poland, he moved to Chicago for his graduate studies at University of Chicago and Northwestern University (working mostly in the fields of German Philosophy, Political Theory and Literature). Świstelnicki has released two albums as a leader in Poland. His musical projects combine his original poetry with various idioms of the jazz tradition, ranging from free jazz, through jazz ballads, to his own personal take on the North and East European jazz tradition. His music also contains traces of rock, classical music and the singer-songwriter genre. His poetry (mainly in Polish but occasionally also in English) has a strong neo-romantic and neo-symbolist identity, yet it does not shy away from, either, comedy, grotesque or brutal directness. He has worked with some of the finest Polish jazz musicians, such as Grazyna Auguścik, Jorgos Skolias, Arek Skolik, Wojtek Myrczek, Piotr Budniak or Marcin Pater. His new project, this time based in Chicago, explores a range of dreams, romances, horrors, ecstasies and hopes of the late capitalistic circumstance. It searches, at once, for the individual and for the universal in the particular experience of our dehumanized and technology-centered end-of-history times.
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