Prowling through Slovak Bandcamp vol. 1: Dazzles & Drones

Published July, 2016
by Easterndaze

In autumn 2015, I was working on an article about the Slovak music scene on Bandcamp for contemporary culture magazine ¾ (that issue has plenty of writing on Slovak music). The main method was to scrape the metadata of all releases with Slovakia related geographical tags and map it all out based on labels, volume of releases, genres, and geography. In the beginning of 2016, I slowly started to crawl and prowl through 1600+ releases associated with Slovakia, searching for anything that would spark my interest – from local strains of vaporwave to outsider hip-hop.

I have ended up with 90 tracks, 8+ hours of music and a dilemma how to present them in a meaningful way that would bring visibility to interesting artists flying well under the radar.

Dazzles & Drones is the first mix from the Prowling through Slovak Bandcamp series. What is holding it loosely together is the impressionistic dazzling style of guitar and piano playing intertwined with shimmering drones. Even though they are not part of one scene – take for instance songs by Ondrej Golis and Martin Kubecka – with overtonal evocative guitar plucking style very close to James Blackshaw – and then compare their styles to piano playing of Kurtizan and i am planet and drones of Strom Noir and dinoZoff. By no means am I trying to push these artists stylistically together more than they really are, there are as many differences as similarities between them. In the end, it’s a very loose mix that had its dose of spontaneity in the process of pulling it all together.

Most of the artists are from Slovakia but I have also included a couple of foreign artists released by local labels or those that decided to associate their releases with any part of Slovakia. The Washboard Abs is a typical representative of Z Tapes, Slovak cassette label focused on releasing (American) lo-fi bedroom indie. dinoZoff is a French artist who associates his music beginnings with the city of Nitra or as he says [his] “interest for the musical experiences multiforms was born there”. And the mix ends with a song by “international trio” Uke Brothers Ensemble.

Enjoy the prowl!

Tracklist

Ondrej Golis – A Great Deal of Sadness (2009)

kurtizan – zasvet (2012)

The Washboard Abs – death & taxis (2015)

strom noir – polnoc celý den (2015)

dinoZoff – Чорнобиль (Tchernobyl) 26-4-1986 (2015)

Whithe x Subsets – Memories (2015)

David Kollar – Shine throught the heaven (2013)

strator – alej koukej (2016)

skviry & spoje – 10:50 (2013)

Zelf Bloemen & Jana Surovicová – Slnko a hviezdy / The Sun and stars (2013)