Dunaj

Throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century, Dunaj was an integral part of the Czech alternative music scene and even enjoyed a “cult” status. The band was renowned for its unique, unmistakable style, based on repetitions, polyrhythm, original, even prophetic lyrics and the cranky performances of the frontman, Jiří Kolšovský. The group disbanded a year before Kolšovský’s untimely death in 1998, but its remaining members, Vladimír Václavek, Josef Ostřanský and Pavel Koudelka, reunited in 2019 to perform a concert together. Their navigation on the Danube (Dunaj is the Czech name of the river) in the Romanian region Banat was captured by David Butula in his film documentary Dunaj vědomí (The Danumbe of the Mind). The shared chemistry which still unites the three musicians after more than twenty years, the irrepressible desire to play together and the sense that they still have “many things in common” they want to explore, resulted in a series of concerts together with singer Iva Bittová who used to be a regular guest of the band, followed by a reedition of some of the original albums and a release of a “best-of” collection on a double vinyl album. October 2022 saw the release of a long-anticipated new studio album. On this occasion, the band invited guest producers for the first time in their history, Aid Kid and Petr Ostrouchov, to help them create a Dunaj sound for the twenty-first century.