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Expecting to fly

Soaring sounds from a '60s Czech folk hero
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By Darrell Jónsson
For The Prague Post
January 16th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Andrtová-Voňková's radical style mirrored her politics.
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Dagmar Andrtová-Voňková

When: Thursday, Jan. 17, at 7:30
Where: Kaštan
Tickets: 120 Kč at the door

Anais Nin once compared the art of writing to skiing down a mountain, and it has often been said that Jimi Hendrix’s astronautical sound owed much to his military service as a parachutist. So it is no surprise to discover that the most visionary artist launched during the Czech Republic’s 1960s folk music movement took her early inspiration from nighttime skiing.
Singer-songwriter Dagmar Andrtová-Voňková finds the connections between action sports and music natural. “While flying through space on skis, your body moves quickly through the ‘extrinsic information field,’ ” she says, while within, the “intrinsic territory of mind” maintains its slower tempo. In this strange discrepancy between the tempo of the outer and inner worlds, Andrtová-Voňková has found fertile artistic territory.
From the time of her 1977 debut single on Supraphon (Holoubek/Chlapci na tom horním konci), the feelings expressed by Andrtová-Voňková’s voice and guitar have become legendary. A large part of her immediate local appeal was that people could relate to her personal artistic impulse, which she says was “reaching for freedom, what else?  When you fully rely upon your inner need to express your honest opinion, the technique of playing the instrument comes to you voluntarily, to assist your need. The technique is not a goal, but a medium.
“Many of my closest friends in the folk music community I belonged to, known as Šafrán, were forced to leave the country after signing Charter 77, as they were considered politically dangerous. I screamed and shouted for them. I scratched the guitar for hope.”
Not only did she literally scratch the guitar — she also pounded on it, caressed it, played with tunings of her own design and developed a unique double violin bow method for fiddling. With an array of electronic effects in the mix, Andrtová-Voňková’s guitar music was at times closer to the Asian-influenced jazz moments of Pharoah Sanders than the Greenwich Village sound that influenced most of her peers.
On top of these “sheets of sound,” Andrtová-Voňková worked up allegorical protest lyrics by borrowing extensively from Carpathian folklore. “I used the same type of hyperbolic shortcuts as my folk song ancestors did,” she says. “I sang about the winter wind whirling through the chimney, about a peasant mother drowning her newborn baby as she could not feed it, about a country gal who jumped down from a church tower to fly, about the eagle who soars the heaven above the mountain peaks all alone. I also wrote several songs about scapegoats. The audience understood all these metaphors, as we were used to looking for messages between the lines.”
Andrtová-Voňková stayed in the country but was stripped of recording opportunities. She spent most of the next nine years working as a janitor while playing private underground concerts. Some respite arrived with her first international performance opportunity in 1986.
“The thawing of the strict police regime crept in during the Gorbachev era, and I was allowed to participate in the huge Roskilde Open Air Festival,” she recalls.
That same year, Andrtová-Voňková finally returned to the studio for her first full-length LP, on the officially approved Czech Panton label. This new exposure drew interest from as far away as Japan, where in the ’90s Andrtová–Voňková performed a series of tours. There she found collaboration with kindred spirits such as Butoh dance master Min Tanaka, Otomo Yoshihide of the Ground Zero Group, the female underground star Phew and the aged mountain recluse sage-poet Nanao Sakaki.
Taking time from her current intensive recording schedule, Andrtová-Voňková was reluctant to break the spell of her creative secrets and offered little information about her upcoming concert and CD. Instead, she turned reflective and said, “When I was young, I sought for the kicks of the wild movement. But, at my present age, I prefer to walk through the charming countryside where I live, so as to watch and contemplate it. Such stillness gives me tremendous feedback in just observing nature. And, last Sunday, I went skating on our frozen pond just for the joy of it.”

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (16/01/2008):

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