Prší v prázdném domě

Jakub Čermák's (Cermaque) poetic rap, driven by Pavel Kielberger's captivating beats, offers a fierce battle between desire and scepticism, curiosity and collapse, tenderness and fatigue on his new album.

     Prší v prázdném domě. (i.e. It's Raining In An Empty House). That's the name of the first collaborative album of singer-songwriter and rapper Jakub Čermák (Cermaque) and producer and experimenter Pavel Kielberger. Boom and pathos mix with intimacy and inner openness. Hanging gardens of varied electronics are connected by cascades of vividly rolling verses. And hovering above it all is the shimmering of guitar surfaces and a scent of intense and impatient searching.

     "In the summer of 2022, Pavel and I had our first rehearsal to revive songs from my never-played rap album Lament for its stage presentation. A year and a few dozen shows later, I was already rapping vocals for 12 brand new, this time collaborative, songs at Aluna Studio in Údrnice," says Cermaque.

     Even though the album is dominated by vivid rap lyrics, served with the appropriate energetic vehemence, it would be inaccurate to classify the album as hip-hop in terms of genre.

     "Certain moments of the album are not far from classic rap with a hip-hop base, but the vast majority of the album was more influenced by music that has less to do with the genre (progressive rock or abstract/non-dance electronic music). The inspirations are not literal, but rather conceptual or purely technical," explains Kielberger, giving a glimpse into his creative method:

     "I see electronic music as an inspiring clash of the worlds of technology and imagination. Electronic composition teaches me to free myself from thinking purely in terms of notes, tones and chords, and to perceive rather the colours of sounds, their characters."

     Does the record have a theme? "I have no idea," Čermák admits. "If my pre-pandemic album Lament was a kind of religious service for 'the world waiting for a restart', one could perhaps think of its musical successor as an early post-apocalyptic record. In a changed world, it's as if I no longer want to wallow so much in doubts about the direction of civilization and sift through more and more details of our collective failure. The self-summoning of the muses throws me more to my roots, to rethinking basic experiences, feelings, terms and values. To the articulation and defence of principles that, I firmly believe, will outlast all crises: such as tenderness, reciprocity, kindness, forgiveness, but perhaps also desire, hunger, and curiosity, which I fiercely try to defend against scepticism, environmental collapse, and my own weariness."

     Čermák's generation-younger bandmate and creative phantom of the rising Pilsen scene, Pavel Kielberger, took care of the mixing of the whole album in addition to the production and composition.

     The album was then mastered in the JáMor studio by the band's friend and oracle Ondřej Ježek. As with Cermaque: Lament, the artwork on the front cover was done by Julie Ježková.

     All the musical basis of the songs were recorded in the kitchen of an apartment in Karlín during the first half of 2023, and all the vocals and guitars were recorded during one week in July in the Aluna studio.