Crossing borders between traditions, sonic territories, and instruments, musicians Tomáš Niesner and Aldana Duoraan created their first collaborative album Plot. The sound of khomus meets guitar melodies simplified into pentatonic scales, intertwining in a dialogue that remains playful while moving between meditative passages and bewitching, hypnotic moments. Solid yet ever-changing, these melodies explore a delicate relationship between the present interactions, their past, and possible futures. “I feel that the essence of our collaboration is not to close the songs off, but to leave them open so that they can develop and be interpreted a little differently each time, depending on the circumstances,” Niesner explains when describing the duo’s artistic approach. The recording therefore captures only the most essential moments and ideas, which continue to unfold in new directions during live performances.

Each segment of Plot, word meaning “fence” in Czech, while also referring in English to a narrative structure or hidden plan, represents a different constellation shaped by the pairing of specific khomuses and guitar tuning. The track titles, such as The Key of Radiance or The Key of Humbling, are inspired by the ancient Chinese text I Ching (usually translated as Book of Changes). Like the classical cosmological text itself, the compositions meditate on similar fundamental principles. The ideas explored in the chapters of the I Ching are thus loosely translated into musical language. Themes of Radiance, Attending, or Nearing thus loom over the reflective realm of Aldana and Tomáš.

The two musicians first met in 2021 through a collaboration organized by Konektiv, an event series that aims to create new connections between genres and musicians with diverse backgrounds. Aldana Duoraan is a Prague-based artist born in the Sakha Republic, whose experiments with the khomus (also known as the jaw harp) draw on the traditional music of her homeland. Tomáš Niesner, a sound artist and guitarist based in Brno, navigates the realms of American primitive guitar while incorporating influences ranging from folk to drone. Because the duo rarely finds themselves in the same city, an important moment in the development of Plot was a showcase at Cafe OTO, organized by mappa. The album, capturing the fleeting energy of this encounter and several others, has now been released on the Slovak experimental label, which helped bring the collaboration to life.

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Allison de Groot is a clawhammer banjo player from Winnipeg, Canada whose work spans old-time, bluegrass, and folk traditions. A recipient of the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and an Americana Music Association Instrumentalist of the Year nominee, she is best known for her duo with fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves, whose two albums, a self-titled debut and Hurricane Clarice, earned recognition from the IBMA, the Canadian Folk Music Awards, and the JUNOs.

Rich Ruth is the recording project of Nashville multi-instrumentalist Michael Ruth. Across three albums, most recently 2024's Water Still Flows on Third Man Records, he has built immersive instrumental music from ambient, spiritual jazz, minimalism, and synth-driven post-rock, compositions that begin in solitude with loops and drones and open outward through collaboration. He is also a third of Shrunken Elvis, the Nashville trio he shares with pedal steel guitarist Spencer Cullum and guitarist Sean Thompson, whose well-received self-titled debut arrived in 2025.

Their collaboration began with a simpler plan: Ruth would produce a solo record for de Groot. Over roughly a year in his Nashville studio, the plan dissolved. The two started composing together, and the album that emerged belongs equally to both of them, shaped as much by space and process as by melody. De Groot's banjo runs through looping and delay, acting as the pulse at the center of the arrangements, its rolling figures gathering krautrock-like momentum before giving way to Ruth's synthesizers. Patrick M'Gonigle, who also contributed to writing several of the tracks, threads his violin and string arrangements through the record, and Shrunken Elvis bandmate Spencer Cullum adds pedal steel to several tracks, widening the album's atmospheric reach. The final push to complete the album came in the form of a deadline they set for themselves: a surprise live debut of the material at Big Ears Festival.

Across eight tracks, the album maintains a tangible sense of human touch and tenderness at the center of something cosmic: de Groot's banjo grounds the music while Ruth's soaring guitars and electronics blur the boundary between the earthly and the celestial. Passages of unadorned banjo and violin, distant birdsong, and fragments of radio sit alongside vibraphone and synths, all refracted through a psychedelic, cinematic lens. The result is two distinct musical voices arriving not at a meeting point but at a new, shared sound.

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When everything around is racing blindly toward ruin, change direction and spin as fast as you can until you defy gravity and rise above the ground into blissful madness. "K-drone", the debut album by three renegades—Jakub Šimanský, Michal Vaľko, and Ján Podracký—is like a hallucinatory Calvary with five stations. Each station is a time-loop capsule, a tiny utopia sneering at the phantom progress of the world outside.

The opening track, "Speedrone", is pure vertigo; for seven long minutes, there's nothing to hold onto. Šimanský’s banjo cuts through the air, Vaľko’s hurdy-gurdy sounds like someone scraping a rusted sheet of metal with a handful of nails, and Podracký’s bass recorder hums like a slowly intensifying migraine. "Sine" is like a train journey through a barren wasteland, where the images outside the window constantly repeat like a bad trip. "Pro DJ" starts like a gig in a bar at the end of the line—a gig that never actually goes anywhere. It’s as if all three are locked in a spasm, their repeated motifs turning into haunting earworms. "Alien Radigue" shifts into a strange idyll in a clearing in the middle of the forest, where an unknown bird species trills in the background. The end and definitive dissolution come in "Slush", where everything suddenly slows down. Šimanský plucks a simple guitar melody, Podracký’s harmonica drifts from side to side like a boat gently rocking by the shore, and Vaľko’s hurdy-gurdy drones like a drunken mosquito buzzing around.

"K-drone" sounds like an acid anti-western movie recorded in a tucked-away burrow, like smoke-soaked folk and experimental campfire songs echoing through a deep forest. It evokes Third Ear Band's "Alchemy", it screeches and repeats like some of Henry Flynt's experiments, and you could easily imagine hearing it drifting from one of the windows on the cover of Hala Strana's eponymous album.

Jakub Šimanský is the bard of Czechoslovak guitar primitivism, an earthy folk sommelier whose fingerpicking you may also know from the duo Šimanský Niesner. Michal Vaľko, aka Line Gate, needs no introduction to fans. He has released three albums on mappa, and his hurdy-gurdy meditations hold an important place in the drone and minimalist music scene. "Den", "Apex", and "Trap" have become essential listening. Ján Podracký is a self-taught composer and musician whom you might know from various participatory music projects, such as an orchestra where all the players play diatonic harmonicas. Besides harmonicas, he has long explored a wide range of flutes. In short, a pied piper who will guide you through other worlds.

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