A beautiful ritual: Prague artists are stoking the flames of the vinyl revival

Klez Brandar has been living in Prague for nearly 10 years, a decade of prolific artistic creation during which he has dabbled in many projects, always on the move and seeking new inspiration.

A skateboarding enthusiast who designs his own brand of wheels, Loukoum Skateboards, the 39-year-old Frenchman from Brittany moonlights as: an actor – with minor roles in Czech and international productions; a writer – with a novel on the way; and a photographer, including his beautiful black-and-white series of street-photography ‘Bydlíte tady na Žižkově?’ now exhibited at the Boudoir – U Sta rán cafe in Vinohrady.

But it’s in making music that he finds the most joy and most satisfying creative release to his ever-bubbling artistic mind. In addition to a host of singles, Klez has already released three albums (Solitania, 2015; Rivage, 2020; Mangrove, 2022), with the fourth one, the five-track EP Amazônia, on the way.

And with his 40th birthday upcoming and the 10th anniversary of calling Prague his home, Klez wanted to do something special to mark this double occasion.

“I wanted to create a physical and tangible object, something to keep to embody 10 years of my music,” he tells us, revealing one of his most personal projects to date: a vinyl featuring a panorama of 10 years of musical creation, putting together 12 tracks from his four albums hailing from about half-a-dozen genres and sung in no less than five different languages.

“All the songs were composed and written since I’ve been in Prague, except for one, but that clip was still filmed here, on the boat of the Forman brothers, Lod’ Tajemství,” Klez, who also lived for several years in Buenos Aires, says.

“The songs on the vinyl include punk, folk rock, reggae, electro or disco pop music”, Klez, who revels in the dual marvels of eclecticism and polyglotism says, “and I sing in English, French, Portuguese, Breton and Czech”. ‘Something for every taste’ has rarely found a more accurate example.

“’Klez Brandar / 2015-2025’ is both a retrospective and a travel album,” he tells Expats.cz, travel through genres, cultures, space, and time, all compacted and gathered on this delicate musical medium, the vinyl, he appreciates so much.

A medium with a fascinating and storied history in Czechia, now the world’s largest vinyl producer, makes Prague an all-too-logical place for young artists and musicians to create their own.

With the competition of cassettes and CDs, the medium had almost been confined to the dustbins of history in the 1990s. Some, however, decided to hold out a bit longer.

“I realized when I came to the company [about 40 years ago] that the vinyl would be finished one day. But I wanted our company to be the last one to stop making them,” Zdeněk Pelc, owner and president of Czech global leader GZ Media, told The New York Times in a recent profile.

A winning bet if any, as the vinyl made, against all odds, a surprise comeback in the second half of the 2000s, putting Czech manufacturers on the vanguard of a global musical revival.

Based in Loděnice, where vinyl production was centralized in communist Czechoslovakia – an era when vinyl also became a kind of totem of the rock-and-roll-infused underground circles – GZ Media pressed about 300,000 gramophones per year in the 90s. They now produce almost as many in a single day, or some 60 to 70 million annually.

“To our surprise, a product that was mainly an item of nostalgia became something that made economic sense,” CEO Michal Štěrba told Radio Prague.

Jan Lechner, a 28-year-old product designer at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague (UMPRUM), also found inspiration in the medium’s rich history and creative potential, creating a modular shelf designed to store vinyl.

According to the Czech-French designer, whose recent projects include installations for the Milan Design Week, sunglasses for famous actor Jiří Macháček, or an ingenious sound recording device now on display in the Prague metro, his modular shelf allows people to use it according to their own specific needs and spatial constraints.

Contrary to the limitations of the (few) other shelves on the market, it can hold up to 1,000 records – in addition to the record player itself. From the choice of sterner oak wood to the precise dimensions, everything has been thought through to enhance the vinyl ritual and listening experience. 

“For me, the vinyl itself is a beautiful product that can be passed on from generation to generation,” he tells Expats.cz.

From the choice of sterner oak wood to the precise dimensions, everything has been thought through to enhance the vinyl ritual and listening experience. “It’s not a luxury item. I wanted to make it accessible to many people, like small record shop owners or young parents with a special affinity for vinyl.”

Like trends observed in other cultural sectors, vinyl indicates the analog revival in the age of ubiquitous streaming platforms and unlimited digital options.

“Hip-hop vinyl led me to funk, jazz, and African and Brazilian music. Twenty years later, I’m making my own contribution by mixing this and that,” Klez says. “Vinyl is a small token of musical history to listen, forget, and then listen again years later.”

Echoing Klez’s mindset, most vinyl lovers will describe its appeal as part of a whole physical and social experience, the personal connection with something physical and tangible, heightened by the artistic delight of beautiful covers and the social ritual of carefully choosing and playing the record, whether alone at home or surrounded by friends, thus completely changing the listening experience.

Most major artists now have their work on a record, and some, like heavy metal band Metallica, are even buying their own record pressing companies, a testament to its newfound success. But for experts, the small budding artists give the sector its real strength.

But for them, it’s also an investment. To help fund the production of his ten-year retrospective vinyl, Klez has launched a crowdfunding campaign, appealing to friends, followers, and listeners to support his unique endeavor.