[engl] Galvanising our ongoing commitment to the lost music of the Czech New Wave cinema movement from the late 1960s and 1970s, Finders Keepers Records follow up our series of previously unreleased music to Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders, Daisies, Saxana and The Little Mermaid with a short series of soundtracks for films by the country’s master of the macabre and the nation’s first point of call for freakish fairytales and hallucinogenic horror, Mr. Juraj Herz. Regarded as the final ever film of the Czech New Wave, Juraj Herz's Morgiana (alongside Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders) was made after the Prague Spring during Czech cinema’s most scrutinised censorship era, deep in the throws of communism. Spearheading a micro-cosmic sub-genre of hor- ror fantasy or scary/fairytales alongside Karel Kachyňa's Malá Mořská Víla (The Little Mermaid), these directors built a handful of subversive, flamboyant and experimental new films based around classical communist approved sur- realist literature; sidestepping creative compromise and uniting some of the leading lights of the FAMU founded film movement for the last time. Both musical scores courtesy of Luboš Fišer unite Valerie and Morgiana; sharing doppelgänger production and compositional ideas presented by Finders Keepers Records for the first time ever outside of the original context of the film. It is easy to hear why the music for both films could easily be confused as part of the same score, or as very close twin sisters, having been recorded just 18 months apart in 1970 and 1972. Revealing tiny shards of identical melodic phrasing, the Morgiana score visits darker hallucinogenic corners for this tale of two sisters seen through the perspective of giallo-esque “cat’s eye” cam- era work (filmed by Jaroslav Kučera) revealing poison induced hysteria fuelled by sibling rivalry and desperately twisted jealousy. Adopting his mys- teriously macabre musical persona, the versatile Fišer interweaves chimes, harps and harpsichord with echoing flutes, lutes and piano, applying his sig- nature orchestral tension and experimental percussion traits in the form of treated pianos, vibra-slaps, tape samples of striking matches and spring reverbs to this oblique heady selection. Revered in similar esteem to that of Czech film legend Zdeněk Liška, Fišer’s unreleased filmography of forward-thinking Czech scores is slowly reaching a wider global audience through his first-ever dedicated commercial soundtrack releases which should, in time, win him the same votes of confidence that we now award the likes of Komeda, Korzyński, Roubaix and Nicolai, amongst other European soundtrack luminaries.

[engl] It has been exactly ten years since Finders Keepers Records first liberated Luboš Fišer’s immaculate soundtrack music for Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders (Valerie A Týden Divu) from the vaults of the Barrandov Studio in Prague. As the inaugural release of an ongoing discography of previously unreleased scores from the hugely creative “Film Miracle” that occurred during and after the Czech New Wave (CNW), this score will always retain a special place in the heart of the label as well as our listeners who consistently request an updated repress of this significant vinyl milestone. Having grown in status from an obscure and misunderstood socialist-era art house oddity, via the hands of risqué foreign fluff merchants, to finally find its rightful audience as a bonafide surrealist cinematic masterpiece of world class standards, this 1970 film adaptation of Vítezslav Nezval’s 1935 avant-garde novella (a film that literally cross-pollinated Max Ernst’s A Week Of Kindness and Lewis Carols Alice In Wonderland) has garnered widespread critical acclaim. Inspiring ongoing generations of visual artists, musicians, writers and filmmakers – all of whom regard this truly individualistic and inimitable surrealist film poem to be an indelible influence – Valerie continues to impregnate their daily artistic referential fabric. Commonly considered to be the swansong of the CNW, following a huge paranoia fuelled government lm cull in 1969, owing to the fact it is last government approved feature film of the post-Prague Spring era to combine the efforts of controversial filmmakers from the FAMU (Filmová A Televizní Fakulta Akademie Múzických Umení) film school, Valerie would also be the first of an exciting and essential new fertile strain of Czech made cinema fantastique. Successfully condensing the final drops of CNW lifeblood through a series of presumed apolitical scary/fairy tales, directors like Jaromil Jireš and Juraj Herz used surrealism, traditionalism and fantasy to rejuvenate the creative energy of apathetic fillmmakers evading government scrutiny via creatively coded artistic allegories. By strategically choosing to adapt a pre-war surrealist melodrama written by a communist convert author called Vítezslav Nezval and based in a non-specific traditional era, the previously censored filmmaker Jaromil Jireš was able to craft what many consider his nest filmic hour and what would later become his most universally received achievement. Enlisting the individual talent of some of the CNW’s most formidable stalwarts, in what might have been their most creatively challenging roles, Jireš managed to unintentionally establish a new genre format that was both stylistically and sonically tuned to the trends of the impending decade thus future-proofing his career and providing a woozy gateway drug to an otherwise time-locked lost movement.