Yahoo Lifestyle The Coolest Music Venue and Museum You’ve Never Heard of: Prague’s Doupe (aka DopeYeah)
In an elaborately converted garage in the Czech Republic, a 15-minute ride from Prague’s city center, sits one of the most unusual and ambitious venues one is likely to find anywhere.
It might have three stages, but “venue” is a misleading term for Doupě — which means “den” or “lair” in Czech and is pronounced “dope yeah” (which is also the company’s English name). Its compound is the home base for a multifaceted operation that includes a specialty record label, a production company that includes a podcast and livestream operation, a festival booker, a recording studio and, most striking of all, what must be the world’s greatest collection of vintage radios, gramophones, turntables, stereo systems, televisions, telephones and other pristine antiques that Doupě’s founder, musician/businessman Petr Chmela, has painstakingly displayed as a sort of history of recorded sound.
More from Variety
European Film Academy Chair Mike Downey Honored With Prague Lifetime Achievement Award
Production Booms in Prague as Safety, Incentives Lure Shoots
Billion Dollar Location: Czech Republic - Animation and Visual Effects Take Root and Grow
The jaw-dropping collection includes literally hundreds of ultra-rare items across several dimly lit rooms decorated with vintage posters for Philips radios and other products. There are original Edison cylinder phonographs — precursor of more-traditional phonographs, which were precursors of turntables — and music-box-like players that are even older. In a house down the street, there are even more, including themed rooms with ‘60s or ‘80s-era items along with astounding vintage furniture. It’s the kind of collection that you’d see a fraction of in a major museum.
But that’s merely the most eye-popping part of the compound. There are three different stages — an outdoor one in the courtyard, which holds about 350 people; a smaller, 100-capacity indoor one with unusual, intimate vantage points (the audience is both above the stage on a balcony and below it to the side, but never in a conventional stage-audience relationship); and an even smaller, 30-capacity one in one of the museum rooms.
The artists who have performed there are mostly Eastern European musicians or touring jazz performers like Billy Cobham, John Scofield, Al Di Meola and Steve Gadd, but Doupě’s organizers are looking to expand that clientele.
While the venue’s business model, which is subscription-based, presents a challenge for staging one-off shows for audiences beyond its core clientele, the company stages bigger gigs, including the Metronome Festival, at other sites and deploys their remote facilities: Last year, the company set up a mobile studio in a container at Metronome, and British superstar Raye came in for a podcast interview and was so inspired that she and her band played an improvised set that went on for 90 minutes.
The venue’s rooms are sonically pristine and beautifully decorated with vintage guitars; its podcasts and livestreams have strong production; the label’s small-batch releases are pressed on high-quality, often elaborately colored vinyl with lavish artwork; its printed materials, including a giant photo book of performances at the venue, are also top-quality.
The entire operation is a labor of love for one obsessive fan: Chmela started out as a jazz drummer and, as a sort of side-hustle, launched a kitchenware company called Tescoma in 1992 that quickly became one of the biggest in the world and now operates in 130 countries. The company’s success enabled him to indulge his formidable collecting impulses — and his dream of building an ideal environment for musicians to create, which he launched in 2016.
“The idea for Doupě was born when, after 20 years, I decided I wanted to play drums again,” he tells Variety. “My wife got pregnant and there was no space at home that was insulated enough to play in. There were some terraced garages near our house, and that was the inspiration and the first steps towards the big project. I was very lucky when visionary architect Standa Fiala, a personal friend of mine, suggested connecting the garages to create a place for me to play. This is how we gradually acquired and rebuilt the entire adjacent complex of the former auto repair shop.”
The venue is run primarily by David Gaydecka (who joined from the Metronome Festival, which now collaborates with Doupě ) and Kryštof Kodl, both of whom have backgrounds in event and festival production.
“Peter is working with musicians to make other musicians happy, and to make Prague maybe one of the music centers of the world,” Kodl says. “Not like L.A. or New York, but lately we’ve seen a lot of musicians and producers coming to Prague and using it as a base.”
Although the venue itself is prohibitively small for a major artist, it’s just one element of what Doupě offers. “We definitely look for artists that like to have different or kinds of shows,” Gaydecka says. “Like, an artist could play the arena in Prague or a larger club, but if they’d like to play a club that’s very different, we’re there, and we also could record the concert, release an album on limited-edition vinyl, do a podcast with them, they could use the studio. There’s so much we can do.”
The compound’s location in Central Europe is an advantage for touring artists from North America, Kodl adds. “We definitely could be a [staging ground] for American artists when they come to Europe to tour — they could start it from Prague, practice here for a few days, maybe record something and do some media here as well. We’ve spoken with lots of agents and they like this idea, because Central Europe is often where they start a tour.”
While the quality and attention to detail is obvious throughout the venue, Chemla’s “Museum of Sound,” some 40 years in the making, is truly astonishing.
“The first piece was an old Philips wooden radio from the 1930s,” Chmela says. “This fascinated me so much that I became highly interested in this type of collecting. But I don’t just collect radios and record players. A large part of the collection is also period furniture, telephones, accessories or perhaps period packaging and boxes.
“Despite the fact that there are more than a thousand pieces, I am not emphasizing the quantity, but the fact that the collection spans the space-time of almost two centuries of sound: from the first polyphones, mechanical music boxes of the late 19th century, to the first crystals, musical cylinders and the world’s first sound carriers invented by Thomas A. Edison. You will also find shellac records, forerunners of today’s vinyl records, and hundreds of historic telephones.”
Some of the most rare items include a Sparton Nocturne radio, designed by Walter Dorwin Teaque, from the Blue Bird series, of which only a few pieces have survived; and the Bang & Olufsen Hyperbo 5 RG Steel radio, one of just four existing prototypes of a model that was never mass-produced.
That near-fanatical perfectionism and attention to detail is a hallmark of the entire Doupě brand. Chmela concludes, “Doupě is a place of endless dialogues about music and art in general — a utopia for musicians and an ever-evolving ecosystem.”
Best of Variety
Sign up for Variety's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
