1. Traband left its style called “dechno“ (brass sound) and it calls its new sound “home music“. What the fans should imagine it is?
The name “home music“ is not so much the definition of a style as rather the expression of opposition to what is called today the “world music“. All the music, which patches together carelessly everything it comes across, folk songs from anywhere, in the best way from the Balkans, adds to it the functioning rhythmic or something else, non-homogeneous, without internal relations and connections has been getting on my nerves recently… I realize that we contributed to this properly in the past and at one moment I started to find it quite disgusting. I love, when the things are authentic, when the inner matters can be felt from them. That is why we returned to the home music making, to home resources and traditions. It is like looking into your own wallet and saying to yourself: Well, so how much do I have?
2. How do the fans take the present form of the style at the concerts?
Variously. Some of them are enthusiastic and some of them are not. However we counted it in. We will always play as we like and not as we are required to. But the new listeners come and also the ones, who would have not gone to our concert before, find their way to our music.
3. Harmonium, quite unusual concert instrument in the present repertoire of the bands, became the inseparable part of Traband, how did you find your way to it? And why is it just the harmonium to be the productive instrument of the present Traband?
I love this instrument, its sound, its breath. Wooden case, in which the metal reeds are made vibrating by means of the leather bellows, which blow the air inside. Wood from tree, metal from earth, leather from animal, air – the whole universe is contained in the harmonium.
4. How much did Ondřej Ježek, at whom you recorded in Jámor studio, affect, as the producer, the songs, the sound?
This is our first record, which we did not produce by ourselves, but we invited Ondřej to choose the songs with us and give them the total sound. And I think that Ondřej made it excellently. He has the rare quality that for the period of working on the record he becomes the proper member of a band, he is emphatic, he can guess the intentions, he is able to think through the ideas, the musicians come with. In this sense he strongly affected the record.
5. The record contains the music references to the “Czech brass music“, what is your relation to it?
There are many references to the Czech and Moravian folk songs, not only the brass music, on the record. And you can find also the references to the folk church singing and children’s rhymes and so on. I simply have it encoded in me, whether I want or not.
6. Your last songs contain also hip hop elements, do you listen to hip hop? What speaks to you most as for hip hop?
I listen to hip hop, but I am rather critical. I like the possibilities of message and expression, which it offers. There I looking for what I look for in folk songs and all other thing: authenticity, personal view, poetic features, originality. Unfortunately, ninety percent of our hip hop production is rotten. People, who have the great ego and great need to say something, but they don’t know what. But there are also the exceptions, for example WWW. But it is probably not hip hop, it is rather an industrial Vlasta Třešňák.
7. The distinct part of the album is formed by lyrics. Did all of them arise during the year, when Traband was in garage or are there also older songs?
Most of the songs arose during the one-year break, however there are also some older songs there, a ten-year song, for example. I compose the songs continuously, we play some of them immediately and some of them are waiting for their time and the other will remain probably only on the paper.
8. It seems to me that Hyjé! album contained the lyrics reflecting more the environment and present time, but “Přítel člověka“ includes more inward lyrics, why?
This was the intention. To stop, calm down, look into your own heart and look at the world more generally, I would say from the bird’s eye view.
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