Vojtěch Havel, the influential Czech cellist who performed together with his spouse as Irena & Vojtěch Havels, has died, his file 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 attributable to lead in to extra dates behind this 12 months’s 4 Arms LP. Vojtěch Havel was 62 years previous.
Irena & Vojtěch Havels made acoustic ambient music that drew from American minimalism, European early music, and Jap philosophies, the Czech author Pavel Klusák notes in an obituary. They emerged from what was then Czechoslovakia, within the Eighties, as a part of the Capella Antiqua e Moderna mission. “Within the large echo of Prague’s gothic and baroque temples,” Klusák writes, “the minimal music of the Havels flew and smashed in opposition to the partitions in a big instrumentation with trombone, contrabass, flute, organ, strings, voices.”
On a visit to Czechoslovakia within the late Eighties, Bryce Dessner’s sister heard the couple enjoying on the road and purchased their file Little Blue Nothing. When Dessner fashioned the pre-National band Clogs, the album grew to become “one among our favourite information 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 file many extra albums and accumulate snowballing worldwide acclaim, together with an invitation from Sufjan Stevens to the Ohio pageant MusicNow. Numerous compilations—akin to 2021’s Melodies in the Sand, collected by Jonny Nash for the ambient label Melody as Truth—reframed their classics for brand spanking new followers, earlier than this 12 months’s 4 Arms, 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 appreciate that we arrived on Earth with a serene thoughts. Really we weren’t fascinated about all the pieces on this planet and relaxation. We didn’t have the standard each day needs folks have normally.” Vojtěch Havel provides, “After we really feel that the area and other people play together with us, it is probably the most stunning second. It’s like disappearing.”
