Prašná bašta

The first documented concert at Prašná bašta dates from 25 January 1997 (“old and new melodies”). From then on the ensemble played there regularly: almost monthly in 1999, then several times a year, usually on a Sunday, Monday or Thursday at seven, in summer in the courtyard under the stone wall, in winter in the vaulted room. The owner František Machaj greeted the launch of our first CD in Hungarian. In 2008 we dedicated the album Prašná Bašta Social Club (Azyl) to the café, for which we very nearly got a platinum disc, and in 2009 we celebrated fifteen years there. The last Prašná bašta poster in our archive dates from February 2019. The café has since closed.

Prašná bašta was where the part of Požonism that speaks of music as an object of everyday life took place. Marek Piaček put it this way: audiences at new-music festivals take Požoň as controversial music; at Prašná bašta people don’t listen – or they listen, but it is background music for them, which makes sense for the new context of Požoň music and the culture of that space; and the best audience is in the theatre. The American ethnomusicologist Barbara Rose Lange, who came to Prašná bašta in June 2007, noted: the players leafed through thick notebooks of scores and decided on the spot what to play; marches, waltzes and tangos, each very short, with startling style switches; the guests chatted in Slovak, drank wine, ate and never applauded. As she was preparing to leave, the group switched to its rock arrangements.

From 2009 the evenings at Prašná bašta came with posters – always new, always with a different found photograph from the 1920s to the 1960s: bathing girls, radios, peasants at a receiver, a couple in a convertible. You will find them in the Posters section.

It is pleasant to play a piece by Vladimír Bokes on a concert stage and immediately afterwards in a café where people drink coffee, eat and talk. Is this art?
— Marek Piaček (Slovenská hudba 3–4/1997)