PLEASE THE TREES debut album LION PRAYER is OUT NOW at Absent Hour Records!!
YOU CAN ORDER THE RECORD through / ALBUM MUZETE OBJEDNAVAT pres: vac@selfbrush.com
The band is presently working on their second album to be released in 2009.
All the members of Please the Trees were born in the Czech Republic, but when they take the stage some concertgoers may be surprised to find their melodic sounds have little to do with Prague...
It might be because bandleader and songwriter Vaclav Havelka has always taken inspiration from the outside. Not only his songwriting, but every aspect of Havelka's production, touring and artistic direction reflects a careful distancing from the pack. Emerging on the Prague scene in 2004 as singer-songwriter project selFbrush, he navigated an odd, compelling mix of alt-country and eclectic lo-fi in recordings like 2006’s Three Names (released on Havelka..s own Absent Hour Records).
Havelka's identification with the geographic frontiers of rock is as much by circumstance as by choice. Born in Pardubice, east Bohemia, he spent much of his childhood, in his own words, “living in the woods." The woods in question are those surrounding the mountain resorts of north Bohemia, where his parents made a career as traveling hotel workers. Because of this semi-nomadic past, Havelka's diverse musical tastes owe more to rural post offices than to anything broadcast from the Prague-centered media: his formative years of trading mixtapes by mail left him with a colorful and complex musical background. Initially drawn into music by the early 90s grunge movement, his rural mixtape odysseys soon expanded his horizons in directions as varied as folk, country, analog electronics
and post-rock.
Explaining his taste for musical roaming, Havelka says, "In Prague, it's hard to get fresh air. When Joanna Newsome or CocoRosie plays in Prague, it's presented like the newest thing, but the whole free-folk scene is a 5-year-old movement. With the internet today, though, it is all there for the digging and I'm happy to dig for new music, even going to Germany or elswhere in Europe to see shows. But what is the inspiration for young bands here? It's London and MTV, as if England is the center of the musical universe. It is in many ways the center, but you also have scenes in Australia and New Zealand, and just beyond London there is Manchester, Bristol and Ireland. I felt always the closest to the american alternative scene."
Two hours south of Prague lies the small town of Tabor, where Havelka's current band mates formed a group called Some Other Place in 2003. Their 2004 debut album To be continued... was released internationally on Free Dimension Records. Stripping down the grandeur of '90s rock into minimalist dynamics and textures, Some Other Place remains one of the country's more distinctive and enjoyable stage acts. In fact, it's a mystery why they haven't gained more local or even global attention.
Havelka is the sort of person more likely to have a Woody Guthrie biography tucked into his knapsack than a stack of Tortoise CDs, so it was a surprise to some when he teamed up with an experimental spin-off from Tabor's predominately hardcore-influenced scene. The connection between selFbrush and Some Other Place, Havelka says by way of explanation, is "more personal and spiritual than anything else."
Whatever the chemistry between these two seemingly disparate spirits, both onstage and on their 2007 debut CD Lion Prayer (on Absent Hour Records) the results are timely. Their sound summons the spirits of everything from the expressionism of Germany's Popol Vuh and Scotland's Mogwai to the experimental 60s folk epics that American artists like Ron Elliot, Neil Young and Jack Nitzsche dabbled in. That Please the Trees is benefiting creatively from what at first seems an odd coupling grows increasingly apparent on the group's newest material, which ventures even further off the beaten track.
Please the Trees' atmospherics may evoke something of the drama former Bob Dylan producer Daniel Lanois mastered in his work with U2 and Belladonna, but Havelka and his band mates are far from being Dylan folk-rock acolytes. Rather, their dedication to originality is reminiscent of what Dylan once said to The Los Angeles Times' Robert Hilburn: "You can't just copy somebody."
Niklas Hegfalk je písničkář ze Švédska. Náhoudou projíždí Prahou, přes web si domluvil koncert v Chapeau, přes web si vypučil kytaru. Jeho zvuk je inspirovanej americkou alt-country scénou: Bonnie Prince Billy, Damien Jurado a Magnolia Electric co. Doma ve Švédsku hraje s kapelou The Sanctuary Seekers, v neděli v Jakubský si vystačí s kytarou a hlasem /asi tak: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyWyam1PtfU /. Předskočí mu pražský lo-fi slowcore Lopsided, jinak člen Hissing Fauna. Po konci koncertu bude pro zájemce večer v klubu pokračovat pražskym hip-hopem Neplatná Identita.
Ahoj ahoj! Ako sa na MájSpejsu sluší a patrí: Díky za add!;) Teším sa na ďalšiu hudbu, ktorou nás oblažíte. Super, že sa zase ukážete v Brne. Hodně zdaru!
