Šénau - CD

This CD contains eleven songs that form eleven stops on a journey between the past and what remains of it. Petr Linhart’s album Šénau travels through a landscape where memories mingle with fog, childhood diaries become indecipherable ciphers and ghostly trains pass each other on silver rails. Linhart writes about places that have disappeared and people who are still here, whether we want them to be or not: Sudeten Diana bathing in a pond during a storm, Marie receiving poems from the other side of Facebook, Oldřich Janota standing outside a church while everyone says goodbye to him inside, and a signalman in a Brno park directing the movement of panting trains, not worth waking. The album’s title refers to Teplice’s Šanov, or Schönau, a beautiful town from which the first chords, the first golden string instruments from East Germany and the first sense that all of this would one day amount to something emerged. Petr Linhart is joined in the studio by his regular collaborators Josef Štěpánek, Jan Steinsdörfer and Jaromír Honzák. Štěpánek’s arrangements take their final form during the recording itself, created collectively through dialogue among everyone involved. These are three musicians who know when to play and when to leave space for silence. Šénau is an album about nostalgia, but it is not a nostalgic album: it is too clear-eyed to lie and too kind to judge. The release received financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic. The tracks are Dávný déšť, Marie na staré sociální síti, Mlha a luna, Nepoznávám, Nostalgie, Šénau, Silencio, Tohle není requiem, Vysoký les, Výhybna Husovice and Cosplay.