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Mixtape

For our exhibition Seismographic Sounds – Visions of a New World Lucia Udvardyová from the music blog Easterndaze.net compiled a Mixtape. It is a personal assemblage of fleeting encounters, uncompromising sonics, recordings from house parties and demonstrations. A 20-minute transition through perpetual transition, a looped past-future-past, an ode to the «former» Eastern Europe: from Budapest to Bucharest, Prague to Belgrade, Vienna to Bulgaria, conjuring an imaginary landscape open to contingency and adventure.

Tracklist

Powitanie: «Animacje Hotelowe, Słoneczny Brzeg»

Laura Luna: «Auroras»

Ivan Hrušovský: «Idée Fixe»

William: «Budapest» (11/2014)

Falochron: «Nessebar, Stare Miasto»

Kassett: «444 (Imre Kiss remix)»

Somnoroase Păsărele: «SEPT TREI»

Springboard: «Yanni Rhytms»

Demisia: «Bucharest» (12/204)

Mirat: «Mane4»

Magma Trakt: «Syrup»

Highway 69: «Suleiman The Magnificent»

Valea Cascadelor: «Bucharest» (12/2014)

Wsie: «Wieś z błotem»

Id M Theft Able: «Jowls Without A Face»

Alone In Heaven: «Sacral»

Radu: «Bucharest» (12/2014)

The mixtape was presented at the exhibition Seismographic Sounds.

Biography

Lucia Udvardyová is a music journalist, curator, and organizer. In 2010, she co-founded Easterndaze, a project that aims to document and interconnect the emerging underground scenes in Central and Eastern Europe. She has worked with Czech Radio, Resonance FM, Cashmere Radio, The Listening Biennial, The Quietus, and The Wire, Central European University (CEU), and the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), among others. Between 2016 and 2021, she curated and co-organized the Easterndaze x Berlin series that aims to bring together collectives from Berlin and the CEE region. She also gives lectures and talks and leads sound-related workshops. Udvardyová currently works for the SHAPE platform, a pan-European festival initiative that promotes innovative music and audiovisual art, CTM Festival’s discourse program and magazine, and she’s the film curator at WOMEX. Follow her on Instagram, and on her Website.

Published on December 16, 2016

Last updated on August 11, 2020

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Seismographic Sounds

Seismographic Sounds: Mixtapes

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Easterndaze: Irony, Kitsch, and Noise

Playlist

by Lucia Udvardyová

Far from folkloristic clichés and beyond the radar of the taste-shaping music press, there are alternative music scenes thriving in Central and Eastern Europe: from electronic music and noise to the ironic deconstruction of traditional music, or to local genres such as manele or chalga, often belittled as kitsch. For years the music blog Easterndaze is our entrance into this other music of Eastern Europe. We asked the founder of Easterndaze, Lucia Udvardyova, to share with us the most urgent video clips from Eastern Europe for our Musikfilm Festival. What came out is an unsettling selection changing between politics, the negotiation of identity, and belonging.

Mister D & Maria Strzelecka – Zona Pilkarza

Poland, 2016

Mister D is the sonic alter ego of the «enfant terrible» of the Polish literary scene, Dorota Masłowska. As in her writing, Masłowska's music touches upon the often flawed realities of our era in general, and the Polish society in particular. In this video, created by the illustrator Maria Strzelecka, the lives of footballers' wives are explored without the glitz and the glamour of their public lifestyles.

Kyklos Galaktikos – I.N.R.I.

Czech Republic, 2012

Kyklos Galaktikos is an open platform established in 2007 encompassing anything from theater and dance performances to concerts and children's shows. In 2011, the Czech collective delved into the music scene with an eponymous band, whose debut Osa dobra (The Axis of Good) appeared in the same year. In this (literally) explosive video they set out to demolish our turbo-capitalist affinity for shopping malls and materialism, borrowing various blockbuster tropes along the way.

Benzokai – Identities Too Abstract

Estonia, 2015

Benzokai is the nom-de-plume of Estonian artist and musician Artyom Astrov. His work explores the notions of emptiness and its implicit potential for change. In this video, taken from his self-titled album which was released in 2015 on Czech label Baba Vanga, we follow a journey across non-descript landscapes somewhere between Vilnius and Vienna.

Samčo, brat dážďoviek – The opinions of Slovak experts on tragical deaths of refugees

Slovakia, 2015

Not many musicians dare to touch politics nowadays, especially here in Central Europe. Samčo, brat dážďoviek is an exception: media-jamming like a sonic Yes Man, photoshopping posters of the far right, and autotuning hate speech. In this video, entitled «The opinions of Slovak experts on tragical deaths of refugees», he aggregated various xenophobic Facebook comments and added the profile photos of their authors. The twisted lo-fi animations of their faces, often taken from holiday or family photos which depict them as «normal» people, become a chilling metaphor of what's wrong with this world.

Schwarzprior – Železem rty

Czech Republic, 2014

Schwarzprior is a collective from Ostrava, a coal-mining center in the north-eastern Czech Republic. Like the industrial Sheffield, Ostrava's depressing environs proved fertile for various artistic endeavours, including mixing music and visual art. Schwarzprior is one of the bands which emerged from this scene – alongside the likes of I Love 69 Popgeju and Marius Konvoj – and this video is their raw paean to the city.

Biography

Published on April 03, 2017

Last updated on October 29, 2020

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5 Video Clips from

Norient Musikfilm Festival NMFF 8 (2017)

Norient Festival

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Five Video Clips from Czech Republic

Playlist

by Lucia Udvardyová

This list about some current Czech sounds was compiled by Lucia Udvardyová. She runs the blog Easterndaze, a platform for up-and-coming independent Eastern European arts and music scenes. And thats exactly what we can explore in this list: electronic shaped tracks accompanied by colorful and digital video art – inspired by tumbler aestetics. For the first and the last video we're going to visit particular places in Prague as the ubiquitous Chinese restaurants and the communist council estate. See five video clips from other countries in our ongoing videclip series here.

Artist: Deaths
Track: Karaoke Blues

Video not available anymore

Deaths are a young and up-and-coming Czech synth-pop act. In their video, created by Igor Bruso, they plunge themselves into a thriller-like fantasy set in Prague's ubiquitous Chinese restaurants. Equally dramatic and romantic, simply, the Karaoke Blues.

Artist: Space Love
Track: ASH TAR SHE RAN

Andrea Pekárková is known as one of the most inspiring Czech VJs. Under the moniker Space Love she teamed up with her love, the fledgling producer Voodoo, to create an audiovisual project inspired by trap and global bass music, sci-fi, tumblr aesthetics and pop-cultural sampling.

Artist: Střed Světa
Track: Travinou Obklíčeni

The mysterious Střed Světa emerged last year with his debut on the Baba Vanga label (we admit affiliation). «Travinou Obklíčeni» was visualised by the Polish, Bristol-based musician and video maker Wojciech Rusin, augmenting the abstraction of electronic music, but adding various visual ephemera, largely sourced and deconstructed from commercial stock images.

Artist: Lightning Glove
Track: To All Traitors

The aforementioned Andrea Pekárková is also the resident visualist of the increasingly successful «post-rave» project from Prague called Lightning Glove. They have just released a vinyl on the British Ono Tesla label, and their no-frills attitude and forlorn lyrics are a perfect soundtrack to (not only) Eastern urban dystopia.

Artist: Máma Bubo
Track: Skončíš jako já

The Czech band, established in 1983, was one of the pioneers of the local new wave/post punk scene (if you can call it that). Incorporating electronics as well as elements of ska/reggae, Máma Bubo still sound fresh with their characteristically lo-fi aesthetic utilising primitive «home» studios and spreading their oeuvre on cassettes – at that time more out of necessity than fashion. The video for their track «Skončíš jako já» (You Will End Up Like Me) is wonderfully desolate, shot in the then newly built communist council estate in Prague.

Biography

Published on July 13, 2015

Last updated on October 20, 2020

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5 Video Clips from

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