Karel Vesely – institute of anxiety

Cerne slunce (Black Sun) is a podcast serie and a subsequent book about anxiety and depression in western popular music of the last app. 40 years. It surveys the way contemporary music reflects changes in our society, it connects political approach with aesthetical one and the narrative aims to be both personal and objective. Essay-like chapters discuss the history of male and female emotions in rock music (from Joy Division to Burial, from Bessie Smith to Lorde), narate the story of sad rap, tell the history of melancholy in Czech pop music after 1989 and try to pinpoint the reaction of pop culture to the financial crisis of 2008 and afterwards. One chapter is supposed to deal with teenage angst and Cerne slunce also can not avoid the narrative trope of male heartbreak as the only suitable emotion for pop songs until recently. A six-part podcast is being published monthly at www.instituuzkosti.cz from July 2018 to January 2019. The book is supposed to get published in 2019 in an acclaimed publishing house Paseka. The lenght of the book is going to be about 250 pages.

The Institute of Anxiety creates a space for the study of anxiety, which is spreading throughout society and manifests itself through insomnia, stress, alienation, loss of empathy, inequalities, and violence. It is suppressed without success by products of the pharmaceutical industry and intensified by growing social and economic uncertainty. The institute aims to be a platform where anxiety communicates and opens itself to a potential solution and turns into a force that is capable of radicalizing and forcing structural changes in the current state of affairs.