I’m writing this on 11th September 2002, and somehow the subdued, hazy atmosphere of this CD, the ominous and dark undercurrents, and some of the texts, like THIS CITY, fit in with the strange emotions I probably share with others today; CNN on in the other room with memorial services on Ground Zero stirring up my own memories of the unfathomable sight on live TV last year, when reality merged with covers of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Watchtower or Awake, displaying visions of Armageddon, God’s mighty war on Babylon the Great, the symbol of all the evil of humankind… and I was wondering when I saw those unbelievable television transmissions, if this actually was God’s foot coming down as he marched up to that great war… Those were eerie moments…
Now, of course much worse things have happened, like the U.S. bombings of Iraq during the Gulf War, or, much worse even; the U.S. genocide in Vietnam, when millions of completely regular, normal, everyday people like you and I were slaughtered by our fine, Midwest, down home boys in their B 52s… [let us never forget!] but WTC 9-11 was so… theatrical, symbolic… which is why we feel like we do about this act… while we may tend to forget those much worse acts of the brave and the free… (in no way what so ever do I mean to downplay what happened on 11th September 2001; these were also regular, normal everyday people, and you and I could have been there too, caught in the whirlwind of rage…) … and Petr Dolák Samojsky’s music makes me think all these hard thoughts…

I’m usually suspicious of the amassment of instruments and collaborators that Samojsky meticulously accounts for in the booklet, because this sheer mass of sound sources would substantiate a heavy, messy, over-worked result – but I had no need for those suspicions, for the composer handles the sound with a delicate hand, achieving a fastidious and discriminating web of audio, on a range from the transparent and ascetic to the tight and forceful, but never jammed, messy; always very fluent, like water in a canal or starlight through interstellar space. He only utilizes exactly what he needs at any given time, at any given score point.

The composer is a minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Greeley, Colorado, but he originates in Plzen of the Czech Republic. He came to the U.S. in 1995 to further his theological studies. He received his Doctor of Ministry from Chicago Theological Seminary for his project of applying the expressive arts therapies in ministry.

I first encountered Petr on a compilation CD – or rather project CD – from the CT Collective, titled Locations Volume 1, with sound scenes from around the globe.
This is what I wrote about him then (his own presentation of his piece first:

And Sonoloco's comment:

At the outset of IT WAS LATE there is really no way to tell where things are headed. It begins like a nice, homely guitar tune, though pretty soon a darker aspect of homeliness arrives in thudding bass hits, until, a minute or so into the piece, the coziness is exchanged for a sweeping stillness, like smoke from an accident floating in layers in the air. A slow and sparse gong strengthens the feeling of danger spreading like rings on water.
Since no one is credited with the recitation on track 1, I suppose the voice belongs to the composer himself. The text catches a certain moment of uncertainty, looking hard at it, and no actual conclusion of the situation is given. It’s just a moment of looking up, waiting to decide something, the magazine on your knee, the doorbell ringing.
The soaring quality of sound from mid section towards the end is highly ear catching, interesting, darkly beautiful.

VISIT conveys a peculiar, laconic state of mind. The recitation starts immediately, on a layer of a simple but somewhat threatening melodic line, approaching and passing like a set of musical staircases accommodating only three big steps each.
The voice begins at a normal pitch, in a greeting from an arriving stranger:

If I were to compare this text to texts I keep on the hard drive of my mind, names like Gertrude Stein (as recited by Petr Kotik and the S.E.M. Ensemble on MANY MANY WOMEN) or Robert Ashley (IMPROVEMENT or YELLOW MAN WITH HEART WITH WINGS) pop up. The detached tone of voice is one of the properties these all have in common, plus that laconic feeling of a certain dandyism… something slightly deteriorated or perverted…

As the text of VISIT continues, the tenant who receives the visitor speaks, in a deep, electronically down-pitched voice, which sort of rumbles out of lungs two yards deep, passing deep waters on the way:

The brass section at the end growls and howls like any Coltrane or Shepp at The Village Vanguard, inducing conflicting, contradicting pictures flickering past on the inside of my eyelids. This music makes me feel really strange, like in a dream, out of control. I feel I can’t foresee at all what is about to happen, or whether it is dangerous or simply… fun!

WOLF-CHILD starts like an apprehensive moment of cautiousness under the trees in some meadow, in a repeated little figure in the guitar, and some tingling, gleaming sounds spraying down like diamonds in the sunshine. As the voice kicks in – the composer himself – I get reminded again of people like Robert Ashley and a few other hypnotic-laconic mind-talkers. A typewriter – the old kind! – adds a percussive office feeling to the music, as it slowly produces a lettrist poem typed so hard that the letters open little cracks for the light to seep through…

LAST NIGHT at first appears like some violent gush from the workshop of The Too Much Too Soon Orchestra or something else from the defunct label Radium – but a female voice takes care of all that an sweeps down the stairs in a dressing gown and hair flowing round her shoulders; Jennie Mizrahi. The tune is very short, but during its cut-short duration it manages to travel from that violent surge into a softness that sounds almost like the Velvet Underground; Nico and her set in gone-by Big Apple days, when they were building the WTC, and I used to hang out at Max’s Kansas City on Park Avenue…
The text is t he story of a strange metamorphosis, like in the story by Kafka when that man turned into a beetle, but here the woman turns into a robot:

The hurdy-gurdy adds its magic of old days of Brittany and its rambling troubadours to this very strange tune.

This CD is filled with glimpses of a strange mood, a strange phase of life, a peculiar state of mind, as if the composer was eavesdropping on leftover dreams in the forgotten orchard of an insane asylum. There is a kind of restfulness inside this purplish anxiety, as if, at some stage, a lot of time has passed, and what’s left inside this music is sketches of ruins of long-since decayed minds…

Some of this texts are eerie in themselves, though delivered in a contradicting softness, or a sense of assured comfort right in the ravaging destruction, like in EXPERIMENTS, which reminds me of my best friend Lasse Kjellstrom, who set himself on fire in 1995 and turned into a black skeleton inside a heap of ashes:

The text is conveyed in that blurry, deep, watery voice I described above: strange, yes… strange… but scarily appealing in its strangeness.
The music is elastic but dense here, saxophones growling in curling solos on the backdrop of rumbling and thudding layers of dark timbres…

Above I named one certain piece on the CD, which especially brought up the feelings of 11th September 2001, even though the essence of the whole CD harbors that strange sense of imminent catastrophe, lurking there inside the darkness of the music. It has to do with the layers of winding, curling, meandering sounds that are sort of breathed more than played, sort of just appearing out of the depths. The text of this piece, THIS CITY, goes:

An absolutely unexplainable thing about this tune is that it sounds very much like a song on a Swedish LP from the mid-80s with the poems of poet Thomas Tidholm, which even has a similar sentiment and even talks about telephones! This is a kind of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy improbability…

The Jewish song and dance number at the end of track 13 (which for some reason is mentioned in the booklet with a Spanish translation of the title…) reminds me of periods I spent at Israeli kibbutzes in the 1960s and 70s, but it also contours the current tragedy of hate and war in the Middle East – so this CD, probably both unwillingly and unknowingly to me wakes up discomforting emotions of our world today, where so much is so intensely disjointed, out of whack, dark. Simultaneously, in a hypnotic, weird way, the feeling of this CD takes all that hate and all those dark hues and plays them without fear, in a laconic expression of, perhaps, the Bardo Thödol realization of the millions of lives we all are to travel…

On track 14 there are musical characteristics present which move me into flowing, soaring emotions of the 1960s, Dana Phillipsen’s Nico vocals (yes, she too!) and the tabla descending me on some Charles Lloyd Love-In in 1967 San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park…

The last track, MONOLOGUE OF THE FLY PRINCE; a perfect picture of contemporary man, painted in cruel, clear-sighted colors; a disdainful portrait of contemporary man, glued to a screen, to a computer, existing only at the interface of mind and technology; so… greetings from technopoly, old boy!

When nobody notices a newspaper is blown down a New York City lane by a warm gust of wind… carrying the smell of French fries and urine… and energies of many lives gush down the avenues…