<div id=":17w" class="ii gt"><div id=":17x"><b>Podcast: PARASOL ELEKTRONICZNY. RUMOURS FROM THE EASTERN UNDERGROUND #2. Czech Republic and Slovakia<br>
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Curated by Felix Kubin</b><br><br>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8.5pt;font-family:TradeGothic" lang="EN-US"><font style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif" size="2">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. </font><br>
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</span></p>
Link: <a href="http://bit.ly/lMEejg" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/lMEejg </a><br>Related info: <a href="http://bit.ly/lMEejg" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/jRPWiK </a><br><br><br><b>Summary: </b><br>
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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.<br><br>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.<br><br>'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) <br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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!.' <br><b><br>
Felix Kubin, 2011.05.07 </b><br><br><br><b>Featured artists (in order of appearance)</b><br><br>Ivan Palacký and Peter Graham (Jaroslav Štastný) – Brno (CZ) <br>Federsel (Tomáš Procházka) – Prague (CZ) <br>Birds Build Nests Underground (Petr Ferenc, Michal Brunclik and Martin Ježek) <br>
– Prague (CZ) <br>Hugo & Zoe (Johana Merta, Ondřej Merta and David Merta) – Brno (CZ) <br>Kyl the Sistem (Mungular Bubu and BOOM Fonda Spacey) – Bratislava (SK) <br>Urban Failure (Michal Lichý) – Bratislava (SK) <br>
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More on the podcast series: <a href="http://bit.ly/kJ3Hra" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/kJ3Hra </a><br>Follow us on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/Radio_Web_MACBA" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/Radio_Web_MACBA</a>
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