Prague was the right city for Jealous Yellow's chief sonic summoner, Benjamin Rea, to find himself housebound, as he has now extended that city's haunted legacy into our lives, even if only incrementally. So the legend goes: while Benjamin was on tour promoting his solo release
Sugarweeper in 2021, he was struck by a sudden illness... a curse maybe, the spite of a venefica, or perhaps he had caught the eye of a ravenous lamia who extended her robes over him in order to squeeze him dry. Whatever the cause (apocryphally, the official explanation was COVID), the condition of his humors lent panic to the public, and he was sanctioned and condemned to quarantine. There in the dark, overlooking an urban waste cleared by plague, a bedevilment during which one may expect to find the avenues patrolled by lumbering golems, Benjamin was visited by 14 children of the night, rapping on his window with a scraping solicitation before gaining entry to his parlor. In his fever, the afflicted young man consulted these cold hematophagous house-crashers about the nature of their appetites, the cut of their toothy jib, interrogated their truths and trimmed the frills off their deceptions, realizing through the course of his inquest the intercoursing circulation of spirit and energy between a city and its denizen apparitions.
Czech Vampires is Benjamin's long-awaited exhalation from these encounters, one which relieves him of the tension and mounting shock of his redoubtable rendezvous- a coarse brush with the inevitable that is as sticky, disquietingly supple, and unobtrusively ensnaring as spider's silk.
