Vaclav Havelka Musician, songwriter and activist.

He started making music at the end of the 1990s, first as a singer and later also as a guitar player. His core project is the band Please The Trees, which he founded in 2005 together with members of post-rockers Some Other Place based in the South Bohemian city of Tabor. In 2015, Please The Trees released their fourth album Carp, in which they presented a new, rawer sound. They recorded the album in Detroit during a tour of the USA. In addition to nominations for the two music awards Vinyl and Andel, it won the 2015 APOLLO music critics’ award for the best album of the year. The previous, third album A Forest Affair, recorded in San Francisco, was awarded the Andel genre award for the best alternative record of 2012. Please The Trees are one of the few bands that have managed to maintain a high bar since the release of their debut in 2007, four times having toured a string of alternative scenes in the U.S., tirelessly pampering their audience with strong concerts and being socially engaged (the campaign Let's Talk about Old Age and cooperation with the Elpida seniors' choir, the benefit Concerts for the Sumava Wilderness, cooperation with the dance group 420PEOPLE, planting trees at the locations of their performances, and the recent project on the environment Future Landscapes -www.futurelandscapes.cz/en/future-landscapes

Havelka also has under his belt several albums recorded and released in the Czech Republic and abroad, as well as performances all over the world. He has collaborated with musicians such as John Grant, Jan P. Muchow and Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, Martin Tvrdý, The Havels, Slim Cessna, David Boulter, Will Oldham, James Toth, Thor Harris, Marisa Anderson, Ben Chasny, Rebecca Vera, Jay Munly, Mike Watt, Paul Leary, Pall Jenkins, William Tyler, Mr. Thorarensen and others. He is the author of music for several theater performances at the Stavovske Theater, the Dejvicke Theater and the Theater On the Rails, NoD theater and Ungelt theater in Prague. He is the author of music for films in collaboration with Jan P. Muchow (Yuma, Theory of the Tiger), the film Places by Radim Špaček and Ondřej Štindl in collaboration with David Boulter from the English Tindersticks, and the film November by the American director Garry Griffin, in collaboration with Martin Tvrdý (formerly Bonus), with whom he also worked on the Tvrdý/Havelka musical project.

During the Covid years, he published a series of video recordings on YouTube and shared on social networks under the title Distant Sessions for the Covid-19 Times. Another of his core projects is the group Sun+Dead, which he formed with his now fifteen-yearold son Šimon, who has been playing drums since the age of three. In Spring 2024 the duo releases a debut EP featuring legends of American independent music scene Mike Watt, Slim Cessna, Paul Leary, Thor Harris and Chris Koltay. In the last few years, he has also been engaged in experimental work. The Exhale Extender album, which was released on audiocassette in the spring of 2019, is another installation in the collections mapping this dimension of his creativity, after the previous
EP City Fox on Acid (2016). He loosely follows this work in 2024 with live music composed for the dance performance Pulps, directed by Simona Machovičová, who is also its main protagonist. In 2021–2023,

Havelka realized a multi-genre and interdisciplinary project called Future Landscapes

www.futurelandscapes.cz/en/future-landscapes

which examines the human influence on climate change through sound. The main output is a music album by the fyield project, where Havelka is a music composer, manager and booking agent, and which he created in collaboration with Kryštof Kříček and Icelander Pan Thorarensen.

In November 2023, the project completed a
month-long tour of the USA during which the fyield group performed as part of the prestigious Live Studio Sessions series of the KEXP radio station in Seattle. He is currently working on a solo album, the first after a seventeen-year hiatus since the last album under the moniker selFbrush.

The Havels Irena Havlová and Vojtěch Havel,
known in the world as The Havels, are a married couple who have been a musical duo for over 40 years and have toured 37 countries with their unique music. The music on cello, viola da gamba and piano is enriched by singing and other musical instruments such as Tibetan bowls, bells, harmoniums, gongs, silver cups and stones to create a unique sound that allows you to connect with the depths of the soul and experience rapture as well as deep connection and feeling of inner peace and freedom. Although they have played in front of audiences of several thousand people, they prefer to share their music in intimate settings, where they have the opportunity to establish a close connection with their audience. Their music has been described as alternative, global, new acoustic, improvised, experimental, minimalist or meditative. Regardless of how we classify the genre, their musical expression is always anchored in authentic immediacy and deep humility. The story of Vojtěch and Irena Havel grows out of the atmosphere of the turn of the eighties and nineties in Prague. In the 1980s, the streets and public life were soaked in gray and tired hopelessness. Late totalitarianism prevailed, no one believed in the regime anymore.
At the same time, however, a lively life in the underground developed: from postpunk through protest songs to contemporary classical music, overlapping with theatre and happenings. People from this multigenre scene met frequently and stuck together, irrespective of their working methods. At that time, an ensemble that formally belonged to classical music began to perform in Prague, quickly acquiring young independent musicians. The ensemble, called Capella Antiqua
e Moderna, was rooted in humility and tradition: they performed old Renaissance music. But the sound, tuning and performances in the echoes of the old churches inspired the musicians to develop their own music: the new grew from the old. Vojtěch and Irena belonged to the core of the group: from here grew their alliance, their playing together as a duo. When the Berlin Wall was demolished, fresh freedom and manic activity flooded Czechoslovakia. Isolation from the rest of the world was over. In these years when people learned to do business and enjoyed greater consumption, the music of Irena and Vojtěch pulsed as inconspicuously, quietly and patiently as before. It spanned this period of historical change with its own plan: focusing on what does not alter with a change in state regime, namely the dimensions and depth of inner freedom. In the Havels' music you can easily hear a repetitive pulse, a music of recurring motifs inspired by minimalism. It is significant that Vojtěch and Irena combine the free inspiration of the minimalists (as well as traditional music of Asia and Africa) with a deeply Central European instrument: the baroque viola da gamba. Like the ghosts of the past architecturally evident in Prague at every turn, the history of this instrument echoes through the music of the Havel’s. Through their music its spirit now communicates with people in the present day, occupying a different role than it did 400 years ago. When Vojtěch and Irena started to travel to India repeatedly, yet another unique element entered their style. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the gestures of their work stand with wide and surprising range, from fragile post-Satie piano to loud ritualistic percussions and gongs. Their work has an unspecified, open spirituality that appeals at the level of care, compassion and focused paths to essence. A strong personal charge balances the universal here. It is indeed impossible to ignore the closeness and unpretentious intimacy of both partners on stage: I think that part of the audience returns to Vojtěch and Irena year after year because it is music of secrets and music of safety. The couple, whose life and music are like Möbius' strip, have had many important collaborators in over 35 years. They have participated in the birth of Czech video art (Radek Pilař), accompanied existential contemporary dance (Eva Černá and Karel Vaněk). A documentary about the couple was made by the celebrated independent filmmaker Vincent Moon. Bryce Dessner's composition Little Blue Something is a tribute to the music of the Prague duo and uses its motifs: it was recorded by the Kronos Quartet on the album Aheym. Musicians from The National, as well as Sufjan Stevens, are among the long-time fans of Irena and Vojtěch Havel. Their music is open and still receiving new stimuli. But even so, its germ could hardly have grown elsewhere than in "Praga magica", a city where the past permeates the present and the demons of today struggle with those who have lived here for centuries. Information on The Havels is based on this article by Pavel Klusak:

leguesswho.com/news/lgw22-havels-introduction

We also recommend this article by Andy Beta:

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/irena-and-vojtech-havlovi-melodies-in-the-sand