Tracks featured on
Most played tracks
Thanks!
Your suggestion has been successfully submitted.
Tearooms in post-revolution Czechoslovakia symbolised places through which new spiritualities were flowing, and the influx of largely uncharted ways of life closely intertwined with new age, ambient, folk and minimalism. With their minds altered thanks to smuggled records by Fripp & Eno or Steve Reich, this loose network of musicians had begun composing meditative music, using loops and handmade instruments, with a different sensibility. Compared to the boisterous Zappa-adjacent and booze-soaked underground movement, which was led by Plastic People of the Universe and provoked the state authorities, this music was meant instead for tea rooms and spiritual sites like churches or monasteries, as if occupying some place where time flows anticlockwise. Music journalist Pavel Klusák dubbed this 1990s scene a “tearoom alternative”. Experimental folk singer Oldřich Janota, Jaroslav Kořán’s various ensembles like Modrá or Orloj Snivců (The Horologe of Dreamers) or Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi were drawn by the light and composed music that didn’t match the fast pace of newly imported capitalism. Mix created by: Miloš Hroch
ZULI, experimental club producer and VENT co-founder hailing from Cairo hits the NTS airwaves to showcase his club wares: aggressively left-field.
Sign up or log in to MY NTS and get personalised recommendations
Support NTS for timestamps across live channels and the archive
Orchestra JB was the alias of Jimmy Brown, a multi-instrumentalist and DJ who, after releasing a few underground dance hits for indie labels, signed to major EastWest Records and in 1991 released Tambourine Fever, an album of trippy, Ecstasy-fueled “comedown” tracks with nothing too groundbreaking or noteworthy, save the album’s single, “Come Alive.”
“Come Alive” is an earworm, an insistent, hallucinatory yet catchy track with a spoken word/sung female vocal not too different from the music Dot Allison and One Dove would create a couple years later. “Come Alive’s” laconic beat, stream of consciousness vocal and harmonica showed up in another club hit that year, the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds.”
Orchestra JB was the alias of Jimmy Brown, a multi-instrumentalist and DJ who, after releasing a few underground dance hits for indie labels, signed to major EastWest Records and in 1991 released Tambourine Fever, an album of trippy, Ecstasy-fueled “comedown” tracks with nothing too groundbreaking or noteworthy, save the album’s single, “Come Alive.”
“Come Alive” is an earworm, an insistent, hallucinatory yet catchy track with a spoken word/sung female vocal not too different from the music Dot Allison and One Dove would create a couple years later. “Come Alive’s” laconic beat, stream of consciousness vocal and harmonica showed up in another club hit that year, the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds.”
Thanks!
Your suggestion has been successfully submitted.
Thanks!
Your suggestion has been successfully submitted.