Aiming for ecstasy

When Melody Maker editor Richard Williams speculated in 1970 that, "if Wagner were alive today, he'd work with King Crimson," he may have been jumping the gun. It's more likely that Wagner would have found the Czech band Aku Aku closer to both his musical heritage and home in nearby Saxony.

Formed in the late 1980s in Teplice, a city in north Bohemia where Beethoven once composed, Aku Aku is a regional prog-rock legend, with a Slavic-Germanic sense of drama that's hard to match. As Aku Aku founder/bassist Ludék Zedník once explained to the Czech magazine Rock & Pop, "The Bolsheviks taught us gloom and depression. I never thought about anything jolly."

Such moods didn't keep Aku Aku from gaining a solid regional reputation during the '90s, with tours that jumped across the Czech Republic's borders to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. As the freedoms of the Velvet Revolution took hold, Aku Aku's lyrics and music veered from protest to more mystical themes, fed by the band members' longstanding fascination with fantasy literature.

"We read Tolkien in samizdat [illicit hand-typed publications], but we could only get the first part of The Lord of the Rings," recalls Zedník. "The book fit naturally with our point of view. And we remain faithful to Tolkien's direction and continue to be inspired by things and events around him. The whole Lord of the Rings, and much of Tolkien's work, is about freedom and faith in goodness."

On the 2006 re-release of Aku Aku's KNAK 1992 (Guerilla Records), the band's evolution toward the better characteristics of prog-rock and jazz-rock is clear. Fronted by the classically trained and Jean Luc Ponty-inspired violinist/vocalist Slávek Neuhöfer, Aku Aku gravitated toward the delicate density of King Crimson's Larks' Tongues in Aspic and Starless and Bible Black period. Such comparisons have been hard to shake off, but, with 99 percent of Aku Aku's material being original, the band continues to pursue a distinct goal in both composition and performance.

"To me, one of the basic building blocks of music is the well-known fact that ostinato rhythms and a pace around 120 BPM are considered mystical and bring ecstasy," Zedník says. "And the construction of our melodies has careful gradation, dynamics and harmonics. Our ideal is to unite around these concepts."

Those aspirations work very well within Aku Aku's heavily syncopated sound, as the band demonstrated last month in a performance on their home turf in Louny. On a cold, snowy evening in a small city dotted with Gothic and Baroque architecture, Aku Aku's violin-driven prog-rock was especially fitting to the season and place. Occupying center stage was Neuhöfer, who looked like a giant mountain elf sawing epiphanies on his strings while tossing Czech lyrics into the lilting perpetual-motion mill of the band's rhythm section and lead guitar.

Prog-rock fans in Prague were disappointed in January, when Aku Aku's opening set for a Plastic People of the Universe concert at Akropolis was cancelled. As that would have been Aku Aku's first appearance here since 1997, it was a highly anticipated event. Fortunately, Unijazz's Kaštan club is offering another opportunity next week for local concert-goers to hear one of the Czech Republic's most unique roadside musical attractions.

No doubt there will be moments of what Zedník calls "rawness and ferocity." But Aku Aku's fire is well-tempered with an approach best described by Zedník when he says, "We are interested mainly in creation, and creation brings joy."

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at
features@praguepost.com