Ultimate Nothing 8CD Box

A Retrospective Eight-Album-Collection of the Work of Oldrich Janota.

This 8CD box set contains recordings from live concerts, jam sessions but also archive recordings from home studios. Seven out of eight albums have never been released and they map Janota’s work from 1982 to the present. Oldrich Janota is an icon of Czech alternative folk music and many of his songs have quite a number of cover versions. The box set aims to map, at least partly, the extensive work of this legend.

Janota has his loyal fans and admirers who have been carefully mapping his work and concerts from the very beginning. This shows the extent of the material from which the editor of the collection, Jaroslav Trnavsky, and Oldrich Janota had to choose. “The current archive of the historical bootlegs, a mixture of studio recordings and Janota’s concerts, has got 120 GB. In layman’s terms, it would take a quarter of a year to listen to it all.“ They add information about what key they used to process the selection for the nine-hour-long set: “to map mainly the recordings so far not released, most of all the solo versions. The set Ultimate Nothing is neither “Best of…” (Where is Savoy Hotel?!), or “Collected Works”. We inclined towards the selection of the best versions from different sources, in a chronological (partly loosely conceived) order.”

Oldrich Janota started to perform in the early 1970’s. Between 1977 and 1979 he was with Jakub Noha and other musicians in the Prague band Pentagram. From 1980 to 1983 he was the major figure of the group Mozart K, for which its unusual instrumentation (guitar, harmonium, mandolin, saxophone, percussion) and Janota’s magical songs belonged to the most remarkable folk-rock formations of its time. From 1983 to 1985 he cooperated with the guitarist Pavel Richter and Lubos Fidler and created with them a very distinctive concept, using mainly minimal music cues. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Janota performed together with Irena and Vojtech Havel (they played viola da gamba) and his approach got very close to new age music.

All recordings went through a thorough cleaning and mastering in the Jámor Studio of Ondrej Jezek. Each CD is packed in a separate digi-pack with all lyrics and Janota’s commentary. The recordings won’t be sold separately. The 8CD set consist of two 4CD box sets.