Everything’s in the mix

But the 24-year-old cellist and frontwoman for the Warsaw Village Band hopes people will come to tonight’s show at the Somerville Theatre with open minds.

“This music is very pure and barbarian,’’ Kleszcz said on the phone before a concert in Minneapolis last week. “The folk music is important as an example of how we can take inspiration from the past and incarnate it with new life, new styles. With a mixing of ideas I think you create a kind of global continuity of music - an infinity.’’

The youthful six-member group has been taking inspiration from old, vanishing Polish melodies and instruments for more than a decade and fusing them with modern elements. The band’s influences range from Celtic, klezmer, and Scandinavian to hip-hop, African, and Renaissance. The result defies easy description.

Pair a Swedish nyckelharpa with an electronic siren? Why not. Polka with a shot of techno? Sure thing. How about a hurdy gurdy with turntable scratching alongside a deejay howling “Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’’ as wedding music? The band hasn’t shied from such experimentation on its four albums, including its latest, “Infinity.’’

“We just want to have good fun with the past,’’ says the band’s 29-year-old fiddler, Wojtek Krzak.

When band members started out in 1999 - some still in their teens - they sought out the Polish music elders of the eastern rural Mazovia region for songbooks, instruments, and singing techniques. But much of that area’s rich folk past seemed to have disappeared.

“Tradition was destroyed by the communists,’’ says Krzak, who is also an ethnomusicologist. “They wanted one vision of tradition. If there was a folk player, let’s say, and he would like to play for a large audience, he had to take some exams, [things] like this, which was controlled by anthropologists, etc., and it was not connected with the music anymore. It was part of a communistic show. That’s why we had problems to find this kind of music.’’

Part of learning the traditional music required Kleszcz, at age 14, to master so-called “white voice’’ singing - the primeval style of shouting used by shepherds - without a teacher. Kleszcz likes to sing white voice “really wild and high,’’ usually to haunting effect.

The group last came to Boston in 2004 to promote “Uprooting,’’ its third album, a hard-core folk fury of string-plucking and insistent, trancelike drumming employing new and old instruments. Those pieces include the hammered dulcimer and such reconstructed instruments as the medieval suka, a knee fiddle picked with the fingernails whose use among older Polish musicians in the hills had died out.

“Uprooting’’ put the band on the music map, garnering it the BBC World Music Award for Best Newcomer in 2004 as well as a Fryderyk Award - the Polish equivalent of a Grammy. The band has since performed 400 shows outside Poland and 200 inside, says Krzak. The highlight for the musicians, he says, was last summer’s Glastonbury festival in England, the largest greenfield music and performing arts festival in the world, drawing a weekend crowd of about 135,000 people.

Kleszcz, who has a 2 1/2-year-old daughter with Krzak, says the concept of “Infinity’’ was born the moment little Lena came into the world.

“I have this experience of baby blues because of this hard experience of life with a newborn child,’’ she says, laughing. “This time my voice and my performance is more bluesy, more emotional.’’

Krzak adds, “If we were from America, we would be blues players.’’ One of Krzak’s biggest US idols is Chicago electric blues master Buddy Guy, and Kleszcz admires the late Bessie Smith, the empress of the blues from the 1920s and ’30s. With the addition of an electric bass to the band’s repertoire, Kleszcz says “Infinity’’ also has a jazzier sound than previous albums.

In Poland, Krzak says, the group is a cult band popular mainly among students but has fans into their 70s. “You will not find our faces on crackers or cornflakes - never,’’ Krzak says. “We just want to play and make this music good enough for people the way it was good enough 200 or 300 years ago.’’

Lydia Rebac can be reached at lrebac@globe.com.