Richard Dawson is nothing short of a force of nature. The English singer and guitarist’s work is deeply rooted in British folk, but as he quips, his approach to the genre is akin to Beefheart’s treatment of blues: there is a sympathy for the genre, but also a lot of deconstruction and destruction, which force out unsuspected connections.
At the same time, Dawson is still a songwriter; it is just that his songs are full of pauses, detours and twists. At the core of his music, there is an eccentric voice that could as well be carried through time from the Yorkshire hills circa 1500.
Dawson’s distinctive boisterous, almost bleating delivery can be both buffoonish and poignant, and the same goes for his lyrics, which are at turns playful and dark, often working with a poetics of literal descriptions. Yet despite his unconventional expression and unwavering artistic integrity, his work remains accessible to a fairly wide audience, as evidenced by the fact that ever since 2014’s Nothing Important he has been one of the most highly regarded musicians in British media from The Wire to The Guardian, whether the praise was for the quasi-medieval ballads of Peasant (2017) or the sombre pop of 2020.
His appearances outside the UK are few and far between, which makes his Czech premiere even more remarkable.
Within the Bratislava scene, Bolka (Matúš Kobolka) is something of a cult figure. His early split release (2012) with Jonáš Gruska on Gruska’s label Lom showed a musician combining electroacoustic tradition (or “microtonal glitches”) with a sense of bizarre humour.
The seemingly shapeless ebb and flow of his compositions made surprising sense; his concerts featured a Wii game controller and homemade software instruments. There was both the knowledge of a sonology graduate from The Hague and the playfulness of a theatre enthusiast. His orange cap became an offline meme. This year’s Smutné stropy (Mappa), however, takes it a few levels further. Bolka’s full-length debut feels like an explosion in a toy store.
Piled over each other are autotune trap, emotional songs, fragments of Slovak folk music, radio smash hits and club bangers. It’s all wrapped up in a kind of anti-sound design that transcends and subverts the digital hyperrealism of the seminal label Orange Milk in favour of a messy, decidedly Eastern European sound. Bolka proudly dismantles notions of what is proper, functional and tasteful, and makes you dance, laugh and meditate, often at the same time.
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