2024-04-18 12:53:11
Jan P. Muchow calls it hibernation. He didn’t even expect that his music group Ecstasy of Saint Theresa would wake up from it after eight years. The last time she performed publicly and rarely was in 2016 in Prague’s Arša on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Radio 1, through which she established herself after the Velvet Revolution.
This summer, however, she will perform at several music festivals, and solo concerts await her in Prague and Brno in the fall. The last time she completed so many in one season was decades ago. “Hopefully, we’ll also play one or two new songs,” Muchow plans, adding that there should be more of them at the autumn events.
The group, which carries elements of the cultural myth of the 90s of the last century, is constantly in the limelight. It was founded 34 years ago by twenty-somethings who conquered London for a while with their music, after which they broke up on the threshold of great international opportunities.
At that time, the guitar and “noise” Ecstasy of Saint Theresa was introduced to the Western audience by the famous BBC radio DJ John Peel and also by the British label Go!Discs, with whom they signed a contract for five – ultimately mostly unreleased – albums.
Musically and in terms of composition, it was a different formation than today’s, which uses samplers and electronics more. It consists of Jan P. Muchow as the sole successor of the original project, singer Kateřina Winterová and guest players.
Do we still exist?
Muchow and Winter were awakened from hibernation by the children who once introduced them to it. Parental duties did not allow the artist, who was busy writing film or television music and producing albums, and Winterová, an actress engaged in the National Theater drama and busy preparing the television magazine Herbář, to devote themselves to Ecstasy. At the same time, before the concert in Arš, Jan P. Muchow mentioned that they will release a new album by the end of 2016. They didn’t issue.
Jan P. Muchow prefers to be in the dark in the background during Ecstasy of Saint Theresa concerts. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
Only last year they briefly met again. They performed with rappers PSH, Matěj Ruppert, Lenka Dusilová and Vojtěch Dyk at a private concert or rather an exclusive gathering at a Prague elementary school, where the children of the named musicians go as well as the sons of Jan P. Muchow and Kateřina Winterová. Ecstasy won her over – the students’ parents expressed their joy at hearing her again, Muchow confirms.
“Our sons are classmates in the same class. So, during the silence of Ecstasy, Kateřina and I saw each other quite often thanks to the children. And from time to time we asked ourselves, do we still exist? And we agreed that we do exist, we just don’t really focus on the group ,” Muchow explains what happened to Ecstasy between the evening in Arš and the gathering that the school celebrated 130 years of existence.
When they began to prepare for her, dal Muchow on the social network X a photo from the exam. She took it as bait. Festival dramaturgs caught on to her. Suddenly they started calling with offers. “However, we have never been a festival band. We only played once at Colors of Ostrava and once at Pohoda in Trenčín,” explains the introverted musician, who claims that playing in front of people is suffering for him, so he tries to be on stage at least in the dark in backround.
But now they have already arranged several big events for the summer. They will play at Rock for People, Colors of Ostrava, Pop Messe in Brno, Besed u bigbít in Tasov or at the festival of the music magazine Full Moon.
Muchow and Winter will perform a medley of songs from their three albums together. In Dust 3 was released in 1999, Slowthinking three years later and Watching Black in 2006. That is, for 18 years, Ecstasy has not come out with a new song. Muchow would like to correct this with at least a few new items.
The repertoire from the first records that Ecstasy published until 1994 in the original line-up without Winter – they were called Pigment, Susurrate, Fluidtrance Centauri recorded as part of the BBC Peel Sessions program and Free-D (Original Soundtrack) – they do not intend to play. “We are in a new incarnation,” he alludes to the twenty-five-year collaboration with Winterová. “It would be disrespectful to the original and to the current lineup,” he adds.
In addition, old compositions from the early 90s could not be heard in their former form, because at that time someone robbed the band’s rehearsal room and stole the effects that determined its sound. The original line-up has performed together only once since the breakup, in an encore concert for Radio 1 in Arš.
The ballad For That Moment was contributed by The Ecstasy Of Saint Theresa in 2000 to the soundtrack of the film The Loners. | Video: Warner Music
It’s not album time
When Muchow mentioned another record in 2016, he didn’t have new songs ready yet, just ideas in the works. “I still have the EOST 2016 folder on my computer, but we just didn’t manage to make anything meaningful out of it at the time,” he explains, adding that he leaves the ideas in the folder. “I won’t go back to them. I don’t remember ever reaching into the drawer. I don’t do that, it’s pointless. It’s always paid off for me, and it’s faster and works better when I make the music again,” he explains and plans to so far they will only release a single or an EP, because “it’s not album time”.
“We can make the first single, if it works, we’ll record another one, and maybe then an album will be made from it,” he explains, adding that people hardly listen to LPs anymore, they’re more used to playing a random selection of songs, for example on the Spotify platform.
Jan P. Muchow in 2015 with the Czech Lion for the soundtrack to the film Beautiful. | Photo: Lukáš Bíba
From Muchow, who as a producer, author or musician is behind a plethora of albums – recently, for example, the title Čierna labuť, biela vrana by singer Richard Müller, previously behind the records of Barbora Poláková -, it sounds almost resigned. However, he observes the trend not only among young people, but also among peers. “They’re not in the mood for albums, they don’t concentrate, they get bored after the fifth song. Few albums hold their attention,” he argues.
He doesn’t listen to them as much as he used to. “I’m in the studio all day in the noise of the music I’m working on. And when I come home, it’s almost the last thought that I would listen to something new and unfamiliar. I’ll put on the most serious music or spoken word so I don’t hear any more noise. It’s a certain sound hygiene. So I play the album only on a day when I’m not required as a composer or when I’m not filming, I’m not producing,” he says.
And so, for him, music is more often just information. He approaches it like a newspaper report that you read quickly in the morning. “I have now worked on three series for Nova, for which I also selected music. And since the plot was set in the environment of the young generation, we wanted to use fresh compositions. That’s why, for example, I go through the New Music Daily playlist on Apple Music every day to know what is new,” he adds.
When something excites him while “flipping” through music, it causes him even more euphoria after everything he’s heard in his life and when a lot of new songs remind him of something he’s already recorded.
The music video for the song I’m (Not Really) Optimistic by The Ecstasy Of Saint Theresa was directed by Tomáš Luňák. | Video: EMI
Once Upon a Time in the West
In his work for Ecstasy, Muchow also does not want to repeat what the band’s listeners already know. That’s why each band’s album is different. As if the style of Ecstasy consisted in the conviction of having no style. “They are recordings in the sense of the here and now. I don’t like performers who always sound the same, so I don’t want to do that,” he explains.
Going against listener expectations is heretical and unmarketable in popular music as measured by chart success, as Ecstasy experienced in 1990s Britain. This is exactly how Ecstasy behaved in London at that time – after a successful guitar recording for the Peel Sessions, they changed their style and came up with a more electronic, ambient Free-D album.
Ecstasy of Saint Theresa in the original lineup, from left Jan P. Muchow, Irna Libowitz and Petr Wegner, top Jan Gregar. | Photo: David Pajer
When she brought it to Go!Discs, the label was shocked. “But they actually liked the progress, even though they said it was completely rubbish commercially. They said to us: ‘You’ve sold a lot of records in the US. All English bands dream of success in America, and she wants guitars from you, but you won’t give them to her. .’ But they didn’t try to talk us into making Peele two,” recalls Muchow.
Go!Discs was still a so-called independent label at the time, so it supported experiments. That changed when it was bought by the multinational record company PolyGram, which saw strong commercial potential. “It was at the time when Go!Discs had a mega-successful year – they released Gabrielle, who went to number one in the UK, and Paul Weller, formerly of The Jam, who also went to number one in England. But then Go! Discs were released by Portishead, whose massive global success no one expected. They were number one in England, in Australia, in Italy and so on,” recalls Muchow.
Only five people worked at Go!Discs at the time and they did not have time to manage the massive success of their artists. It was saved by 51 percent of the shares sold to PolyGram. But within a year and a day, only the receptionist remained of the original five people. When Muchow, based on the original contract with Go!Discs, took his recordings to the new employees, they rejected them, wanting different music. The London dream faded and the musician, who settled in the British capital for a while, headed back to Prague.
At the same time, he could get a once-in-a-lifetime chance. The American composer Philip Glass, a famous minimalist, author of progressive operas and film scores, heard the Free-D record and called Go!Discs to say that he liked the record very much and would like to collaborate with Ecstasy. Muchow was in Prague for a long time, where he was shooting the film Whisper, in which he acted and wrote music for it. An employee of the publishing house told him about Glass’s interest in the Czech capital. When he later returned to London to contact Glass through her, Go!Discs had already been completely absorbed by PolyGram, and the “Glass connection” was no longer working there. She disappeared somewhere in America, where she came from.
Muchow didn’t even try to find a contact for Philip Glass. “I didn’t think of that. I’m terribly unambitious. I would wait for him to call me,” she says almost thirty years after the missed opportunity.
Jan P. Muchow and Kateřina Winterová in 2007, shortly after the release of their latest album, Watching Black. | Photo: Viktor Chlad / Lidové noviny / Profimedia.cz
Short term goals
It almost seems as if Jan P. Muchow, the sought-after composer of music for about 50 films and TV series, made his mark through no fault of his own.
“Someone always approached me and wanted something from me. Even Richard Müller, when he was preparing the last record. I don’t even have my own website and it’s a mistake, of course. In a way, I admire ambitious people because ambition gives them direction and a goal,” he reflects. He says he only has short-term goals determined by the projects he is working on.
One of the closest could be the reissue of Ecstasy’s three albums from Muchow’s collaboration with Winter. “We thought we’d do vinyl reissues to come back because these albums never came out as classic LPs,” he plans. On the other hand, vinyls from the first period of Ecstasy exist, but they cannot be bought normally and tend to be rare. For example, LP Susurrate from 1992 is currently being offered by one seller on the website Aukro.cz for ten thousand crowns.
“Relatively often, interested parties from abroad contact us saying they would like to reissue Pigment, Susurrate and Peela. We have the rights to all the old Ecstasy recordings. Maybe we’ll give the license to someone, maybe we’ll release them ourselves, but we haven’t decided yet,” admits Muchow.
“The original tapes are stored by Petr Wegner, but we don’t even know what their condition is,” he names the drummer of the first line-up of Ecstasy, in which guitarist Jan Gregar also played and Irna Libowitz sang. “We are still in contact, we meet from time to time. But it is nonsense for Ecstasy to perform in two formations and confuse people. The band is functional in a different composition,” Jan P. Muchow excludes the hope that the original Ecstasy would ever return of Saint Theresa, as the former encore of the concert in Arš might have indicated. Then he hesitates and adds, “But we’ll see.”