Tegnaputan’s new interstellar prog-space-rock opera aims high, combining cosmic concepts and musical aplomb. The band are gearing up to release the album and have launched an Indiegogo campaign and will officially release the album at Klub Re on May 27th.
Hungarian psych-rock maestros, Tegnapután, and the trio at their centrifugal core (Béla Petrik on bass, Tibor Puskas on drums, Attila Gyurmanczi on guitar) have been honing their trade in off-kilter prog-inspired soundscapes for the past decade. They’ve added the keyboard and vocal talents of Krakow stalwart, Thymn Chase, to their current project, The Space Erase. It’s an ambitious operatic fusion of various genres, part space opera, part performance art. The Space Erase is the perfect concept for our information-saturated post-truth world.
Concept photos courtesy of Tegnaputan.
CCCP astronaut provided by Kraków Music.
Concert photos by Shaun O’Neill for Kraków Music.
the live show is a conceptual extension of the album and a visual extravaganza, musically elaborate, hugely theatrical and beckons the audience to step onboard to experience a thrilling space adventure that may or may not have actually happened.
— Shaun O’Neill
The backstory of the project begins in the Spring of 1968, the Soviet Union and the satellite states under their influence, started a new era of crewed and uncrewed space exploration called Interkosmos. That program sent into orbit the first non-Soviet citizen – Vladimir Remek – from the former Czechoslovakia. The program ran until a few years after the fall of the Berlin wall, but already before that, Hungarian national, Bertalan Farkas, had become the first Hungarian cosmonaut onboard the Salyut 6 Space Station which sparked the public’s interest in such daring interstellar antics.
In 1968, Hungarian leader János Kádár signed a launch order for a secret mission that allegedly sent four then unknown Hungarian cosmonauts on a test mission to orbit the moon to attempt the first launch and landing of a lunar module. In Tegnaputan’s space opera, the project is codenamed “Emese” (a Hungarian mythological goddess on a par with Apollo) but officially the Hungarian and Soviet officials in the Mission Control center based in Tapolca (near Lake Balaton) ultimately declared the mission a failure after losing communication with the Emese before it reached lunar orbit. What actually happened to those cosmonauts has been a mystery until…now.
Flash forward 25 years to 1992, when a Hungarian military cadet was visiting a local watering hole near a military barracks on the northern shore of Lake Balaton. The cadet overheard a rambling story coming from a drunk military Vet, weird tales fell from his lips of an underground military base and a secret mission to the moon. The cadet plied the Vet with enough Palinka to down a satellite, until he eventually produced a photograph of himself and several other officers standing in front of the area where the underground mission control bunker had supposedly been built. As far-fetched a story as it sounded, it stuck with the cadet for many years, until in 2019 that same cadet, Bela Petrik, founding member of Tegnapután, decided to use the band as a time machine to explore the real “truth” of these unsung heroes’ mission.
The essence of good propaganda ultimately is to ensure the majority of the information is factual to add some credibility – the 20% that is blatant lies is mixed into the pot – people often find it hard to tell the difference.— Shaun O’Neill
Assuming the identities and roles of the actual crew of the mission: Major Tamás (Thymn Chase) is the leader of the Emese Mission, Commander Attila is the pilot of the command and landing modules, Lieutenant Puskás is the aerospace navigation expert and General Petrik is the former head of the Hungarian Interkosmos space program. The Space Erase is the band giving artistic and creative voice to the crew’s untold story. Buckle up and hold on tight. Re-entry is gonna be tricky.
The story is indeed fabulous – whether it is fiction or not is irrelevant. Perhaps not all the cold war space missions were grounded in hard facts: the East spun fable and fact together – maybe the West did too. The essence of good propaganda ultimately is to ensure the majority of the information is factual to add some credibility – the 20% that is blatant lies is mixed into the pot – people often find it hard to tell the difference. The Nomenklatura cleverly used the space race, and the involvement of the satellite states behind the iron curtain in it, as a way to bolster national pride and hold onto their dwindling power. The lauded success with one caveat: as long as it did not overshadow their own.
The band have fleshed out this improbable story in multiple formats and are releasing The Space Erase on both Vinyl LP and have also produced a 24 page hand-drawn vintage comic entitled Moontruth! The band worked with 17 visual artists from 6 countries including numerous Krakow-based artists to bring their vision to life and you can pre-order the album and support their work on the Kickstarter campaign.
But for those of you that saw the preview of The Space Erase in September, 2022 at Teatr Barakah, the live show is a conceptual extension of the album and a visual extravaganza, musically elaborate, hugely theatrical and beckons the audience to step onboard to experience a thrilling space adventure that may or may not have actually happened. Don’t miss the world premier of The Space Erase at Klub Re on May 27th as part of the Green Zoo Festival with fellow cosmic traveler’s The Reptilian Government opening.
