Výklenkové Rezonancie: The modern sound of Petržalka

Published July, 2015
by Easterndaze

“A BMW is waiting for me in front of the house, calm down…” “I don’t give a fuck about the world, or you…”  “I took half a crystal last night, and today a whole spiral”

Existential drone courtesy of Výklenkové Reznancie is the perfect backdrop to the brutalist socialist realist legacy – one of the largest concrete block estates in Central Europe called Petržalka. Its mildly post-apocalyptic look typical for Eastern European socialist housing is somehow made more forlorn and dystopian in Bratislava. Most of the people in the city reside here, in the 90s, the area became a haven for heroin. It’s not surprising then, that this is the milieu that spawned and inspired the project Výklenkové Rezoznancie, a duo firmly involved in Bratislava’s burgeoning underground music scene – composed of organisers of the fledgling techno party Counterpoint (which draws on the city’s rich, albeit slightly moribund, techno legacy) and producers (Jacques Kustod, to name one of them). “The musical retardation courtesy of the Counterpoint crew members represents the postmodern sound of Petržalka using a single Korg synth, fucked up guitar, effects and noisy mike. This live recording is far from perfection, but both of us see some sort of deranged magic in it, and the cover is quite nice,” proclaims the self-deprecating duo.

The sonics itself is disturbing and disquieting and abrasive, as you would expect from something born in Petržalka. A hypnotising drone with doom laden atmospherics and lyrics, a sort of inane diary of their everyday life there in an Irvine Welsh kind of way. And last but not least, the cover – putting a UR logo on a bw photo is not even a postmodern piss take in this case, since both of them are fans, but maybe it’s some sort of subliminal aesthetic camaraderie – as The Wire asked once, could Bratislava be the new Detroit?