Whisper Out Loud

Bands with their backs to the audience, eyes cast down at the tangle of guitar pedals on the floor, and ethereal vocals drowned out by noise. No other music style tuned into the post-communist changes as well as shoegaze. The newfound freedoms were accompanied by deafening guitar distortion.

An entirely new independent scene was born in Czechia: the bands Toyen, Ecstasy of St. Theresa, Here, Naked Souls, and Sebastians were miles away from anything that had happened in music before. And they played in places they could hardly have imagined years earlier: in Prague churches, Swiss squats, New York's CBGB club, or London's BBC and MTV studios. The intoxicating sound no longer hit the borders of the Iron Curtain and became an expression of a hard-to-describe ecstasy. Prague joined London as a capital of shoegaze.

In the book Šeptej nahlas (Whisper Aloud), music journalist Miloš Hroch tells the story of a unique era whose sound faded before it could truly begin.

This publication was supported by the International Visegrad Fund as part of the Visegrad Literary Residency Programme and by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.