2024-05-30 02:14:06
Within the current TV collection It Will Be Defined, Comrades! paranormal investigators arrive at a tramp settlement the place a monster is claimed to be on the rampage. The locals chase her away with a music from the campfire. The hyperbole collection hits the nail on the top right here – the choral singing actually evokes a particular type of cohesiveness. That is additionally confirmed by the brand new recording of the country-folk band Northern Platform.
Her just-released second album, Orel, batýr a pes, revives the spirit of romantic wandering via town and across the bonfires, the place this group typically performs acoustically, with out sound. She not too long ago launched her new report on the Kabinet múz in Brno, and on the finish of final month she offered it on the Liben Synagogue in Prague.
This former non secular area is now managed and cultural occasions are typically organized right here by the Krajinou tlivilu affiliation. The North Platform is offered out. The musicians begin with a slight delay, they nonetheless summon the wandering guitarist Anežka Matoušková. Once they arrive, the primary spherical of applause is heard. There will likely be a lot extra. A pleasant ambiance pervades the darkened area for the following hour.
After a few older songs, the nine-piece Northern Platform begins, whose line-up contains guitar, banjo, flute, waltz, double bass, violin, harmonica and accordion, the opening observe from the brand new album. He’ll then play it in its entirety.
The album is characterised by songs with a quite medium tempo, from which one thing particular emerges each jiffy. Probably the most touching second of the recording and the live performance happens with the composition Slezská, guitarist Michael Kačura’s summary associative reminiscence of rising up on the street of the identical identify. “That every one the water is hidden right here behind the inexperienced wall, and if somebody pushes the clouds away from the metal, they may see,” sings the whole Nástupistě refrain, which evokes the invention of the hidden corners of town and one’s personal reminiscence.
The energy of the composition stems from the multitude of voices, which give an individual the need to belong someplace, additionally to sing. It will lastly be fulfilled through the live performance encore Samota, a remake of the repertoire of the Czech Tramp Hoboes. The band and the viewers fill the whole synagogue with phrases about uncertainty, balancing, the unfairness of life and the unattainability of directions on “methods to be cherished”.
The northern platform is called after the already demolished location. She mentioned goodbye with a live performance. | Photograph: Petr Zewlakk Vrabec
The Northern Platform has carried out a number of instances within the Libeň monument, and likewise carried out there within the spring of 2020, shortly after the covid restrictions have been lifted for the summer time. Within the air there was a – quickly disillusioned – hope that the worst was behind us, that the world would possibly get higher, and the group singing wanderings via the city and pure panorama supplied an appropriate accompaniment.
In spite of everything, the Northern Platform was created from joint journeys – its members in a wider group went on longer walks via Prague’s neighborhoods. They led them to a unusually deserted location close to Smíchovského nádraží, from which they took their identify. Final 12 months, they symbolically mentioned goodbye to it with a live performance, earlier than it was demolished for improvement building.
In January 2019, the North Platform accomplished an identical, however quite extra intense, efficiency through the clearing of the Klinika autonomous middle. This had a particular that means for them, as they began rehearsing right here and likewise performed their first concert events right here. They nonetheless seek advice from it as their tramp settlement.
The title of their debut album Rostli jsme sote from 2020 relies on the music We’re like mud, which culminates in declamations in regards to the supremacy of cash and consumerism over all different values or virtues, which was highlighted, amongst different issues, by the Clinic’s actions.
It’s also no coincidence that the band releases music via the unbiased label Silver Rocket solely on vinyl and provides it digitally solely on the Bandcamp platform or a couple of clips on Youtube. In any other case, it would not help Spotify or different streaming providers that primarily profit their shareholders and the largest pop stars, not smaller artists.
Within the single 16 hooves from the brand new album of the Northern Platform, a choir sings recurrently. | Video: Silver Rocket
Enjoying music through the intervention of the executors within the Clinic may need appeared pointless. But it surely will also be taken as a warning about locations within the metropolis that we’d overlook, regardless that they’ve a particular spirit and that means, which can later be misplaced within the identify of effectivity or building.
In the identical manner, music might help us, for instance, to take a look at the streets crowded with vacationers with completely different eyes – because the older compositions of the band Spálená and Eleven sorts of spices did. Its protagonist is led by Kaprova close to the Outdated City Sq. and a view of a quick meals chain to the purpose of leaping off a bridge.
On this regard, the northern platform continues the custom of underground Czech songwriting, all the way in which again to the Tramps of the First Republic, a few of whom brazenly joined the left and led polemics in regards to the political involvement of their very own subculture.
Turns within the composition Slavske from the debut album, resembling “I can lie within the grass now, however nonetheless with out bugs” or “In an empty forest, wolves do not howl, birds do not take you away” may be learn as capturing the affect of man on nature. “The unique tramping was about discovering a spot the place you are able to do what you need. There are fewer of them within the metropolis,” declared a couple of years in the past the accordionist of the Northern Platform Jan Trnka in an interview for the A2larm web site, that town now not provides “loads of locations the place an individual may be alone or with a bunch and make a hearth”.
The ultimate composition, Tichý údolí, scented with a blues rhythm, acts as a type of invitation to journey elsewhere on the brand new recording. In it, the title of the whole report, Eagle, Bat and Canine, seems as an indication on a chipped wall evoking the previous. However we can’t get to that wall via the noise of civilization, within the music embodied by airplanes. All that is still is to flee into nature and sleep within the quiet valley of the title.
The brand new recording of the Northern Platform resembles the gradual stream of a river in a valley. The temper is already set by the one 16 hoofs, wherein choral singing recurrently booms. Solely in a couple of locations does the music take off like a mountain stream stumbling over stones in a mattress – for instance, within the music Nightscape, paying homage to a flamendre’s journey by prepare and ideas of a cherished one we are able to lose. The opener Black Bushes begins with simply the guitar slipping into disharmony right here and there, earlier than the flute and harmonica are added.
The intrusion of a stomping rhythm snaps an individual out of a potential lull identical to a light socio-critical sting. “It is arduous to consider in a tram full of individuals with out beliefs, it is arduous to face straight within the mud of days when nobody is trying,” the primary refrain of the recording sounds. Varied layers are then shed from the composition till it ends with a single voice exhaling the final phrase of the textual content.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Northern Platform band additionally took half in a live performance in assist of the invaded nation referred to as Vigil for Ukraine. | Video: Draw
The album is enriched with extra such stunning moments, for instance, the layered polyphony within the music Párky. It evokes misunderstanding, distance, alienation between neighbors, which should be overcome. “Do not inform me the way you watch the information, with each phrase you are one step additional, inform me how I performed, the place somebody went, who stood in entrance of the shop,” the primary refrain sounds clear at first, later in a labyrinth of phrases and unstated phrases.
The work with choral singing culminates within the composition Splétej, which the Northern Platform took over from the Canadian group Minor Items, with a closing canon melody evoking folks music. Accordionist Jan Trnka sang the English textual content with an emphasis on sustaining a type of internal flame of hope. The brand new board underneath this fireplace, examined by moisture and rain, provides not less than some type of log.
North Platform: Eagle, Bat and Canine
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