Amerika

Kafka Band Offers Amerika Full of Contradictions

Kafka Band presents its new album called “Amerika”. As a seven-member band with the writer Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99 as frontmen, they got inspired by Franz Kafka’s fragment of the same name. The band has also made a music video for which you need special glasses to get into the virtual reality. Kafka Band is currently touring Germany, where they are going to play at a prestigious international book fair in Leipzig. They will return to Czech stages in May.

The twelve songs on the album “Amerika” offers a significant transformation from the previous album, Zámek (i.e. The Castle). The band made sure that the album wasn’t just a theater record. The band focused on the songs that included a lot more electronics. “Amerika is based on songs we wrote for a theater adaptation in German in Bremen in 2017. We have already released two theater-musical forms of The Castle there. The director of both productions was Alexander Riemenschneider, who also produced Amerika and participated on some of the lyrics. We continued work on the tracks and created some more,” says Jaroslav Rudiš.

The album offers twelve pictures, twelve stops of Karel Rossmann through America

“Kafka Band brings us to the acoustic mirror hall with fragments of rap, pink-floyd guitars, electronic grooves and country chords, and suddenly, as if by magic, we’re in the middle of Kafka’s melancholic Amerika. How’s it possible?” Reiner Stach wrote about the album. Stach is a literary scientist and a leading expert on Franz Kafka. He is also the author of the monumental three-part biography, also published in Czech, that is highly regarded. In order to make the transition to Kafka’s world as intense as possible, Amerika is accompanied by the release of a new music video to the single, People get lost. It is also available in a version for virtual reality glasses. Press Play and go to Amerika!

The whole concept of covering the novel in relation to current events in the world has also strongly influenced the recording and final sound of the album. This is confirmed by the guitarist and producer, Dušan Neuwerth: “Amerika is a contemporary novel, originally called The Missing Person. It is about looking for a place in the world, about human dignity, and about solitude and damnation. All these themes are still up to date and always will be, I think. That’s why we also wanted to make the album musically as contemporary as possible; to make use of all technical possibilities offered to us nowadays and in which we often get lost in.”

Music and Literature

Cooperation between the singer and artist, Jaromír 99, and the writer, Jaroslav Rudiš, has existed for some time and doesn’t only concern music. They’ve created the cult comics, Alois Nebel. It’s adaptation won the European Film Award for Best Animated Film in 2012. “We have always had fun with Jára Rudiš, connecting the seemingly unconnectable, heading even to blind streets,” admits Jaromír 99 and adds how important their present project is. “We did the comic book, theater, film and music together. Kafka Band is probably the pinnacle of our collaboration, in which we try to make use of everything we’ve learnt since we started going for a beer together. But Kafka Band is not just the two of us, of course. It’s been made up by other great musicians, producers and graphic artists.” Although they are now focusing on their band, they are both very busy with other projects. Jaromír 99  has recently released a comic book, Zatím dobrý (Good For Now) about the Mašín brothers. Rudiš is now enjoying success with his first novel, Winterberg’s Last Journey, written in German and nominated for the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Award.