Singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart will come to the Czech Republic next year with a new album called Flying Wig, which he released in September. The 42-year-old American with Venezuelan roots drew attention to himself at the beginning of the millennium as the frontman of the band Sonic Youth. At that time, some referred to his music as freak folk.
Banhart will perform on August 6, 2024 in Prague’s Yellow Spa, Fource Entertainment, which is organizing the concert, announced. Tickets will be on sale from Friday morning.
So far, the musician has performed twice in the Czech Republic, the first time in 2013 at the Colors of Ostrava festival, and the last time in January 2020 at the Prague Acropolis. He ended the performance at that time with a song Carmensitawhose Bollywood-tinged music video featured the singer’s former girlfriend, Hollywood actress Natalie Portman.
The label freak folk, like the Czech adjectives “strange” or “crazy”, wanted to describe the wave of singers at the beginning of the millennium, which, in addition to Banhart, included sister duo CocoRosie, androgynous Antony and The Johnsons or fragile Sufjan Stevens. All of them together overtook and co-defined the moods of millennials, wrote critic Pavel Klusák.
According to him, Banhart, a young man with a hippie-like Christian appearance, still maintains the relevance of a bohemian wayward author whose playful, surreal, imaginative, but also vulnerable or sometimes psychedelic songs met a return to acoustic songwriting in the middle of the technological era and helped shape the idea of hipsterism. “People come to him to spend a while with an undoubtedly special personality: a guy who is beautiful and charismatic, but also shot, unpredictable, compulsively improvising and remarkably connected to something irrational, behind words,” said Klusák.
Devendra Banhart was born in Texas, USA to a Venezuelan mother and an American father. His parents divorced when he was two, and he grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, before returning to the US as a teenager.
Around the turn of the millennium, he began to study at the Art College in San Francisco, which he did not finish, he moved to Paris and drew attention to himself for the first time as a forerunner of better-known performers. His way to fame was paved by Michael Gira from Swans, who in 2002 helped him release his first significant album. Today, the singer has eleven to his credit, including this year’s Flying Wig, in which the Welsh musician Cate le Bon contributed significantly. In addition to her, Banhart performed with Yoko Ono, Caetano Velos or Beck.
In recent years, he has not only devoted himself to music. Banhart has been designing and painting record covers for years. Four years ago, he published a book of drawings Vanishing Wave, a year later he exhibited his oil paintings for the first time at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles, in addition to publishing, for example, a collection of poems called Weeping Gang Bliss Void Yab-Yum.
Video: Singl Carmensita od Devendry Banharta
The video for Carmensita by Devendra Banhart featured actress Natalie Portman. | Video: XL Recordings
