Jaroslav Rudiš & U-Bahn: SKY UNDER BERLIN
Jaroslav Rudiš returns with the band U-Bahn after 22 years and republishes his first novel Nebe pod Berlin, after which the entire tour is named.
"This book changed my life. She made me keep writing and wandering through history and the present. I would never have thought that readers would take her on a trip to the German capital, or that a real U-Bahn group would be created. I wrote "The Sky Under Berlin" dazzled by the Berlin underground and its stories. Nowhere else is this changing and fleeting city as interesting as here. At the same time, there is something constant in the noise and movement of trains and people. Only here in the underground is it possible to try to grasp and understand Berlin. At least that's how it seemed to me at the time," Jaroslav Rudiš says about the new edition of the novel The Sky under Berlin and adds: "Years later, I read the book again and slightly edited and fine-tuned it. He threw something out here and there, added something here and there. I feel that there is a certain timelessness in this 'Sky Below Berlin', where it does not grow old.''
In 2002, he won the Jiří Orten Literary Prize for his novel Nebe pod Berlinem, a nomination for the discovery and prose of the year Magnesia Litera 2003, and for the graphic design (by Juraj Horváth) the title of the Most Beautiful Book of the Czech Republic. The book was published in many translations and received a great response, especially in Germany, where it saw several editions. After 22 years since the first edition, the book is published again in a revised form and with a new graphic design with color photos by the Labyrint publishing house.
In 2010, Rudiš read the book in its unabridged form as an audiobook. This is now being re-released by Suprahon, as well as an EP of the same name with original music by the cult literary-punk band U-Bahn. The recording contains three original compositions that Jaroslav Rudiš composed and recorded together with Petr Kružík from the band Priessnitz.
"Music also plays a big role in the book. And so soon after the publication of the novel, Peter and I founded the U-Bahn group, which I write about in the book. We went around the entire republic and half of Germany. We often jumped ahead to the Priessnitz group, where Petr, a great guitarist, played. And where Jaromír Švejdík sang, with whom we created the joint comic Alois Nebel. Everything was so connected. Jaromír and I are also performing in the literary-musical project Kafka Band. But my musical beginnings are precisely U-Bahn and songs like "Ich bin Berlin" or "Gagarin Pop", coming directly from the pages of Nebe pod Berlin," adds Rudiš.
For the new release of the EP, Petr Kružík remastered the tracks and the atmospheric Berlin video for the Gagarin Pop single was created by Jaromír Vondrák alias Clad. "The video is based on photos I took in Berlin during the isolation. The city where I mostly live today was completely empty and I was wandering the streets alone. Loneliness is also the theme of the song, the lyrics of which I wrote more than twenty-two years ago on a cigarette pack in the Berlin subway. Somewhere high above us, strange planets are floating, Gagarin lives on one and Iggy Pop on the other. They are lost in space and cannot return to earth," concludes Jaroslav Rudiš.
https://www.facebook.com/jaroslavrudis
https://www.instagram.com/jaroslavrudis/
https://www.facebook.com/ubahn.band
