XION: Championing the hidden experimental scene of Czechia
Published July, 2025
by Freddie Hudson
The first time I came to Prague I got taken to Noise Kitchen, a small synthesiser shop in the Vršovice neighbourhood. Between tapping away on some of the first hardware electronic instruments I’d ever played on and checking tapes and records, a little 3D-printed puzzle caught my eye, which became my introduction to the XION label.
By the end of the year I was working in Noise Kitchen, packing boxes, managing the record and tape collection, writing the odd thing. The first big task I was given was to do a mini-writeup of every LP, CD and tape for our e-shop. The majority of our catalogue was from local Czech and Slovak labels, and many didn’t write their press texts in a language foreign to them and their friends and customers, or bother at all.
That task had me buried to my neck in local music from labels like Stoned To Death and Genot Centre, and I found myself opening several old release pages from XION. Writing up Stoned to Death properly would be a mammoth undertaking, with such a massive catalogue of diverse material; while every last release is engaging and special in some way, Genot Centre closed up shop, and there’s an opportunity here to talk about a living, breathing record label. It took me longer to get a grip on what XION was investigating, musically, and I’m still not confident with my assessment, but XION offers a look at the underground music scene in Prague in a way that no other label here does.
Hierarchical distinctions between record labels is typically facile; they are often operated by an utterly different ethos to one another. Labels like Gin&Platonic serve more specific functions, casting their net a little wider than Czechia and Slovakia to catch music that fits their vision of music. XION represents a different autonomous arm of the underground scene in Czechia, motivated to highlight the music made by relatively unknown persons, even within the relatively small city, and its relatively-sized music scene.
The label then seems to show a function as a curational endeavour, an archive of sorts that, in the infinite shifting nebulae of the internet, preserves a fraction of Prague’s quite genuinely underground music community. XION’s operator, Marek (aka iob), runs a frugal ship, but often still makes the effort to print an “iconic and symbolic” run of tapes or CDs, which is as valuable to a (new) musician as the chance to perform at a release event. They are simultaneously the first and final rung on the ladder of releasing music; a first achievable goal, or the dream itself.
“Community” is a term often weaponised, or at least ill-used, but here we have something genuine. What XION shows in its releases is the tip of an iceberg, a loose thread: finding and following the artists on its roster will lead a listener into the largely hidden experimental ambient scene of Czechia, which is not heard very frequently in brick-and-mortar establishments, but in fields and forests as part of ultra-DIY events; looking at the label’s event lineups will introduce you to more of Czechia’s best-kept secrets, artists like Shakali, Martin Kuška, or Řehole label/festival founder Timmi; knowing more of the people and groups that keep the same orbit, XION’s name seems to crop up more and more frequently as a credit, co-releasing music with other labels in order to make a dream physical edition happen.
The label harvests music from unknown musicians curled up on beanbags at the old ambient festival stomping ground near Mělník, stargazing in the glade of the necessarily secret treehouse party, or serving handmade food to people on a Tuesday night in Punctum. What makes a “XION release”, from a musical perspective, is made unclear by the breadth of the music offered, but the roster includes some of Czechia’s experimental music scene’s busiest, most essential hands. Many are immigrants, from as near as Slovakia or as far as Mexico, and the country’s capital would have a far poorer music scene if it weren’t for their work oiling the cogs.
Without labels like XION, operated on an egoless basis in service of the local scene, a similar thing could be said. The bread-and-butter labels of any local scene are not often found served at the “high tables”, and writeups about their endeavours are scarce; these selected recent releases offer a quite narrow perspective through XION’s labour of love, but are an induction for people interested in exploring Prague’s lesser-known “ambient” music scene, and give some recognition to those who ask for none.
Sky To Speak – Lost & found: unreleased and unfinished recordings
When I walked into Noise Kitchen in September 2020, it was Matěj Kotouček behind the counter. A consummate duetist and live improvisational musician, Kotouček creates wondrous ambient music as Thistle, with Finnish musician Shakali, and performs solo as Loops of Decay. ‘Lost & Found…’ is a collection of early works that show a range of stylistics, but typically evoking an introspection similar to the legendary 90’s ambient-dub heroes framed, pride of place, on Kranky’s wall. ‘Trapped’, in particular, has the hallmark of Kotouček’s later work within Thistle, ascendant in will yet tethered by some emotional ballast, or connection to the earth.
mvd0ae – Onán Convulso
A multimedia artist who moved from Mexico to study at one of Prague’s arts colleges, mvd0ae crafts a singular, puredata-esque mash of sound quite rarely heard in Prague, except by invitation: frenetic arrhythmia devolves as it coughs up full-throated, guttural whirrs that only flirt with sense, that cannot hold a consistent thought for more than a second. The miniature ‘qiratomu’ lurches drunkenly into the barrel-chested ‘coupdegrace’, a three-minute unstoppable force that repeatedly meets you, an immovable object, with anticipated side-effects including thoughtlessness, headbanging, screwface, etcetera.
Euphoria Echoes of Inotai
A negative exposure of the brief and staccato compositions by Mvd0ae, Time Tomb is a release that captures the bizarrest spirits found on the record label in a bottle, shakes to mix, and pours out into a tall, thin glass. Euphoria Echoes of Inotai’s evasive offering sees creative sampling techniques wielded as an industrial-scale grinder, unsettling shrouds of sounds forming backdrops in developmental stages, like a wheezing console rendering an early game on a haunted CRT screen. There’s a snide challenge, almost, subliminally spoken in the record’s most intense moments — “how much can you take?” — that is rewarded by beautiful yet disconcerting pieces, ‘Echo Bay Motel’ or ‘Void Flowers’.
Myst K. – Vibes
If I had to pick a release that might best show the kind of music playing in far-off fields by riverbanks in 2021, this (or Stanislav Abraham’s release in a similar vein, ‘Forces’) might be a good pick. It’s (deceptively) simple electronic ambient/listening music, unpretentious, and it instantly invokes the many memories of semi-slumbering, hazed by ambient music, in a fogged, dark room, or amongst the light chatter of Petrohradská’s summer outdoor concerts. There’s still a fervent interest here in this sort of durational and transcendent ambient performance, even as interest grows and tastes shift toward louder and more performance-based musical theatre, and it’s in spaces like Punctum where Prague can sometimes see the likes of David Toop or Sugai Ken; Myst K. might be the supporting act, or piloting the mixing desk, or simply there.
únava materiálu – 2:2
New únava materiálu releases come few and far between, with the predecessor to this short EP coming out in 2019. It’s forgivable; the artist is a busy and key component of Radio Punctum, a beacon for underground artists across the region (and an essential component, in turn, of the broader music community). ‘2:2’ features just two new original productions — both of which read like Actress being simultaneously interviewed by Terre Thaemlitz and a vaporwave sample expert — and remixes from Macronoise and Nina Pixel that stand tall as psychedelic, dub-percussive experimental weapons first reminding of Count Ossie, then Ossia, and finally Vatican Shadow.
Ba:zel – We
Ba:zel are artist couple Daniel Vlček and his wife Ewelina (who also makes music as Ai Fen). As XION’s recent-most project, ‘We’ has received supportive remixes from Czech and Slovak musicians such as Wrong Dome and Ancestral Vision, but the original record displays strength enough through an almost bewildering compilation of musical expressions, often within single tracks. There’s a ghost note of something, perhaps a kind of small-scene naivety, that sits quite in contradiction to the rather masterful production; it’s not as glossy as Aïsha Devi, but it tastes similar in the mouth, and it’s a good place to leave you, reader, to journey deeper on your own.
Text: Freddie Hudson
Photo: Adriána Vančová / @Adra_Studio_ (https://www.instagram.com/adra_studio_/)
This article is brought to you as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthening the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de.
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