My Heart Soars Like a Hawk

They soar high and they head for being even higher. With their debut album “My Heart Soars Like a Hawk”, electro country rock Nylon Jail took off on hawk wings and rose above the ridges of ordinary worries and petty wars. Their emotional songs do not hurtle forward at a frantic pop pace, instead, they show their way, directions and tempo of soaring up to heavens and swooping headlong back to the ground. The encounter of David Sylvian and Depeche Mode, Johnny Cash and Nine Inch Nails throbs throughout the whole album. Your heart can therefore soar like a hawk and float away on the wings of Nylon Jail.

Nylon Jail. A cowboy sitting in a cell, the sheriff rocking on his chair, hat over the eyes. We’re all familiar with this scene. Yet here, a slight buzzing sound of the force field bars fills the whole room. Wild West and sci-fi. Not really Cowboys and Aliens, more like the Knights of Cydonia video by Muse. John Wayne covered in tinfoil, laser repeating rifles, a holographic singer lying on the piano.

Nylon Jail managed a lot in the last two years. They played at big festivals, released a demo, a single and they toured with 3D projections. The debut album is the icing on the cake of this busy time. In the hands of Nylon Jail, slow-paced melodies easily escalate into an eclectic-dreamy-noise Berlin Wall which is immediately demolished by a soft ballad. Supervised by Ondřej Ježek, Nylon Jail recorded all of the above in JáMor Studio and placed it on the album called My Heart Soars Like a Hawk. Roman Vičík says: “It is a quote by an Indian chief from the Little Big Man film. Things we didn’t even dare to hope for happened in the last six months. We recorded the album with Ondřej Ježek and had a whale of a time doing so. Relaxed atmosphere. Our hearts did some badass soaring back there.  They actually carried on soaring the whole summer, since we were playing at festivals all the way from Ostrava to Banat, Romania. So may your hearts also soar while listening to the album.” Nylon Jail have been precisely working on the overall impression considering all the elements from sound to the visual aspect. The album is accompanied by images and graphics based on hawk feathers. Ondřej Hruška, the author of the visual concept says: “The hawk presents a symbol of liberty, freedom and fragile ecosystems people keep disturbing. The hawk is the lord of the deep forests which we find so inspiring. In our conception, a hawk feather is not just a prop. It is primarily a solid structure, a world of rich details open to the interpretation, a meditative spot. The digital “distortion” emerged during the scanning process and the specific look is the result of controlled coincidence rather than a mere intention.”

Nylon Jail became more widely known during the Devil Is a Cowboy Tour 2013 which was held in cinemas. While playing on the stage, the band was accompanied by a fully fledged 3D projection. The only act of its kind in the music world except for Kraftwerk projections. Václav Hruška, the guitar player, elaborates on the motivation of the band: “Nylon Jail. A nylon cage. Being trapped by this overtechnologized time. Everything is plastic, everything has a touchscreen, everything is glowing. That’s why we’re coming back – back to country music, if you want. An acoustic guitar, a banjo. Still, we do take something from the modern time to the woods with us. A synthesizer… We even have a macbook on the stage. Yet, we’re no campfire obsessed hikers or the Amish. We just gotta escape from that jail and take refuge in the woods from time to time.”