‘Sting would not do that. The guitars are too loud, the voice too drowned.” Jan P Muchow, of Czech shoegaze band the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, is remembering how sound engineers used to patronise them when they emerged at the dawn of the 1990s. But as Muchow says, “We didn’t want to be three universes close to anything like Sting”.
The Ecstasy despised guitar solos, used English lyrics and hid behind reverb and distortion. Czech listeners, accustomed largely to folk music or schlager pop, were not ready for it. “Our early tours outside Prague felt like Easy Rider,” Muchow remembers; organisers from the houses of culture, relics of communism across the country that would host concerts, were horrified by overpowered amps catching on fire, and audiences covered their ears when faced with massive walls of guitar.
But in the capital of newly democratic Czechoslovakia, which was about to become the Czech Republic in January 1993, hundreds of people stood bathed in bliss when confronted with the heavenly melodies and hulking guitar feedback of not just the Ecstasy, but a whole wave of other shoegaze bands who resonated beyond the country’s borders – and who now enjoy a second life on radio station NTS and archival YouTube channel Eastern European Shoegaze.
In the 80s, in the more open times of perestroika, Czech teenagers had been divided into two camps, fans of Depeche Mode or the Cure. The latter camp devoured cosmopolitan German radio and went to listening sessions thrown by enlightened music journalists of bands on powerhouse indie labels such as 4AD and Creation Records. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 brought an end to the one-party communist state. Buoyed by optimism, teenagers could now dream of having a career in music. The information blockade in the communist era meant Czech bands were always several steps behind, but now, via MTV or the imported British music press, they could follow shoegaze bands such as My Bloody Valentine, Ride or Slowdive.
A small but lively Czech shoegaze scene duly sprouted, with the otherworldly layered music of the Ecstasy, noisy dream-pop by the Naked Souls, esoteric noise by Here, and Sebastians, who added a baggy Madchester gloss. They were friends who produced each other’s albums, used the same equipment and partied together.
The Ecstasy were probably the first band from the former eastern bloc to be signed by a London label (namely Go! Discs’ sub-label Free), earning fans such as John Peel and Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie. “What a great name, wow!” Lou Reed later exclaimed on BBC 6 Music, about the band name inspired by Bernini’s sculpture of Spanish Carmelite nun Teresa of Ávila. “Our ambition was to melt the guitar sound into abstraction and imagination,” says Muchow. “Saint Teresa had an immaterial experience she couldn’t describe – it’s similar with music.”
The scene soon developed its own vocabulary for the genre, inspired by the sylvan melancholy of the country they were born into. “We wanted to try it with a style nobody else played before here. It was possible. You could perform without permission and didn’t have to attend rehearsals in front of the communist commission to make sure the lyrics were OK,” says Milan Šíp, the bassist and vocalist from Prague trio the Naked Souls who were inspired by the psychedelic explorations of Spacemen 3. “I wasn’t shoegazing at the pedals. I was cautiously looking at what I was doing – I was no virtuoso.”
The Czech shoegaze scene’s centre was Prague, but not exclusively – Here were formed in the small town of Vyškov, about 240km from the capital. “We wanted our name to express the here and now,” said guitarist Zdeněk Marek in a 1993 interview for the Czech music magazine Rock & Pop. Here, who opened gigs for bands such as Yo La Tengo and Siouxsie and the Banshees, were hippy kids with passion for cathartic expression and called their style “flower noise”.
“Unlike Prague bands, we carried our cables not in fancy cases but in plastic bags,” Here’s drummer Martin Pecka jokes. “Shoegaze meant freedom. Among those young people, it was a way to express everything hidden inside for all those years,” adds Here’s vocalist Valerie Chauvey, who moved from France to Vyškov to teach English and French. “There was an explosion of feelings and freedom.”
The Ecstasy – Muchow on guitar, bassist Jan Gregar, drummer Petr Wegner and Irna Libowitz with haunting vocals – recorded their debut EP Pigment in 1991 and received support from Radio 1, the first independent radio station in Czechoslovakia, which started broadcasting from catacombs under a former Stalin monument in October 1990 as pirate station Radio Stalin. “My generation listened to Radio 1, and the Ecstasy was played five times a day,” Muchow says. “Everybody talked about us, and our first concert was sold out.”
In the early 1990s, Prague was poor but sexy, and became a destination for western artists. English novelist Tom McCarthy, later the twice Booker-nominated author of Remainder, C and Satin Island, was among them. “Prague was growing in my imagination,” he says. “This playwright and dissident [Václav Havel], who was friends with the Velvet Underground, had become president. It was an extremely exciting time. Everything was in transition.” He arrived in Prague in late 1991 and landed at a concert of Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. “The noise was pretty extreme. The style was clearly influenced by Anglo-Irish bands like My Bloody Valentine,” says McCarthy, who lived in Prague until 1993. “A strange set of cultural migrations were taking on a unique form at that time. This music seemed to carry the weight of history in a way that shoegaze bands back home didn’t.”
After the gig that night, says McCarthy, he fell asleep only to wake up to BBC World Service playing the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. “I thought, this is not a dream. Andthen, 10 minutes later, I tuned in to [Czechoslovakia’s] Radio 1, they played Ecstasy as well, and informed me that John Peel had just played the Ecstasy on the BBC.”
Peel broadcast one of their poppiest, heavily feedback-driven tunes, Square Wave, which was named after the fuzzy guitar pedal the band used along with about 20 others. British music journalist Simon Price, who was working at Melody Maker, was listening too. “It was one of those things where whatever you’re doing, you just sit up and listen to the radio, and you stop everything you’re doing,” he remembers. “I always tried to discover new things for the paper, and Ecstasy were perfect.”
But tastes were changing fast. By the time the Ecstasy reached London to record a Peel session in January 1993 and play several shows, Nirvana were surfing the first waves of the massive US grunge tide, Warp Records had their paradigm-shifting Artificial Intelligence compilation, and Britpop had begun dictating the turn from dreamy introspection to realism and brashness. The interest in shoegaze was winding down. “Ecstasy of Saint Theresa were maybe the last shoegaze band I really liked,” Price confesses.
“Do you remember My Bloody Valentine? No, I mean really remember? Remember the way they pulled the earth from under you? Remember that sudden explosion of possibilities in your head?” begins his live review of the Ecstasy’s concert at London’s Bull and Gate in February 1993. Then he describes one of the songs, Fluidum, from their Peel session: “This is liquid music, alternately flowing like mercury and seizing up into towering glaciers.” (The song was recently included next to Chapterhouse, Slowdive and more on the compilation Cherry Stars Collide: Dream Pop, Shoegaze & Ethereal Rock 1986-1995.)
The success of the Ecstasy opened doors. In March 1993, MTV Europe filmed 120 Minutes hosted by Paul King in Prague with the Ecstasy, Naked Souls and Sebastians, whose music videos rotated on the channel regularly. The same year, the Naked Souls finally released their debut EP, Two and One on Zurich’s Lost Records, and went on to tour England and later Switzerland with Stereolab.
The Ecstasy then worked on their most experimental album yet, Free-D (Original Soundtrack), inside the London’s Blackwing Studios, with Guy Fixsen, who was the sound engineer on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. They progressed to a post-rock phase, utilising field recordings of cicadas and birdsong and electronics in spatial ambient soundscapes, similar to contemporaries such as Seefeel on Warp Records.
“We were like children in toy shop,” recalls Fixsen, who guided Muchow in exploring the possibilities of the recording studio as a compositional tool. The rest of the band were left to their own devices. Due to growing tensions and a lack of communication, Free-D became their swansong (though Muchow, now a film music composer, resurrected the Ecstasy as an electronic duo in the late 90s, influenced by trip-hop).
Here’s debut album Swirl caught the attention of Peel, and they were the second Czech band to record a Peel session in December 1993. When BBC engineers saw their dilapidated amps, “they were horrified – they needed to secure the boxes for safety reasons,” says Here guitarist Tomáš Luska. The Peel session was later released as Sikusaq, where warm violin and piano adds more colours to the palette.
Here moved beyond their shoegaze inspirations. On 1996 album Entre Deux Soleils – with Muchow as producer – the band land between post-rock, new-age esotericism and jazz fusion, employing xylophones, distorted saxophone, and a wide array of traditional folk instruments, such as the Slovakian wind instrument fujara, an Irish bodhrán drum and a kantele, a Finnish plucked string instrument similar to a zither. “We opened our minds towards space,” adds drummer Pecka. “We really wanted to work in as open settings as possible without any genre boundaries.”
Tom McCarthy meanwhile moved back to London and set to work on his first novel, Men in Space (published as his second after the success of 2005’s Remainder). A political allegory about the quest for a stolen painting, it is set in the early 1990s shoegazing Prague around the bohemian community McCarthy was part of, and features a band called the Martyrdom of St Sebastian, “an amalgam of all the bands together that provides the soundtrack to the novel,” McCarthy says.
“It’s looking at this world in a state of disintegration and all these people trying to find their place, but are kind of lost in history,” he continues. “The sense of lateness is always built into any period. Situationists were saying ‘Paris is gone’ already in the 60s. New York eternally feels it’s too late, but Prague then felt like, yeah, now is the time.”
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‘We didn’t want to sound close to anything like Sting’: the exhilarating freedom of the Czech shoegaze scene - The Guardian
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