Reality

Kolektivní Halucinace Offers a Reflection of the Present On Their Album Reality. They Took What They Whispered and Turned It Into An Album.

The trio, Kolektivní Halucinace (i.e. The Collective Hallucination), releases an authentic album about the labyrinth of the present. The third album from these nu-folk alternatives named, Reality, deals with the scenery of these special times. The band hunts in a wide range of music, from acoustic ballads through ambient moods to experimental electronics, thanks to which their songs hit a man like an arrow.

Kolektivní Halucinace recorded songs about the present, in which there is no shared reality, but only a series of bubbles separated by a high wall of misunderstanding. "It's like a situation when you knock curiously on a closed door, it opens slightly and you hear strange, scary sounds through the crack, but there is nothing to see, there is darkness behind the door. What do you do? Close the door slowly, turn around and tiptoe back. Even the mere question of 'what's behind the door' is so disturbing that you don't even want to ask it," says the singer and guitarist Jakub Mühlfeit on one of the topics in the recording.

All ten songs on the album are built on a strong melody and classic songwriting. At the same time, the band garnished the songs with great lyrics, whose sound coat changes from the first to the last track, from acoustic ballads through to ambient moods to experimental electronics. Kolektivní Halucinace has created a shot from each song that is aimed directly at the chamber, the lyrics touch on a wide range of topics, including a unique focus on social issues; such as in the song Siréna, on a historical event during the miners' strike in Kladno in 1889, or the loneliness, isolation and misunderstanding of the modern world in the song about the aging pensioner Šarlota Žofie. "It's our Eleanor Rigby who doesn't understand that her world of five-years and all the madness of the 20th century is gone, that we already have another madness," adds guitarist and keyboardist Jaroslav Habrda with a smile. In the song Realita, the band looks deep into the new kind of loneliness and sings: “Bloudím, ale ať hodí kamenem, kdo nebloudí, kdo se nebojí, kdo všechno ví." (i.e. “I go astray; but let him throw a stone: he that is not astray, he that feareth not, who knoweth all things.”)

Drummer Tomáš Příkaský says: “Currently, Mickey Mouse, the Dalai Lama, Breivik, Donald Trump, Batman, Greta, Osama bin Laden, etc. are standing side by side, and when one is not oriented in context, they can all go hand in hand as a good smiling bunch." Compared to the previous album Kosti (i.e. Bones), there is a clear difference in sound on first listening. The MicroKorg synthesizer gets a lot of space. The acoustic is intertwined with the electronic and thanks to the sensitive ear of the producer Tomáš Neuwerth, it supports the lyrics. Jakub Mühlfeit explains: “We didn’t want to repeat the sound of the album Kosti. The world has changed, we are elsewhere, so we just put our ears to the ground and listened ... " The final impression of the album Reality can be the feeling that we live in a turning point, which won’t forgive our hesitation. "We hear dogs, we see walls, we feel cold, and here comes the fear. And then we don't see evil, we don't hear evil, we don't feel evil. But we know," the band says in the song Šeptají. After the album is over, the listener is deprived of the illusion that the future is rosy. However, from the first song, hope shines through the record, that “The dawn is approaching.” In the meantime, in the moment before dawn, let's listen together to what this extraordinary band has heard not only in the depths of the Earth.