Banket is a dance night series held by Audio Video Bass crew which seeks to re-establish nonmainstream dance music in Ostrava. There surely is a solid base to get back to. When millennium was about to turn, Ostrava used to be a home to lively scene of drum’n’bass parties. It was at the beginning of the zero decade when some of us encountered underground dance music for the first time. Back then the scene was still surrounded by creative environment. The atmosphere of those nights is where we draw our inspiration from when organizing our parties although drum’n’bass has never been the kind of music we’ve been spinning.
Changing party venues and various visuals including videomapping is a way how to approach urban space we’ve been given. Ostrava offers enough vacant spaces, some of which are right in the city centre, to keep us exploring different venues every now and then. By doing so, we react to a specific nature of a post-industrial urban space. In a way our music production therefore reflects our shared experience. Music as an imprint of one’s life experience is an approach idiosyncratic for afro-american music which we all love. It comes as no surprise that its unrestrained character as well as never-ending variability, which make the music difficult to conform to commercial practices, are another principles we are strongly inspired by.
