Music of Environmentalism on a Drying Planet with Pavel Klusák

This presentation will be in Czech language

The renowned Czech music publicist Pavel Klusák will visit A4 with a lecture and music programme entitled “Becoming an Ocean, Becoming a Desert. The music of environmentalism on a drying planet.”

How can musicians and sound artists respond to an era of climate crisis and a warming planet? This composite program presents music that notes the state of the Earth, the Anthropocene, and climate change. Only today can songs be created about the four degrees of atmospheric warming that separates us from the extinction of one-sixth of all species.

A substantial part of the programme is devoted to music and sound art based on fascinating, high-quality field recordings of the real world. Chris Watson and Sir David Attenborough presented the earth-shaking sound of the world’s seas in a special sound collage at the start of the Glastonbury Festival. Jana Winderen sonically maps the vibrant and significant liminal zone between the frozen Arctic massif and the open ocean: after all, the phytoplankton present in the sea produces half of the Earth’s oxygen.

Here, musicians act as those who not only draw attention to the need for change, but also actively think about how to talk about a disrupted world. As New York-based multimedia artist Laurie Anderson says, “The story of extinction is fascinating, but in the end there will be no one to tell it to.” Still, the programme has energising potential: there are so many people who are not passive towards the planet, how about being inspired by them?

Pavel Klusák (1969)

A music publicist from an artistic family, he graduated from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Bohemia and from DAMU in screenwriting. He consistently reflects on contemporary music, especially its independent currents in the conditions of the dominance of streaming platforms (What’s New in Music, 2018). In the past, he worked for the magazines Týden, Respekt and the Orientation supplement of Lidové noviny, but now his texts are published mainly by aktualne.cz and Deník N. He has also worked as a music dramaturge for the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival. His research interest in the intertwining of pop culture with the totalitarian regime was capitalized, for example, in his series for Czech Radio (Passion and Betrayal, Strange Show Business). He is the author of the encyclopaedias 101 Greatest Pop Music Albums (2006) and Inside the Banana (2020). He also dedicated the screenplay of the film mystification The Invention of Beauty (1994) and the podcast Gott’ák (since 2021) to the Gott cult of personality. He mapped the qualitative counterpoint of contemporary musical endeavours in the film documentary Music by Zdeněk Liška (2017).

Dear visitors,

The leadership of the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic is taking steps that are destroying Slovak culture! Their power interventions and changes in laws threaten our functioning as well as freedom and diversity of art. We protest against this course! The cultural centers associated in the Anténa network call on you, our audience, not to stay indifferent. We call on you to follow current events, visit our cultural spaces and discuss.

Stay with us and let’s fight together for free culture.

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council and Bratislava City Foundation.