Jazz
Fat Banshee Records · 22 May 2026
The idea behind “Behind the Universe” is two electric guitars and no keyboard. Kamila Csenge leads a quartet with a second guitarist, Yamirah Gercke, Kateřina Vacková on bass and Ivo Hermanovský on drums, and the record, seven tunes and thirty-seven minutes released by Fat Banshee Records on 22 May, hands the two of them what a piano would normally do.
“The Void” opens almost diffidently before unravelling into fast lines; “Against the Wall”, four minutes two, starts from a bass riff and lays crystalline chords over it before moving to single notes; “Music Forever”, the longest at six fifty-four, builds on a bass ostinato that lets Csenge climb the top of the neck, where the guitar comes out sounding almost like an electric mandolin.
The double guitar is also the trouble. The mix separates the two by channel but doesn’t separate them by tone, and on “This World” the solos jump from side to side without it being clear whose they are: to find out you have to go and watch the band’s video of “The Metamorphosis”, where Gercke is on the left. On a debut that bets everything on a conversation between two equal instruments, that’s not a technicality.
Csenge studied at the Jaroslav Ježek Conservatory in Prague and graduated from Berklee in 2017 with the John LaPorta guitar award. “The Void” and “Music Forever” appeared as singles in April and May.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents