THERE’S AN OLDER COUPLE watching Krasnogorsk play. They don’t say much, but when the band finishes a song, they’re the first to applaud. They seem impressed, not just with the Roma-influenced, vaguely Eastern European music, but also Krasnogorsk’s entire image: their unshaven faces; rustic instruments and the dozen small gemstones covering their patio table. “I was gonna, like, strew these across the table for the interview,” admits Corey Hinchey, one half of the duo. “Just so you’d be like, ‘Woah. The table was covered in strange stones.'”

We’re sitting on the patio of Brussels on Granville, where Krasnogorsk performs weekly. It’s the one regular gig for a band that otherwise plays wherever it wants, from inside a cave at York Redoubt to atop a large pile of bricks by the Notre Dame in Montreal. With its debut album coming out August 13, the band fills an otherwise empty niche in Halifax’s music scene: “Folklore music,” as Jacques Mindreau describes it. “We try to tell stories with our music.”

“It’s sort of ineffable, the stories. They feel the music, and they jive it, and they give it its life.”

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