Various

Second volume of Vampisoul’s Czech Up! series, which compiles 60s and 70s gems from the vaults of the Supraphon and Panton labels from the former Czechoslovakia. Freakbeat, soul, baroque pop, prog-funk, garage rock, psych-jazz… all that and more is contained within these 22 tracks, wonderfully produced and now carefully remastered, many of them never reissued before. Includes detailed liner notes by Lukáš Machata.

Welcome to the second Vampisoul set of trouvailles from the Supraphon vaults, a series of compilations that we launched in 2016 under the title Czech Up!. It’s a concept that we had in mind ever since we began our collaboration with Supraphon over ten years ago, but that wasn’t initially possible to accomplish due to – luckily temporary – licensing restrictions. In the meantime, just as Supraphon is steadily progressing with revalidating their immense back catalogue, we’re now able to move along with them, picking up their cherries as they keep popping up on the notional surface. The Supraphon label was established in the early 1950s in former Czechoslovakia and has been continuously active ever since. While it’s always been highly esteemed by music connoisseurs for its excellent classical music releases, Supraphon’s pop, rock and jazz music catalogue, although comprising around 60,000 unique tracks, remains for the most part a big unknown to the international audience. Today it also incorporates the complete back catalogue of Panton, another Czechoslovak label launched in 1967 that operated independently until the late 1990s. On