A moment of silence to celebrate the journey so far and the one up ahead.

In Besední House in Brno, instrumentalists from leading Czech ensembles and symphony orchestras gathered on stage — they held their instruments in their hands, but they didn't play. For an hour and a half, not a single note was heard. Silence alternated with the whirring of the tap, the clinking of glasses, the footsteps of artists moving on the stage. Soft sounds spread like fog through the hall and fed the rich acoustics of the environment, creating spontaneous polyrhythms. Then a gradual increase in noise — sudden waves of applause or laughter that dies down to nothing in an instant. The quiet moments allowed for outside sounds to bleed into the old concert hall where, gradually, the non-performing Philharmonic players merged with the audience. The event, organized by the experimental saxophonist and composer Pavel Zlámal in 2024, was called “306 Beers” and was a joint celebration of the anniversary of the establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 (106 beers) and the birthday of the prominent Czech composer, Bedřich Smetana in 1824 (200 beers).

The unrepeatable event was recorded by the leading field documentarian Tomáš Šenkyřík, struck with powerful emotion at the thought of the magic of the moment, at the certainty that these people will never meet on stage in exactly this composition. “Encounters with certain soundscapes are important. These encounters are full of symbols,” he says. The track captures the uniqueness of the moment, the character of the acoustics of the Besední dům and its reverberation. “This kind of reverberation connects us with our musical ancestors, Leoš Janáček and Antonín Dvořák who both conducted their compositions here”, recalls Šenkyřík. “If we keep our eyes and ears open, we can constantly experience feelings of adventurous discovery.”

As Šenkyřík was formatting the recording of the happening, captured through standard microphones, contact mics, hydrophones, and a parabolic dish, into an album experience, he was feeding the recording through several guitar effects, software granular synthesizer, and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder Still, the duo returned to the spaces of the sacred Besední dům to fill them with Zlámal’s saxophone playing. With the warm brass resounding in the halls, the album found its anchor. “When basic things such as freedom are relativized and distorted in various ways," says Tomáš, “The saxophone is supposed to symbolize that the truth cannot be relativized. The saxophone resounds the past and the present at the same time.”

Following up on to the work Tomáš performed with Manja Ristić on 2024’s “Vstal” (Skupina Records), “306” went from being an audiovisual feast during the performance, through being a generous document of the moment, and ended up being a mirror of the artists’ feelings about the current state of the world. Differently from that album, which was produced fully online, “306” allows Šenkyřík to grasp the physicality of working with another human face-to-face. Together, the duo find the organic connection between the musicality of an excellent saxophonist and the field recordings of a rich soundscape. The anchor and the texture. The center of gravity and the swirling space around it. All in the historic, resonating halls that seek new, courageous endeavours.

Field Recording & Production: Tomáš Šenkyřík
Saxophone: Pavel Zlámal
Mastering: Bartosz Szturgiewicz @ Okla
Cover: Michał Kęskiewicz