Vojtěch Havel, the influential Czech cellist who performed together with his spouse as Irena & Vojtěch Havels, has died, his report label Animal Music confirms. His loss of life of coronary heart failure, on October 21, adopted a latest tour of the Faroe Islands, which had been as a result of lead in to extra dates behind this 12 months’s 4 Fingers LP. Vojtěch Havel was 62 years previous.
Irena & Vojtěch Havels made acoustic ambient music that drew from American minimalism, European early music, and Japanese philosophies, the Czech author Pavel Klusák notes in an obituary. They emerged from what was then Czechoslovakia, within the Nineteen Eighties, as a part of the Capella Antiqua e Moderna mission. “Within the huge echo of Prague’s gothic and baroque temples,” Klusák writes, “the minimal music of the Havels flew and smashed towards the partitions in a big instrumentation with trombone, contrabass, flute, organ, strings, voices.”
On a visit to Czechoslovakia within the late Nineteen Eighties, Bryce Dessner’s sister heard the couple enjoying on the road and acquired their report Little Blue Nothing. When Dessner shaped the pre-Nationwide band Clogs, the album turned “considered one of our favourite data of all time,” he informed Pitchfork in 2006. “Minimal and haunting.” Dessner tracked them all the way down to carry out with Clogs on a U.S. tour, later composing a tribute within the type of the string quartet Little Blue One thing, which interpolated among the duo’s themes.
As Irena & Vojtěch Havels, the couple went on to report many extra albums and accumulate snowballing worldwide acclaim, together with an invitation from Sufjan Stevens to the Ohio pageant MusicNow. Numerous compilations—reminiscent of 2021’s Melodies within the Sand, collected by Jonny Nash for the ambient label Melody as Fact—reframed their classics for brand new followers, earlier than this 12 months’s 4 Fingers, their first album of latest materials in 14 years.
In Little Blue Nothing, Vincent Moon’s documentary on the couple, Irena Havlová says, “It took us years to comprehend that we arrived on Earth with a serene thoughts. Truly we weren’t taken with every thing on this planet and relaxation. We didn’t have the same old every day wishes individuals have on the whole.” Vojtěch Havel provides, “Once we really feel that the house and folks play together with us, it is probably the most stunning second. It’s like disappearing.”
