Though much has been said in the field of progressive, electronic infused rock, it’s still surprising how many DIY bands manage to unveil their own style, staying authentic to themselves while exploring different iterations of their musicality. Brno, Czech Republic based KODDN just released their new EP called “Resistance is Future”, an interesting 5-tracker written during the covid period, which served as a catalyst for ideas and greatly influenced the overall shape of the album. Dystopia, digital, conspiracy, freedom – these are the key themes of the current record. Today, we dive deep into its concepts through the band’s first hand track by track rundown below.
“Inspiration is a positive aspect, but besides this there is also a feeling that the pandemic has fully revealed our collective weaknesses – it showed us how easily manipulated we can be, how much we still believe the establishment and the mainstream media, how easy is to divide us and – last but not least – how our fundamental rights and freedoms can be taken away effortlessly when there is a right excuse.” – comments the band.
“I truly believe that we are living in essential times and next ten, maybe twenty years will be crucial in the term of direction where the humanity as a whole will go. I’m not happy from what I see in the world around me – from my political stance as a minarchist/anarchist I would expect that the right evolution would be the way of decentralization, lessening of the state and generally more freedom for the people. But what I see at least in the Europe right now is the total opposite of this and I’m afraid we are not so far away from the dystopian oppresive regime if we let the things go in current direction. This is why is this EP called “Resistance is future“. Dystopia, digital, conspiracy, freedom – these are the key themes of this record.”
Musically, a major novelty compared to the past are the numerous electronic elements from the pen of Jiří Machů (Killiekrankie, Laokoon), which are interwoven throughout the album and create a fertile ground for sometimes hard, sometimes melancholic guitar riffs. An inherent part of the record is the unsettling, almost sci-fi atmosphere that underlines the album’s themes and, together with the shifting rhythms and urgent vocals, creates a trans-genre blend that should satisfy especially fans of harder guitar music.
KODDN took care of the recording themselves in the spirit of DIY principles, with Tomáš Raclavský (Modern Day Babylon) taking care of the mix and master.
“We were formed at the end of 2017 in Brno, Czech Republic, as a two-piece band consisting of guitar/vocals (Jakub Kodn) + drums (Miloš Bogdan).” – comments the band. “A year later we released our first self-recorded EP characterized by its garage sound, and the following year (2019) we were already pouring out our debut album Melodies Towards Heartbeat. An unplanned, pandemic-induced hiatus followed, during which the band underwent personnel changes – Stepan Hrabovsky took over as drummer and Miloš took over bass guitar.”
“The collaboration with Jiří Machů, who wrapped our riffs with a thick portion of electronics and whose work you can hear on the current EP, was a major enrichment of our work. Genre-wise we call ourselves post-hardcore or maybe progressive rock, but this is just for orientation and we think it is not so easy to specify.”
19|84
We started creating this song just on the start of the pandemic without knowing what will the next months bring and even at that time I was already suspicious about the whole thing. Facing the lockdown restrictions and various strict rules, everything so easily enforced to us without any major resistance felt really odd and unnatural. With my long-held belief that most narratives are controlled it was hard for me just to shut up and accept what I have been told.
Next months and years from then we witnessed a series of the establishment arrogancies, human rights violations, propaganda and never-ending witch hunt on the people with different than official opinion. I mean, yeah, many people has died because of the virus, but was this whole state brutality really needed? And was all of this just a product of pure incompetency, or was there some kind of intention? That’s what’s this song about.
Sinister Waves
With ever-increasing amount and intensity of wireless technologies, some people start to question their safety to our health and well-being, yet they are always quickly dismissed and ridiculed. Just this arrogance towards the people asking logical questions makes me wonder why there is such a push to bring these technologies alive as soon as possible and why it has higher priority than possible safety.
I am a fan of new technologies and I think it brings a huge value to our lives, but I am also very aware of the fact that we can easily find ourselves in the dystopian nightmare if this tech is used against us. Just look in China’s biggest cities and all their surveillance systems and credit score. Combine this with silicon implants in people’s bodies (I don’t think we are too far from this) and you can imagine what can possibly happen – that’s even beyond Orwell.
Superherophobia
“Not an easy time, but I guess easier than war” – I wrote these lyrics during covid culmination in our country, because at that time I realized how hard it must have been to live in ideologically conquered territory where you cannot express your opinions freely and propaganda is throwing its superheroes at you.
Title of this song is inspired by the tv show called “The Boys”, where the main protagonists, a group of superheroes, are perceived by the public as a big-hearted, nice and decent, but in reality most of them are just rotten and sinister people. I think this translates very well to our real life and I am pretty sure everyone can find own “superhero” who preaches water and drinks wine instead.
As lyrics says, PR means everything nowadays and you can be always sure that individuals with huge amounts on money and media on their side can buy themselves popularity. Just for example, Bill Gates is one of these fake superheroes for me.
Great Reset
There is this initiative World Economic Forum, a group of very wealthy and powerful individuals, and they have their initiative called Great Reset, which should be something like a plan how to enter the next humanity era where the endpoint is digitality, transhumanism, green industry transformation and lessening of the private ownership. I’m sure that for some this might seem like a cool idea, but I am pretty aware of the fact that each regime in the past came with these nice-sounding promises to make our lives better, just to end up in a repressive mess full of human sufferring (for example here in Czechia we had communism for 40 years, so people can tell you about it).
The idea behing The Great Reset is total opposite of my idea of free society and it resembles some kind of digital socialism. In a brief, this song is about our fight for freedom and about the need of the world redesign for the sake of majority, not just for a sake of tiny ruling class.
21st Century Witchcraft
I strongly believe that currently some of the opinions are undesirable, be it in the social topics, be it in the science or in the politics. Especially science got to the point where it became politically and ideologically driven and everyone who comes with the conclusion or opinion being out of mainstream is automatically ridiculed and dismissed instead of open and free debate.
In short, pragmatism is not welcomed in these days. This is not how things should work and we need to let go this ego-driven mindset if we as a humanity want to move forward. In the end, you can find so many examples in our past when there was one predominant opinion which turned out to be completely wrong – for example Earth being flat, smoking being safe, bloodletting etc…. – anyone who opposed these opinions was ridiculed or even punished at the time and I think it would be foolish to think that nowadays we know everything. So please, I wanna see more heresy in the world, we desperately need it.
