Cassette
Another set of recordings hauled from the depths of nowhere by Infinite Expanse, a burgeoning tape label showing a very healthy appetitie for marginal (sometimes straight up unknown) music. Richter Band were a Czech outfit let by namesake guitarist Pavel Richter, a prolific musician with a famed penchant for political dissidence. Evidence of that dissidence is entirely absent on Richter Band's debut outing, a collection of recordings steeped in the European ambient music tradition and concerned with the same escapist/transcendental approaches that underscored new age composition. Infinite Expanse fans will note the prescence of Jaroslav Kořán, another Czech artist with an interest in 'quiet' music, and here he dovetails with Richter and another player, Štěpán Pečírka, to great hypnotic effect, subtle guitar phrases intersecting with almost Gamelan type percussion, apparently the result of a homemade instrument called the 'fidlerophone', a name you'd struggle to take seriously before hearing what it refers to. We'll call this 'ambient' in the absence of any better term to describe it, though i'd really rather not - the playing is intuitive and richly textured in a way that seems to suit improvised music approaches as well as reminding me of some of the post/ethno-industrial work of Brunnen and the Korm Plastics empire. You get the sense of people playing together and responding to one another, rather than one of faceless ethereal drift. You can easily get lost in Smetana, transporative as it is, but Richter and his assembled band's playing is real heart and soul spiritually-inclined expression that's by no means anonymous.
