Cassette - deadstock - sealed
London label Infinite Expanse likes to do a lot of its shopping out there in the outer edges of the Czech underground and it's to such arcane interests we must give thanks for uncovering these dead stock copies of a captivating record made in 1999 by husband-wife duo, Irena & Vojtěch Havlovi. While the pair have a dense catalogue reaching back to the early 90s, outside of Jonny Nash's Melody As Truth label who issued a retrospective a few years ago, much of their output has been limited to local territory imprints and micro-labels with little international reach. Distribution and those pesky market forces (and not to mention what it's like for artists to emerge from a post-communist society) must surely be the only reason for their relative obscurity, for this is the kind of folk-derived, experimentally minded modern composition that's long had a foothold in the European underground. My first thought was to Les Disques du Crepuscule's seminal Fruit of the Original Sin compilation, where this would have felt right at home, caught somewhere between the wordless beauty of Wim Mertens and Arthur Russell. Yet this feels distinctly less institutionally avant garde. Recorded live but not obviously so, the entire collection is performed with a rare, instinctive symbiosis, though it's when Irena sings they truly ascend a notch or two, the mysterious folk hymnals communicating a secret understanding that feels tied to an entirely different space and time. In essence, that's what folk is, an expression of specific personal experience, and Jako Motýl Na Tvé Dlani does that in ways that draw spiritual lines of connection between such disparate forces as Svitlana Nianio, Delphine Dora, Morteza Mahjubi or Sarah Davachi.
