Václav Havelka

Václav Havelka is a singer, composer, music manager, producer and activist. For more than twenty years, he has been one of the most prominent figures on the Czech independent music scene. Having dedicated himself to singing, songwriting, and playing the guitar since he was twenty, he performed under the pseudonym selFbrush and, since 2005, also as the frontman of the indie rock band Please the Trees, whose production addresses environmental issues and intergenerational relations. The band has released five albums to date, three of which were recorded in the USA and two of which were chosen by Czech music critics as the best albums of 2012 and 2015 respectively. Please the Trees have performed as the support act on European tours of Mudhoney and Two Gallants, Thurston Moore Group, Robert Plant, Steve Gunn, Kurt Vile, and The Smashing Pumpkins, and performed four American tours of their own in 2010, 2011, 2014 and 2016 respectively. After 17 years with Please the Trees Havelka released his first solo album under his own name featuring a number of international guests. Since 2021, he has been involved in the interdisciplinary project Future Landscapes which uses sound to explore the impact of humans on climate change. This collaboration has so far resulted in the documentary film Neviditelné krajiny(Invisible Landscapes) and an album by the music band fyield. In 2023, the Future Landscapes / fyieldproject toured in the USA, with fyield becoming the first band from the Czech Republic to have performed in a live studio session on the KEXP radio in Seattle. In addition to his own musical projects (Golden Spine, Sonic Herbalism) and a number of current and past collaborations with artists, including Irena & Vojtěch Havel,  Martin Tvrdý, The Ectasy of Saint Theresa, and with his son Šimon in the duo Sun&Dead, Havelka also works as a tour manager of European concert tours, collaborates with a number of music festivals as a producer, and, last but not least, serves as the music programming director at the MeetFactory arts centre in Prague. He has composed music for film and theatre and collaborated with the dance company 420People.