Banausoi - Imagines (New Release)
Δημοσιεύτηκε 9/4/2021 17:49
Banausoi - Imagines (New Release)
The Czecho-Slovak band Banausoi consisting of Petr Vrba, Václav Šafka and Ondrej Zajac are releasing their debut album Imagines: a collection of stories intertwined with the aesthetics of gentleness, radical improvisation and Greek mythology.
“Even though the instrumental line-up is more traditional, the extraordinary technical prowess and the presence of electronics create a unique sound…” wrote Jan Hocek after seeing the band play at Hear Me! festival. Not many people knew that the band’s debut album was already recorded at that point. They had only published a short EP titled Les improvisations de la salle de répétition and played a few concerts. Towards the end of last year they recorded a live video in the props warehouse of the Center of experimental theatre in Brno in collaboration with the Terén platform. In the world of covid and cancelled concerts though, the band cancelled all other plans and focused their energies on their debut album.
“We all have a lot of work, but we still decided to start a band and I personally don’t regret it at all. We work in different ways to how we work elsewhere. In our local music scene, it’s not common that you hear the clarinet, electronics, or the mentality of European free improvisation at the same time, but even if you don’t notice all these aspects you can simply enjoy the good music,” says the guitarist Ondrej Zajac about the principles guiding the band’s work, which started taking form after Ondrej Zajac and Václav Šafka played an improvised concert in Prague’s Punctum, where Petr Vrba was in the audience.
As the trio views itself as a group of craftsmen, they adopted an Old Greek name; the word “banausos” was a reproachful term for a person working with their hands and at that time musicians were part of this group of people. The song titles are also inspired by Greek mythology, similarly to the cover and visuals created by Klára Záhradková and Daryan Hardy.
“A delicate mixture of abstract and raw material with more melodic and often rhythmical stuff, sometimes delightfully powerful,” says about the final results Petr Vrba, who plays trumpet, clarinet and electronics in the band. Imagines was recorded in the Mr. Wombat studio in Prague and in Divadlo 29 in Pardubice, where Ondrej Zajac was invited for a residency. In addition to working on solo music there, he also used the space to record with Banausoi.
“There is communication between the three of us during concerts and it is, more than anything else, a sense of occasion. It’s hard to verbalise its rules though. There are so many variables and factors which make each concert what it is. For me, the strongest two are spatial connections and each of our moods and mental states,” describes Václav Šafka, referring to the concert experience.
CREDITS :
LABEL: CIRCUM-DISC
PETR VRBA: TRUMPET, CLARINET, ELECTRONICS
VACLAV ŠAFKA: DRUMS, PERCUSSIONS, OBJECTS
ONDREJ ZAJAC: GUITAR, VOICE
TRACKLIST
01 Imagines Aeneas Tacticus
02 Imagines Gorgoneion
03 Imagines Periegesis
04 Imagines Dialogues Of The Dead
05 Imagines Phaenomena
06 Imagines Stoa Poecile