NTS Guide to: Czech & Slovak Esoteric Underground

Spirituality was persecuted under communism in Czechoslovakia, but a loose scene of explorers sought yoga literature and sacred Hindu or Buddhist texts, either smuggled from abroad or found through the banned scripts of local interwar occultists. Interest in ragas and om chanting intersected, as in America, with minimalism, but also, weirdly, with the Czech folk movement around the unofficial group Šafrán and old Baroque music in the 1970s. Folk experimentalists Dagmar Voňková and Oldřich Janota; groups like Relaxace, focusing on interpretations of Indian classical music; or the married couple Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi, became yoga-practising vegetarians and performed in monasteries and then, in the 1990s after the revolution, in newly formed tearooms across the country. Today, a new generation of explorers around the Slovakian label mappa, or Czech Stoned to Death Records, tap into sensitivities of the esoteric underground and similarly seek spaces for attentive listening. This mix, which is a follow-up to Tearoom Ambient, bridges the past and present of the esoteric underground. Selected by Miloš Hroch