Střed Světa – Oboustranně dvoudílný (ZamZam, 2015)

Published May, 2015
by Easterndaze

When I first heard Střed Světa – after his friend sent us his demos – I was on a train embarking on another monotonous ride through picturesque environs of the Czech and Slovak landscapes – from valleys and plains of Southern Slovakia to the green hills, woods, flickers of sunshine and small industrial towns of the Czech Republic, passing by like flickers of visual hallucination. It was probably sometime in 2011. I vividly remember listening to his twisted, liquid electronics, a lysergic, very organic melange of his own recontextualisations – lot of his work is a “rework” of his own older material, amassed over ten years of bedroom experimentation. The skittering narrative provided the perfect backdrop for the scattered visual stimuli arising and disappearing in the very same moment. It was like a revelation. He had been making this music for more than ten years some twenty miles away from both me and my Easterndaze/Baba Vanga partner in crime gnd, and we didn’t have the slightest clue…

Elements of IDM are obvious, but mashed and twisted in an idiosyncratic way – slap dash.

Two years have passed since we released his self-titled debut album on Baba Vanga. As his live sets have proven, his music has been increasingly leaning towards rhythm and repetition, one simply feels compelled to move and groove, to loose oneself during the journey. Introversion has been replaced by a need for communion – a wholesomeness of a forest, where animals, insects, trees and greens coexist to create an ecosystem that communicates in its own language, but does so harmoniously and happily.

Střed Světa, similarly to his sonic collages, also makes visual ones and does the cover art for his own records – and always hits the nail. The Dada-esque track titles remain. It is as if they were the secret language, a key to get to the other side of the mirror.