The Polish capital of Warsaw, only about a five-hour drive from Berlin and increasingly inseparable from the local scene here, seems to have emerged lately as an incubator for visionary pop. Perhaps it’s the grey post-socialist scenery of the city that whets the imagination and inspires musical salmagundi. Enchanted Hunters was founded by Małgorzata Penkalla and joined later by Magdalena Gajdzica. The project envelops the two women’s voices in playful arrangements that alternatingly digress and find their way back to the melody again. The result is a complex folk pop amalgam whose kindred spirits lurk more in west coast USA—on the soundtrack to Wicker Man, and among rural preachers like Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver, or Fleet Foxes—than they do in the Warsaw suburbs. Alas, a city built of concrete doesn’t make for particularly rewarding, or dreamy, hunting. The topos of the woods lives in the very blood of the Enchanted Hunters, and it is with a contemporary and sophisticated touch that this duo dishes out home-caught myths from the global forest.
Enchanted Hunters
2016