Dunaj: A Legend in the Fléda Club

3 January 2019, 1:00
Dunaj: A Legend in the Fléda Club

After twenty years the group Dunaj is returning to the concert stage. The legendary representatives of alternative music will be performing in the line-up of Vladimír Václavek, Josef Ostřanský and Pavel Koudelka. 

The dark tones of the group, which at its beginnings drew on big-beat, minimalism and punk, are returning to the 90s, to the time of the release of their third normal disc, Dudlay. The first phase of the rebirth of Dunaj took place back in 2015, when Josef Ostřanský and Vladimír Václavek met at the project Dunaj Wave. Together with the drummer Michaela Antalová they recorded the album Jednou, in which they returned to all the ordinary discs of the second Dunaj period (1992–1998): Rosol(1991), Dudlay (1993), Dunaj IV. (1994), Pustit musíš (1995) and La La Lai (1996). At concerts she then alternated with Dano Šoltis (Vertigo, MaBaSo and minus123minut). The vocal parts of the prematurely deceased Jirka Kolšovský are now taken by all members of the group.

In 2018 David Butula came up with the documentary project Dunaj vědomí (Danube Awareness), which helped to revive and the long-held dream of the group of traveling the Danube from its source to its delta. The future documentary should be among other things “completing a story broken by an untimely death, the revelation of a secret, reconciliation. It should be a metaphor for the story of Dunaj and in a certain sense also the escorting of the lost singer Kolšovský to the other bank.” The voyage along the Danube really took place thanks to crowdfunding and culminated in a concert by the group at the cult festival Banát, which symbolically took place exactly twenty years after the death of Jiří Kolšovský (17/8/2018). The trio recovered the chemistry which had earlier linked them, recovered their spark and decided to renew their activities.

The group Dunaj was founded in 1986 and since that time it has gone through a plethora of excellent musicians. Above all these were Jirka Kolšovský, frontman and face of Dunaj with his unmistakeable brassy voice, Pavel Fajt and Iva Bittová, Pavel Richter, Zdeněk Plachý and Václav Bartoš. Each of them separately and all together made musical history and alongside the renaissance figure of Petr Váša, the playwright Martin Dohnal, the painter Vladimír Kokoli and the poet Karel David they became key figures in Brno’s independent scene.

Musical minimalism and the magical imagination of texts with respect for nature in the context of the freshly charged freedom and the emerging consumer society of the '90s was something quite extraordinary. The compositions of Dunaj were deliberately built on unconventional complex melodies which often avoided the standard formal elements of pop music such as a 4/4 metre or a chorus. These were replaced by the urgent repetitiveness and perfect instrumental interplay provided by the strongly reduced raw sound of the drums of Pavel Koudelka. The irreplaceable poetry of Dunaj was created by the lyrics of Vladimír Kokoli, Karel David, Pavel Fajt and Vladimír Václavek.

The concert will take place on 17 January 2019 at 8 p.m. in the Fléda club.

Dunaj/ Photo from  group FB

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