[spectre] New podcast by Felix Kubin: PARASOL ELEKTRONICZNY. RUMOURS FROM THE EASTERN UNDERGROUND #2. Czech Republic and Slovakia

[Radio Web MACBA]

*Podcast: PARASOL ELEKTRONICZNY. RUMOURS FROM THE EASTERN UNDERGROUND #2.
Czech Republic and Slovakia

Curated by Felix Kubin*

A decade after the end of the communist regime, Czech and Slovakian
underground musicians began channeling the national legacy of progressive
dissident rock to virgin soil. Their new amalgams consist of mechanical
sound art, free improvisation, 8-bit folklore and industrial club culture.

 Link: http://bit.ly/lMEejg
Related info: http://bit.ly/jRPWiK <http://bit.ly/lMEejg>


*Summary: *

Part two of PARASOL ELEKTRONICZNY. RUMOURS FROM THE EASTERN UNDERGROUND
explores the music scenes of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Our local
umbrella agents were Miloš Vojtechovský and Zuzana 'Friday' Přikrylová.
Miloš is part of an older generation that witnessed the transitory period
from the communist era to the Velvet Revolution in 1989. He is currently one
of the main curators at the prolific cultural center Školská 28 in Prague.
Zuzana, a journalist and media theorist from Brno, was born in 1989. For
PARASOL ELEKTRONICZNY she focused on the young scene that has formed around
folk-inspired club noise pop in Brno and Bratislava.

While Prague's current underground consists of a fragmented series of
circles and sub-genres that tend to keep within their own boundaries, the
Moravian scene in Brno is more compact and strongly influenced by the legacy
of the European Rock In Opposition movement. The four artists interviewed by
Miloš Vojtechovský and Petr Vrba - Peter Graham (aka Jaroslav Štastný), Ivan
Palacký, Tomáš Procházka (aka Federsel) and Petr Ferenc - grew up in these
two musical epicentres of the Czech Republic. They all mention progressive
rock as an early influence but also point out the importance of
improvisation and Cagean aleatorics in their music, which is an approach
that doesn't yet have a long tradition in their home country. According to
Peter Graham, who graduated from the Janáček Academy of Music in Brno,
forward-thinking academic music was so zealously suppressed by the communist
regime that the alternative rock scene - represented mainly by a dark
visionary style of the Czech underground school of rock groups as Plastic
People of the Universe, or DG 307 - became a haven for all younger
generations of musical dissidents.

'The 1970s and 1980s were the decades of the rigid Neo-Stalinist regime
installed by Soviet tanks in 1968 following Czechoslovakia's brief
experiment in cultural and political liberalisation. It was an epoch that
brought centralist control and conformism to the Czech arts. For long years,
official contemporary music concerts were grey and boring affairs.
Conservatism also ruled the music schools where composition was taught.
(...) [However, some composers] tended to see themselves as the successors
of the Czech avant-garde of the 1960s, i.e. of groups of composers who at
the time were ostracised and driven underground into a position of musical
dissent.' (Miroslav Pudlák, 'Czech composers in the post-modern era',
Chamber music - Czech Music CD Series 1, 2007)

When the situation of artists relaxed in 1989, the younger generation was
able to draw on a rich underground culture that had continued to exist
during the communist regime.

>From the sound aesthetics of surreal Czechoslovakian films to the
expressionist soundtracks by Zdeněk Liška  (represented in this feature by
short jingles and film excerpts) and the late experiments of Palacký/Graham
and Petr Ferenc' Birds Build Nests Underground (BBNU), many of the works
share a fascination with mechanics. These take the form of different
organisms, such as Ivan Palacký's amplified knitting machine, Jan
Švankmajer's human food apparatus in the macabre film trilogy 'Jídlo', and
BBNU's improvised cinema of sound. Then there is Tomáš Procházka, a musician
from Prague who is involved in the DIY multidisciplinary group Handa Gote
and the neo-Krautrock band B4 and also works as a puppeteer, following the
famous tradition of Czech puppet theatre with its taste for the demonic and
grotesque. The leitmotif connecting all of these artists is the incantation
of imaginary machines, sound alchemy and catoptrics.

As Zuzana Přikrylová's research shows, the younger generation is more at
home in the digital realm of playful, edgy beats and cut-ups and has strong
ties to club culture. Bands like Hugo & Zoe from Brno and Kyl The Sistem
from Bratislava have created something of a folk exploitation craze, where
improvisation is more evident in the social context than in the music.
During the interviews, their playful and dynamic way of talking effortlessly
shifts from statements to songs, dramatic quotations and beatbox noises.

Michal Lichý of Urban Sounds Collective sees his roots in industrial
culture, modern architecture and noisy club music. Like Kyl The Sistem,
Lichý is based in Slovakia's capital, Bratislava, where the scene is less
fragmented than its equivalent in Prague. 'We help each other,' he says,
pointing out how important it is that the collective can organize events
without external financial support. 'Everyone who comes to play in Slovakia
will find that the audience is very open-minded and warm-hearted whereas the
political culture is corrupt and mainly focused on profit.'  In their
typical sarcastic madcap style, Kyl the Sistem express this in a simple
phrase: 'The hearts are empty, we are nihilistic but still full of love!.'
*
Felix Kubin, 2011.05.07  *


*Featured artists (in order of appearance)*

Ivan Palacký and Peter Graham (Jaroslav Štastný) - Brno (CZ)
Federsel (Tomáš Procházka) - Prague (CZ)
Birds Build Nests Underground (Petr Ferenc, Michal Brunclik and Martin
Ježek)
- Prague (CZ)
Hugo & Zoe (Johana Merta, Ondřej Merta and David Merta) - Brno (CZ)
Kyl the Sistem (Mungular Bubu and BOOM Fonda Spacey) - Bratislava (SK)
Urban Failure (Michal Lichý) - Bratislava (SK)

More on the podcast series: http://bit.ly/kJ3Hra
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