Czajka & Puchacz is the duo of Slovenian pianist Kaja Draksler and Polish drummer Szymon Gąsiorek.

To Kaja and Szymon - a kind of love letter 

At some point I lose the distance. It had already happened to me when I knelt on the floor next to Annika, over in the other room of our little jazz club office, which is becoming something like our second living room in the course of the festival preparation, the first time "Hello, welcome to this world | I don't know what we're doing here [...]" resounded from the loudspeakers. This first line of lyrics from "Entschuldigung", a song by Kiebitz & Uhu (alter ego of Czajka & Puchacz), combined with the impressions from the accompanying music video - a jet of water breaks on the bristles of an orange toothbrush, expressionless looks in colorful tops, a wet sponge runs over the trunk of a houseplant and a naked onion is even pulled out of the oven - spoke to me immediately. "That's not why I am, sorry". The song was released in April 2021, and I can't help but wonder if it sprang in part from your experiences at Lockdown. But ultimately, I don't need to know that to be happy about this piece of music and you guys. Not the kind of joy that expresses itself through frolicking exuberance, but rather the kind that smiles enigmatically when it thinks it finds a thought or feeling of its own in a counterpart. Thank you both for this moment and for the fact that I can now reproduce it whenever I feel like it. 

Kaja was born in a small village in Slovenia and grew up in the countryside. "My father was a train driver, my mother is an accountant. I have a younger brother who became an engineer," she writes about herself in an approachable way on her website. In the Netherlands, Kaja studied classical composition and became more and more immersed in the world of Amsterdam's improvised music scene. She now lives between and in Copenhagen and Trboje with regular visits to Amsterdam and Berlin and is widely networked musically. Szymon also studied in Copenhagen and writes about his time there and at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in particular: "There I learned to play drums, compose, lead bands and generally be an artist." Currently, he is working on a solo release, working with bands such as the Pimpono Ensemble, The Love And Beauty Seekers, and I Love My Mother, and writing music for some of them. Szymon also presents music from the Copenhagen underground on his radio show Trans-Bałtyk and enjoys photography and drawing. The latter is appealingly demonstrated by his illustrations in Kaja's interview volume "On Innovation and the Future of Music (and art)," in which she exchanged improvisational work with Peter Evans, Susana Santos Silva, Christopher Dell, and Christian Lillinger, among others, in email conversations between April and July 2020. 

On the way home I'm humming in my mind "I don't know what we're doing here | but here we go, we go | where - it's not known | but here we go, we go" and thinking that I should probably say something else about what you can expect with Czajka & Puchacz at UT Connewitz: electroacoustic music meets the idiom of musique concrète and the European school of free improvisation meets disco melodies, rock riffs and eco-sonorism like the drilling of woodpeckers. In July 2020, the two released their debut album "Bivališča" on the Slovenian label Klopotec. You can get a first impression there. And shorter: Experience two young, internationally networked artist personalities, who will certainly receive many more love letters in the future, live in Leipzig. 

Slightly in Love,
Esther