For a variety of reasons, rock music in former Yugoslavia never achieved the status of a subversive underground movement it had in other communist states like 1970s Czechoslovakia. Instead, this status became the almost exclusive property of punk and its derivatives, since only with the arrival of punk did Yugoslavian pop culture managed to fully catch up with the West and jump onto the train of modernity. This added another dimension to the already messianic advent of punk in Yugoslavia and had a practical effect of defining all true diversity of the alternative music exclusively through punk. Such status of punk music is an obvious truism in the case of 1980s cassette experimentalism in Yugoslavia, where punk’s monolithicness was virtually unprecedented compared to its equivalent scenes in the West.
This essay deals with the marginal phenomena of non-punk infused cassette experimentalism in Yugoslavia through the activities of Nikad Robom cassette edition and two sub-scenes it was affiliated with – the Rock in Opposition scene in Ljubljana and the Other Novi Sad scene in Novi Sad.
The essay isn’t intended as a scholarly analysis of its subject matter and requires some basic knowledge on popular music (Rock in Opposition, cassette culture, etc) in order to cope with some portions of the text. It doesn’t employs any research methods nor it provides theoretical background of its subject matter, but rather aims to supply all the necessary contexts for its understanding. The text is primarily envisaged as a map for art historians, pop culture archaeologists and musicologists that lays out the main features as well as the topology of the alternative music terrain in 1980s Yugoslavia which isn’t indebted to punk in any way.
The five large units are segmented into smaller reasonable units due to the incredibly dense look of the text in Blogger’s layout. The units are, together with notes and references, cross-linked through a table of contents to ease navigation. A great big thanks is due to my sources – Bojan Đorđević, Veljko ‘Papa Nik’ Nikolić, Zoran Pantelić, Siniša Nenadić, Milko Poštrak, Aleks Lenard, Bratko Bibič, Iztok Osojnik, Svi Marš na Ples crew (pop3 et al) and Alter Malter – without whose help this text wouldn’t be possible.
Table of contents:
Primarily, Nikad robom! (Serbo-Croatian for “Never a slave!”) was an often heard war slogan during the Narodnooslobodilačka borba naroda Jugoslavije (or NOB; Serbo-Croatian for “Yugoslav People's Liberation War”) of the 1940es. Then, in 1963, this battle-cry borrowed its name to a comic book edition that published the Mirko & Slavko series about the heroic adventures of two Partisan lads. Although the Nikad Robom edition was launched as one of numerous propaganda vehicles for youth education on NOB, things started to get out of hand when the demand for its most popular comic – caused by a largely unexpected surge of mainstream interest – plunged its creatively bankrupt writers into hyperproduction, resulting in ridiculous super-human exploits of the main protagonists and dismally oversimplified plot lines. Over a period of time, Mirko & Slavko had become a laughing stock of the regime’s distasteful attempts of self-mythologization[1] and consequently, in 1982, got cancelled for vulgarizing NOB[2] in the sensitive and increasingly bizarre atmosphere of the early 1980s post-Tito vacuum. Finally, in 1984, Nikad Robom! gave name to one of the few Yugoslav experimental music labels that tried to navigate through the maelstrom of internal and external impulses within the vast deregulated space that opened up with the cassette culture revolution of the 1980s.
Nikad Robom ran from 1984 to 1992 and primarily focused on the broad area of music of the post-Rock in Opposition era – be it art-rock, experimental jazz or serious music, mainly along the lines of Recommended Records roster (which used to function as an official arm of the RIO exploit during its heyday and which had largely continued its tradition after its demise), but also including various forms of improvised music and contemporary avant-garde which, at the time, went under the term New Music[note 1]. The dual significance of Nikad Robom as an independent music label is mirrored in its function both as a valuable information resource on abovementioned types of music in former Yugoslavia as well as mapping some of Yugoslavia’s most marginal cassette culture enthusiasts. Along the lines of these two functions, one can also divide Nikad Robom’s publishing activity into two distinctive phases: the mimetic phase – lasting from 1984 to 1987 – and the didactic phase – which extended from 1987 to 1992.
In its mimetic phase (1984-1987), Nikad Robom’s editorial focus was roughly outlined by that of its criterion – Recommended Records, while its publishing agenda was largely determined by the current state of affairs in the post-RIO and
New Music worlds. In practice this came down to day-to-day, chance issues such as which post-RIO or New Music project was on tour in Yugoslavia or nearby countries since bootlegs recorded on these concert tours actually made up the
bulk of released material in that period. In this phase Nikad Robom was also relevant as an archival record of foreign artists’ performances – which, at the time, still weren’t considered as something entirely commonplace in Yugoslavia. However, in its didactic phase (1987-1992), the focus shifted towards local music practices that fall within the scope of the post-RIO and New Music influences. The label’s latter function as a showcase for domestic artists did came about only in the wake of the late 1980s boom of Yugoslavian cassette culture, that is, only when such a need generated.
Nikad Robom team basically was Bojan Đorđević and Aleksandar Konjikušić, two music enthusiasts from Belgrade (SR Serbia). In addition to their work as a record label, the duo wrote reviews in the Student magazine, ran a radio show on radio B92 titled Pomen crvenom patuljku (Serbo-Croatian for “Memorial to the red dwarf”) and occasionally organized concerts. However, among a more narrow music public in former Yugoslavia, they were mostly recognizable as a hometaping operation[note 2], their records and tapes catalogue counting around a thousand titles at one point. In the 1980s, Nikad Robom have – due to their hyperactivity and relatively high level of visibility within an underground context – generally functioned as a glue that connected different, seemingly incoherent corners of Yugoslav alternative music (Ljubljana RIO underground, Other Novi Sad scene, etc) into a network of people that is still referred to as the Nikad Robom circle. By the beginning of the 1990s, as the rump Yugoslavia slowly descended into a permanent state of emergency, Nikad Robom’s publishing activities slowly withered as well, finally grinding to halt in the winter of 1992.
From 1992, Bojan Đorđević sporadically organized a series of mini-festivals in Belgrade which culminated in 1996 with the first edition of Ring
Ring New Music festival,
an event dedicated to contemporary music trends that has drawn an extensive array of performers from AMM, Iancu Dumitrescu and Pierre Bastien to Otomo Yoshihide, Sainkho Namtchylak and No-Neck Blues Band. Parallel to his engagement with Ring Ring festival, Bojan Đorđević pursues an active interest in promoting Serbian brand of world music – a phenomenon covering everything from local Roma brass bands to Serbian traditional music and Orthodox liturgical music – and has released four Srbija: Sounds Global CD compilations as well as two Rromano Suno CD compilations for B92 Music to that end; he had also took up managing several acts connected with this scene and has held numerous lectures about music of the Balkans, with a special emphasize on Roma music as well as its long-standing trumpet music tradition.
As a cassette
edition primarily oriented towards promoting post-RIO contents in former Yugoslavia,
Nikad Robom found themselves occupying a unique position, not only in relation to
the cassette culture spectrum, but the total of alternative music production.
Considering that the development of the post-RIO movement in countries of the
West was largely determined by the presence of pre-existing experimental rock
traditions in the 1970s that would facilitate its growth (and especially those
traditions that trace its origins from the progressive rock camp like RIO,
Zeuhl and Krautrock), the absence of such traditions on a country-wide level in
the case of former Yugoslavia, meant that Nikad Robom were facing an uphill
battle in promoting this music.
Since
both the historical RIO (1978-1980) and, to an extent, its offspring – the post-RIO movement (1980-199?)could be understood as a reaction on the part of the 1970s experimental rock underground that stood as a twofold opposition both to the ongoing commercialization of rock in countries of the West as well as punk, a reductionist music trend which the RIO ideologues had undoubtedly seen as a crisis of artisanship, one can say that a certain degree of third positionism– or disposition towards the tertium quid characteristic of the Cold War era politics – is embedded in the very idea of RIO and its
successor. However, in the context of the efforts Nikad Robom made to popularize RIO their country, the situation in Yugoslavia was somewhat different than elsewhere in the West: since there were no genuine 1970s experimental rock traditions in former SFRY to ’lean’ the post-RIO movement against – apart from a vibrant micro-scene in Ljubljana (a city which was always a case by and for itself) – the third positionist logic immanent to RIO movements in the West couldn’t be symmetrically applied in the Balkan country.
Partially
because of this and partially due to the renewed interest in folk music
practices spurred with the explosion of the world music genre in the late
1980s, Nikad Robom at one point shifted their focus towards Balkan’s living
folk music tradition alongside their regular post-RIO agenda. The shift towards
folk music contents reflected especially in the programme of Nikad Robom’s radio
show – Pomen Crvenom Patuljku. The
show started airing in late 1989 and covered a broad spectre of alternative
music like post-RIO, jazz, world music and alike, but was increasingly inclined
towards local folk music practices culminating in 1991 with a first-ever live
report from Dragačevski sabor in Guča
(SR Serbia). Since there were no pre-existing cultural modes for consumption of
such contents for alternative music audiences, Nikad Robom’s rapprochement with
the folk music culture was somewhat controversial at the time as it basically
amounted to a violation of the habitual segregation of the two cultures.
However,
even more importantly – the shift provided a forum for Nikad Robom to speak to
a much larger audience since – outside of a relatively small segment of
Yugoslav society delved into microcosm of Western pop culture – it was
precisely the legacy of folk music and the legitimacy of various competing
modes of its cultural appropriation – from the novokomponovana narodna muzika (Serbo-Croatian for “newly-composed
folk music”) genre to the Sarajevo school of rock – that were the main cause of
much heated debates in the Yugoslav public and certainly not any legacy of
rock, punk or any sort of alternative music.
Nikad Robom started out in 1984 as an unofficial outpost-label of sorts for Chris Cutler’s Recommended Records, as one of the numerous local correspondents of the flourishing world-wide post-RIO phenom. Recommended Records were established in 1978 as Rē Records – a vehicle created for Chris Cutler’s own projects at the time; in the same year when the initial Rock in Opposition festival took place in London under the slogan “five rock groups the record companies don’t want you to hear” in an event which Patrick Wright described as a modern day Salon Des Refusés[3]. As the original RIO movement slowly waned towards the beginning of the 1980s, Recommended Records gradually took over its legacy as well as reputation ultimately becoming a sort of a virtual RIO, a natural extension of the movement. The ingenuity of the Recommended Records as a publishing endeavour and its unique position in the music world lays in the fact that it belongs to a handful of labels which successfully managed to seize upon a unique event in music history which
occurred sometime in mid-1970s – the rapid convergence of the worlds of rock, improvised and serious music (1960s North American avant-garde for the most part) into a single seamless horizon of looming music perspectives called New Music – and place itself as one of its main interpreters.
In the course of the following decade, Recommended Records evolved from a regular DIY garage exploit of the 1980s into an independent music colossus with a wholesale distribution of its own and an elaborate network of affiliate labels and international distributors, eventually renaming itself to RēR Megacorp in 1989 upon reporting heftier profits. The labels within this network of affiliates can be best grouped into three distinct echelons taking into account the level of cooperation these had with the Recommended Records headquarters.
The
first echelon is made of labels like Recommended Music (in West Germany), RecRec Music (in Switzerland), Recommended Records Japan (in Japan), which posed as sort of official subsidiaries to Recommended Records although they were essentially independent enterprises. These labels were generally conceived with encouragement and backing of Chris Cutler. The second echelon is made of satellite labels set up and operated as wholly independent labels which, however, were rather blunt about their allegiance to Recommended Records agenda and were practically cornerstones of the post-RIO phenomenon in their home countries. Notable examples include Bad Alchemy – run by Rigo Dittmann from
Würzburg (West Germany) and Ayaa label from Reims (France) – ran by Denis Tagu and Etienne Himalaya, respectively. Finally, the third echelon is made of DIY tribute labels ran by devoted music fans whose connections with the Recommended Records base were either cordial or entirely nonexistent. Since these editions can’t claim any direct lineage to the Recommended Records, they represent, in a way, pure strength of the post-RIO movement; the two most important names in this tier are Nikad Robom from Belgrade (Yugoslavia) and A.R.S. of Henryk Palczewski from Pila (Poland)– another cassette-only label from Eastern Europe.
In both of its
capacities as a cassette label – disseminator of information, and an active
organization – a loose network of co-conspirers, Nikad Robom was largely a
Yugoslav phenomenon, in a sense that its emergence and functioning was
essentially predicated by the integral cultural space of the former Yugoslavia.
This distinctive aspect of Nikad Robom is clearly observable in the basic-most
geography of their interests: Nikad Robom were a label based in Belgrade (SR Serbia)
interested in developments in the loosely understood post-RIO scene; in terms
of its impact, the initial Rock in Opposition was a fairly marginal event in
socialist Yugoslavia, with the important exception of Ljubljana (SR Slovenia) –
where the movement flourished around the annual Ljubljana RIO Festival and a
small local RIO scene, thus making the Slovenian capital a place of exceptional
importance for the Nikad Robom duo. However, as the body of post-RIO artists
gradually expanded and diversified during the latter half of the 1980s, the
focus of Nikad Robom’s interest shifted towards the underground music scene of Novi Sad (SAP Vojvodina, SR Serbia) which harboured one of the
most interesting articulations of these new post-RIO tendencies.
Although
attaining a cult status in Yugoslav cassette underground, Nikad Robom edition
was virtually unheard of outside Yugoslavia due to its poor or
better yet non-existent distribution; in the international tape exchange, their
releases were limited to a few occasional appearances in Recommended Records and MML
mail-order catalogues. Partly to blame for this were general East-West issues
such as the prevalent Cold War perception of Eastern Europe as a sort of a
cultural exterior[4] and the consequent lack of previously established
mechanisms of interaction; and partly it this was Nikad Robom’s principal
orientation towards the Yugoslav market – being an Eastern European label
concentrating on presenting Western alternative music to local audiences – it
made little sense for them at the time to pursue a more active agenda in promoting
their releases in the West.
Throughout
its existence Nikad Robom maintained a listener-friendly label policy aiming to
produce only a reasonable number of copies in fear of oversupplying the market[5]. The same reasoning also
applied when deciding of putting a new tape out as the number of official Nikad
Robom releases is minute compared to the number of tapes (concerts, demos, etc)
stored in its archives and distributed through internal channels[6]. This type of “socially
responsible” behaviour in self-releasing hometapers as well as labels is an
often-seen trait of Yugoslavian DIY cassette underground: akin to biologists
introducing foreign species into new environments, the care that these
individuals exhibited in utilizing possibilities of the new media speaks
volumes of the extraordinary meaning these had at the time as well as the delicate
sense of shared cultural space. ‘Production’ wasn’t a word that was particularly
frowned upon, but rather out of touch with the overall private and personal character
of the hometaping scene in Yugoslavia.
Some of the characteristics of Nikad Robom releases included innovations such as employing artists to record Nikad Robom-themed music jingles which were intended as a primitive promotional tactic for the label and the distribution. These were usually short radiophonic miniatures not longer than a minute or two, which would usually be inserted at the end of B sides regular run of play to fill up the remaining space (if there was any). Many musicians tried their luck in crafting these from the likes of Fred Frith and Black Sheep to local artists like Larynx and Spontani Telepski Duo; however, none of them was as successful so as Das Kapital with their hit Nikad Robom (verzija).
Nikad
Robom released eleven tapes in its eight year long history, some of which are highly
sought items nowadays. All Nikad Robom cassettes were featured within a single series
and, thus, had the same catalogue matrix (e.g. NR 00x) in which each new
release was attributed with an ascending catalogue number indicating its place
in the chronological order. The catalogue begins with NR 002, since NR 001
is nonexistent:
NR 002 Skeleton Crew - (1985) Esta es la victoria
NR
003 Joëlle Léandre / David Thomas and The Wooden Birds - (1986) April u
Beogradu
NR
004 The Camberwell Now - (1987) Dejavnost V Študentskem
NR
005 This Heat / Elliott Sharp Duo - (1987) Izgon bojazni iz komune
NR 006 Wondeur Brass - (1987) T'as vu mon coing
NR
007 Black Sheep - (1987) Alive in Beograd
NR 008 Tickmayer Formatio - (1987) Monumentomanija
maleroznog prvoborca
NR 009 Buga Up - (1988) Présage de lapin de la maison
NR 010 Begnagrad - (1990) Jodlovska Urška
NR 011 CirKo Della Primavera - (1990) Faima vinovo
NR 012 Institut - (1992)
Minijature
From
this eleven tapes total, there were seven full-length tapes of foreign artists
concert recordings[note 3] (from NR
002 to NR 007 and NR 009) and in most cases these were audience recordings. Nikad
Robom started off as a series of bootleg releases, but have acquired approval
for some of its releases like Esta es la
victoria and the Elliott Sharp Duo side of Izgon bojazni iz komune over a period of time[7]. The only foreign artist’s
release which had an approval before the gig was T'as vu mon coing[8]. A half of these concert
recordings – Joëlle Léandre, David Thomas and The Wooden Birds, Wondeur Brass
and Black Sheep – were recorded in Belgrade and the other half – Skeleton Crew,
The Camberwell Now, Elliott Sharp Duo and Buga Up – were taped in Ljubljana. With
the sole exception of Wondeur Brass – which was the only concert in the edition
organized by Nikad Robom – the rest of the gigs in Belgrade
and Ljubljana were
only attended by Đorđević and
Konjikušić.
On
the other hand, of the four Yugoslavian artists cassettes’ (from NR 010 to NR
012 and NR 008) featured on the Nikad Robom roster had artists’ approvals for
all of the releases[note 4] except the Monumentomanija
maleroznog prvoborca[9].
Of the four Yugoslavian projects released on the remainder tapes, all were in a
way related to Novi Sad, whether the connections were intrinsic – as with
Tickmayer Formatio and CirKo Della Primavera, who were Novi Sad-based; contextual – as with Papa Nik of the
Belgrade-based Institute, who worked in Novi Sad with Boris Kovač’s Ritual Nova when
Nikad Robom made his acquaintance; or plainly symbolical – as it was the case with
Ljubljana-based Begnagrad, who recorded their Tastare material in Novi Sad. This contextual examination already
gives us a clear insight into importance Ljubljana
and Novi Sad
had for Nikad Robom’s activities.
Thus,
the capital of Socialist Republic of Slovenia is indeed the first city crucial
in the story of Nikad Robom. Although Đorđević and Konjikušić of Nikad Robom were youngsters when the Ljubljana’s
late 1970s RIO scene
was in its full bloom, this scene still had an enormous influence upon the two as they did manage to glimpse
some of its vestiges in the 1980s. The pre-punk era Ljubljana is, thus, an inevitable topic in any account of
Nikad Robom’s activities as well as attempts of charting the very few non-punk infused
music scenes in Yugoslavia.
A closer look at the Ljubljana RIO scene of the time also provides a valuable
insight into the origins of alternative music in Yugoslavia and the history of its
exposure to Western pop culture.
Regardless of the
specificities of certain music trends or very narrow context in which they
formed – that is, whether it was punk, industrial music or Rock in Opposition –
Ljubljana was the most logical place where this sort of events happened in
Yugoslavia as it was, as an enclave of Western underground culture like Prague
or – in a more literal meaning of the term – West Berlin, somewhat of parallel
universe compared to the rest of country. Especially with advent of punk in the
1980s, Ljubljana
had become the place to go and a
common practice was established among Yugoslav alternative-heads to go there as
if on a pilgrimage. Towards the late 1980s, the Ljubljana underground played a major role in great social
and political transformations in the country by becoming the backbone of the
civil rights movement in Slovenia[10] that eventually led to Slovenska
pomlad (Slovenian for “Slovenian spring”), a milestone event en route to
Slovenian 1991 independence. The circumstances which account for the evolution
of city’s counterculture into an engine of these changes and especially those
that account for the conversion of its cultural influence into political power
are much studied phenomenon in social anthropology and post-socialist studies.
As
the most westwards-looking capital, Ljubljana
was a stepping stone for the cultural modernization of Yugoslavia.
With its levels of civil liberties and political freedom considerably higher
compared to the federal average, Ljubljana was
the place where all sorts of artistic, cultural and political excesses,
unimaginable elsewhere in Yugoslavia,
were possible. Whereas in other places in Yugoslavia,
a new era of social liberalization was heralded only with the adoption of the
1974 constitution which saw substantial shift of jurisdictions to the
individual republics, in the capital of Slovenia, however, the
constitutional changes had a practical effect of cementing a status it had already
acquired. This special status Ljubljana had
within Yugoslavia
was visible even in the 1960s, at the height of Tito’s rule, in the golden era
of Yugoslav socialism. For instance, in the 1950s and early 1960s, several
semi-independent news media outlets (centred around student, political and
theoretical magazines Beseda, Revija 57
and Perspektive) became well known
for their brazen political posturing and openly critical stances towards the
communist authorities[11]. As the decade progressed, the presence of numerous
subjects from the countercultural fringe became endemic to the city; among them
are OHO conceptual art group (1966), experimental theatre Pupilija Ferkeverk
(1967) or G7 hippie commune in the northwestern suburb of Tacen (1970), etc.
In the early 1970s two important processes happened within the
counterculture-sphere of the Slovenian capital: ‘low’ (or pop-) culture
tendencies gradually took hold in the Ljubljana art underground, which was dominated by the transcendental conceptualism of
the analytical wing of OHO Group throughout the late 1960, while in the same time rock
music became the most important cultural driving force of youth culture. The
combined effect of two processes inevitably led to narrowing of the gap between
of contemporary art practices (or ‘high’ culture) and youth (or ‘low’) culture.
The so-called ‘low’ culture current in the Ljubljana art underground was
mainly demonstrated through appropriation of the Western discourse of 1960s
protest culture and urban revolt aided by the advent of new media such as film,
comics, graffiti, etc; it was
primarily embodied in poets, performers and scene luminaries like Vojin ‘Chubby’ Kovač
and Ivan ‘Feo’ Volarič, who brought the anarchistic and above all anti-institutional
impetus of the contemporary movements like Fluxus, Neo Dada and Situationism[note 5]. On the other hand, the prevalent forms of music expression within
Ljubljana youth culture moved away from the singer-songwriter paradigm of early
rock, psychedelic folk and urban troubadours of the early 1960s towards a more
physical and disorderly rock music forms of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The
Ljubljana-based avant-rock band Buldožer, which begins operating in early 1975,
is crucial not only for this process, but also because its appearance on the
mid-1970s Yugoslav rock music scene signaled an end of its mimetic phase of
development. Parallel to its colossal emancipatory potential for the Yugoslav
rock scene, Buldožer played an equally important role in the local Ljubljana rock scene as a predecessor and a close collaborator
of the Ljubljana’s tentative RIO clique around Begnagrad, Srp and D’Pravda. Over a relatively
short time-period, the synergetic effect of the two processes produced a
fertile creative climate from which a body of prolific authors emerged that
defined the Ljubljana
counterculture-sphere of the mid-1970s.
The outline of the new scene was probably most adequately presented in
1977 on the Dani mlade slovenačke kulture
(Serbo-Croatian for “Days of Slovenian youth culture”) event in Belgrade, a typical sort
of socialist manifestation that played an important role in the mechanism of
cultural cross-pollination between individual republics. The event showcasing
modern Slovenian youth culture took place in Studentski Kulturni Centar (or SKC; Serbo-Croatian for “Student Culture
Centre”) venue from 15.11.-19.11.1977; it was curated by Peter Mlakar, who coordinated it
for Zveza Socialistične Mladine Slovenije
(or ZSMS; Slovenian for “League of Socialist Youth of Slovenia“[note 6]).
The Belgrade expedition numbered around fifty
creative individuals, philosophers and literati, the majority of which hailed
from Ljubljana.
Among these were writers (Andrej Medved, Milan Kleč, Vladimir Memon, Jaša
Zlobec, Uroš Kalčič, Drago Jančar, Ivo Svetina, Zlatko Zajec), poets (Milan
Jesih, Miha Avanzo, Ifigenija Zagoričnik, Marko Švabič, Emil Filipčič, Iztok
Osojnik, Jože Rozman), the so-called rock poets (Ivan 'Feo' Volarič, Blaž Ogorevc,
Petar Mlakar, Vojin 'Chubby' Kovač and Marko Brecelj), bands (Pankrti,
Buldožer, Begnagrad), filmmakers (Naško Križnar of OHO Group, Slobodan
Valentinčič of OM produkcija, Tomaž Kralj, Silvan Furlan of Solkanska filmska
šola, comic artists (Kostja Gatnik), photographers (Milan Pajk), painters (Savo
Valentinčič), etc.
Throughout the event the audience reception in Belgrade was fairly good, yet
the Dani mlade slovenačke kulture had
even a more significant impact upon its participants as a crucial meeting point
for themselves; never before has the Slovenian counterculture of the 1970s
gathered in such vast numbers and in such a representative selection. Its
importance was probably best
elucidated by writer Vladimir Memon in his poetic
account in Tribuna titled Kaj so mi prinseli Dnevi mlade slovenske
kulture v Beogradu (Slovenian for “What have the Days of Slovenian youth culture
in Belgrade
brought me”)[12]. In Serbian rock
press, the Dani mlade slovenačke kulture
event is often noted because of its significance in the context of punk historiography
as the Pankrti concert was probably the first ever punk gig in Serbia.
In
the sweltering atmosphere of the late 1960s Ljubljana Radio Študent – the first
independent radio station in Yugoslavia
– was established in 1969 by Študentska
organizacija Univerze v Ljubljani (Slovenian for “Student Organisation of
the University of
Ljubljana”). The act of
its founding was as a part of concession measures on the part of the
authorities to appease students’ anger over partial media blackout in Slovenia
during 1968 protests. In the following decades, Radio Študent will become an
important factor in the Slovenian media landscape, voicing political and social
marginals, facilitating public dialogue and playing a crucial role in
establishment of the civil rights movement in Slovenia. However, an equally
important aspect of its activities presents its engagement within youth culture
through evolving subculture identities and promoting underground music.
One of the individuals responsible for developing and fostering such a reputation for Radio Študent was Stane
Sušnik, one of its veteran music editors (from 1971 to 1976). In 1972, Stane
Sušnik paid a visit to London
in order to arrange deals with various record labels to promote their releases
on Radio Študent. Among others, he met up with Richard Branson – the owner of
the, at the time, newly formed Virgin label and a future business magnate – and
agreed for Virgin to send a free copy of each release they put out to Radio
Študent[13].
Thus, with the constant influx of new releases from Western Europe, the
programme of Radio Študent got significantly ahead of its peers in Yugoslavia and labels like Virgin had, in
return, got its releases popularized in Yugoslavia, an Eastern European
country starving for Western pop-culture.
In
1974, Stane Sušnik met Aleks Lenard, a young journalist and a creative rock devotee, and
offered him to do a show to present records that none of other editor-DJ’s
wanted to play. That’s how Untergrunt Molekula,
the first radio show in Yugoslavia
dedicated to non-academic experimentalism, came into being[14].
Aleks Lenard’s Untergrunt Molekula
focused on the very broad spectre of non-commercial music associated with the
progressive rock etiquette with a special emphasize on Krautrock and German
electronic music, but also the Canterbury scene, Zeuhl, space rock, American outsider rock, with even a hint of Musique Concrete
here and there. Parallel to his engagement as a DJ on Radio Študent, Aleks Lenard wrote
extensively on the subject of creative rock music for various Slovenian
magazines (Stop, Tribuna, Mladina, Delo and Dnevnik among others). Untergrunt Molekula lasted in its
nascent form until around 1978, when the newly formed Rock in Opposition
movement took momentum in the experimental rock underground (as it also did in
the focus of the show), thus prompting Lenard to drop the show’s German-bent
name and change it to, simply – Rock V Opoziciji (Slovenian for “Rock in Opposition”)[15].
During
his tenure at Radio
Študent, Aleks
Lenard became increasingly fascinated with the RIO movement and after attending
the second RIO main event in Milan, he decided
to bring the RIO festival to Yugoslavia[16]. The general rehearsal took place in 1979 when Lenard,
together with Bratko Bibič of Begnagrad,
organized an Etron Fou Leloublan gig in Ljubljana[17]. After shrewdly acquiring the financial
backing of Kulturna
Skupnost SR Slovenije (Slovenian for “Culture Community of SR Slovenia”) – the Party’s official culture
funding institution of the time – on the basis of RIO artists’ self-proclaimed
leftist sentiments and alleged anti-capitalist agenda, the plan was set in
motion with the organizational help of Študentski
kulturno-umetniški center (or ŠKUC; Slovenian for “Student Cultural
Centre”)[18]. From 1980 until 1982,
Aleks Lenard organized three RIO Festivals in Ljubljana and numerous
other RIO-related solo concerts in cooperation with ŠKUC[note 7].
Although RIO had disintegrated as a movement
by the beginning of 1980, there were still a lot of events bearing its name
well into the second half of the 1980s.
The first edition of these Ljubljana RIO festivals was held from 20.06.-21.06.1980 in the garden of the Rio inn[note 8] in downtown Ljubljana, a well known gathering spot of poets, artists, but also members of the Slovenian political elite throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The guests at the inaugurate two-day edition of the festival were Art Zoyd (Maubeuge, France), Univers Zero (Brussels, Belgium), Mamma Non Piangere (Milan, Italy) and Srp (Ljubljana, SR Slovenia). Although it wasn’t the first time RIO-related artists performed in countries behind the Iron Curtain[note 9], the importance of the Ljubljana RIO festival lies principally in the fact that it was the first RIO manifestation in Eastern Europe. On the second day of the festival some six hundred people attended the shows of Art Zoyd and Univers Zero[19]. Among the originally invited bands were also Etron Fou Leloublan and This Heat, but both were unable to attend the festival[20].
The
second edition of the RIO festival didn’t bore
the name of its autonym as it was conceived and promoted as ŠKUC-eva Novoletna razprodaja (Slovenian
for “ŠKUC’s New Years’s
closeout”) instead.
This unofficial edition of the Ljubljana RIO
Festival took place on 17.12.1981 at Ljubljana’s
Gospodarsko razstavišče exhibition centre presenting a line-up of only Slovenian
RIO bands due to a lack of finances[21].
The headliners were Begnagrad, D’Pravda, Srp (Ljubljana, SR Slovenia) and
Istranova (Izola, SR Slovenia), while the audience
saw four more performances, namely by an Oberkrainer
tin orchestra Pleh Banda, poet and performer Andrej Rozman Roza, singer-songwriter
Marko Brecelj of Buldožer (Ljubljana, SR Slovenia) and multi-instrumentalist Alfredo Lacosegliaz of Gruppo
Folk Internazionale (Milan, Italy).
The third and last Ljubljana RIO festival was held from
02.06.-03.06.1982 at Križanke hall and it was actually conceived as a
dual-event by ŠKUC, fusing RIO festivals’ concert programme with the artistic programme of the third
edition of Spomladanski festival (Slovenian for “Spring festival”)[22],
an annual festival dedicated to street theatre and the performing arts. In this
way, the joint festival saw music concerts by Art Zoyd (Maubeuge, France), Black Sheep (Maassluis, Netherlands), Andrea Centazzo (Udine, Italy),
Peter Frohmader’s Nekropolis (Munich, West Germany), Christopher Wangro’s
Circus Janus (New York, US), Begnagrad, D’Pravda and, oddly enough, Laibach (Ljubljana, SR Slovenia) being sporadically intermingled with theatre performances
by Gledališče Ane Monró, F.V. 112/15 (Ljubljana, SR Slovenia), Kugla Glumište (Zagreb, SR Croatia) and Claudio Misculin (Trieste, Italy). From 1983 onward, a
similarly formulated, but much more conceptually loose Druga godba (Slovenian for “Other band”) festival followed in RIO
Festival’s place.
In
retrospect, it seems that the second edition of Ljubljana RIO festivals stands
out probably as the most intriguing, not only in terms of its programme, but
also conceptually. Unlike the first and last edition
of the festival, its programme wasn’t curated by Aleks Lenard but instead by
Emil ‘Fanči’ Filipčič, later a well-known writer and playwright. Due to
a lack of funds, the whole festival was put together
in a rather improvised, ad hoc fashion; since it was organized half a year behind its original
schedule, only local (Slovenian) performers were available for booking and
henceforth the media interest was much lower – thus making it a susceptible ground for different
sorts of conceptual experimentation.
In this sense, it is interesting to mention that the 1981 edition of the
Ljubljana RIO festival is, in Yugoslav alternative rock concert organizing practice, the
earliest recorded instance of billing grass-roots folk musicians – the aforementioned Oberkrainer
tin orchestra Pleh Banda
– along with musicians with background in rock music.
This practice, which was popularized by WOMAD
festivals from 1982 onwards, was later co-opted and practically turned into a
winning formula by Druga Godba – Ljubljana RIO festivals’
successor – from the first year of its
functioning. Although this was the first time something like this happened
within the context of Yugoslav concert practice, it would be erroneous to
attribute the whole paradigm shift solely to Emil
Filipčič as Begnagrad were in fact the first to consciously engage in
blurring these differences by performing on various folk music festivities
throughout Slovenia.
In
terms of its programme, the second Ljubljana RIO festival nowadays seems even
more valuable. Far from being another stop for the global RIO caravan alongside
Milan, Reims, Paris, Brussels, or Stockholm where the audience would get a
glimpse into the current state of affairs in the world of RIO, the Ljubljana
RIO festival headlined all three bands that were relevant for the relatively
short-lived RIO-momentum in Ljubljana – Begnagrad, Srp and D’Pravda – thus
turning it effectively into a feast of Yugoslavian (or better yet, Slovenian
RIO)[note 10]. The idea to present such a line-up was virtually impossible in
the preceding year since Begnagrad were on hiatus at the time, while D’Pravda’s
forerunner – Papa Kinjal Band were disbanded. The only time the three bands
ever appeared again on stage was during the 1982 edition of Desant na Beograd (Serbo-Croatian for
“Raid on Belgrade”) mini-fest, an overview of
Slovenian alternative bands in Belgrade.
Since
the Ljubljana three never identified as a RIO bands on the level of
self-subjectivization (albeit Begnagrad often recognized its influence) and Srp
were even staunchly opposed to the RIO label in context of their music[23], for proper contextualizing
it’s important to clarify the relationship of the Ljubljana RIO three with both
the historical RIO movement (1978-1980) and its unofficial continuation in the
1980s – the post-RIO movement.
In Yugoslavia, Begnagrad, Srp and D’Pravda were
first brought into connection with the RIO
movement around 1980 or 1981 by the Ljubljana RIO Festival mastermind Aleks
Lenard writing for Stop and Mladina. This was quickly picked up by
rock press in their native Ljubljana – in particular journalists like Drago
Vovk (Džuboks, Stop) and Marko Uršič (Tribuna)
– and, soon, this perception was cemented with the three’s participation on ŠKUC’s Ljubljana RIO festivals. In
three separate editions of the Ljubljana RIO festival, the three bands
performed on two editions each, in this way becoming somewhat of a staple
ingredient of the festival. However, in international RIO circles, the Ljubljana three usually
weren’t considered part of the corpus of post-RIO artists during their
respective lifetimes, with the sole exception of Begnagrad (in their second
phase, 1981-1984). There are a couple of reasons for this, the most important being
– the absence of RIO self-identification on the part of the bands[note 11], relatively late (Srp) or
entirely nonexistent (D’Pravda) physical releases which rendered them invisible
to prospective RIO audiences in the West as well as detachment from the
cultural mainframe which shaped the official narrative of the movement.
However,
in the same time, the Ljubljana RIO three still shared some significant traits
with the RIO movements such as functioning as a two-fold opposition to rock’s commodification and punk’s musical
reductionism as well as working actively outside of the music industry. On an
individual band level, there are more vital characteristics that point to creative
and ideological synchronicity with the RIO
movement such as D’Pravda’s social commitment to rock. Likewise, the influence
of the performing arts isn’t as negligible correlation since these were, in many ways, close to the RIO movement[note 12]. This influence is articulated in different
ways with the Ljubljana three – with Srp through
cabaret tradition, with D’Pravda through some sort of a guerrilla agitprop
theatre and with Begnagrad via a proto-culture jamming intervention with the
context of performing; and this is where the influence of Ljubljana’s
1970s non-institutional theatre scene upon the RIO
three becomes apparent.
Due
to the shared rehearsal room in the basement of the fourth block of Rožna Dolina student
village, Srp
found themselves increasingly enmeshed with the nucleus of the Ljubljana
non-institutional theatre scene which occupied it and, as a consequence,
eventually started incorporating theatrical elements in their live shows. Although
the basement rehearsal spot – commonly known as Vetrnica (Slovenian for “Windmill”) after the theatre group of Vlado
Šav[24] which anchored itself there
in 1973 – was originally utilized by alternative theatre groups, by the end of
1970s, music acts, an overwhelming majority of which were punk-infused, began
rehearsing there. Srp started practicing at Vetrnica around mid-1980 when the
space was still occupied by the original Vetrnica troupe as well as three other
theatre groups: Performance, Pocestno gledališče Predrazpadom (Slovenian for “Street
theatre Abouttobreak”) and Dolina tišine (Slovenian for “Valley of silence”).
The
Performance group comprised of Neven Korda, Zemira Alajbegović, Samo Ljubešič,
Marina Gržinić and Dušan Mandič. Already in the autumn of 1980, the group morphed[note 13] into FV
112/15 with the addition of Aldo Ivančić and Dario Sereval. The FV 112/15 crew were
strongly defined by the punk movement. In late 1981, after claiming
the premises of Disko Študent club (which
were right across Vetrnica), they turned it in one of the first regular punk
venues in Ljubljana and Yugoslavia – the famous Disko FV. On the other hand, Pocestno gledališče Predrazpadom
troupe – essentially an
enterprise of Andrej ‘Roza’ Rozman and Marko Kovačič – was rooted deeply within the
Ljubljana’s hippie contraculture of the 1970s. While
both Vetrnica and FV 112/15 pursued a style of physical theatre in tradition of
Grotowski and Barba, Pocestno gledališče Predrazpadom – were inclined
towards less hermetic traditions like street theatre,
circus and variety[25]. In March of 1981, Roza initiated
a series of weekly cabaret instalments in Disko Študent for which Srp co-realized
with his troupe and other Vetrnica musicians a performance titled Cabaret. Not long after this, Srp devised and produced
their own cabaret performance titled Črna Mačka (Slovenian for “Black Cat”),
which proved to be an important formative experience for the group. In the
end, it was Roza’s influence which eventually skewed Srp’s creative sensibility
towards their unique brew of variety and musical theatre.
Besides Pocestno gledališče Predrazpadom, Roza was
the driving force behind a number of Ljubljana’s
non-institutional theatre efforts of the era such as Cirkus sedma bodočnost
(Slovenian for “Circus seventh future”), pagadajpagapustime as well as the Spomladanski festival street theatre
festival. Among other things he was – together with Samo Ljubešič from theatre groups
Performance and FV 112/15 and Iztok Saksida – the founding
member of
D’Pravda, another scion of the Ljubljana
hippie contraculture of the 1970s. D’Pravda was a formation that flourished on
the intersection of fringe theatre, para-artistic practices and political pamphleteering.
However, what set D’Pravda apart from Srp and the rest of the non-institutional
theatre scene in the basement of Rožna Dolina facilities was its
logocentrism. Since D’Pravda was, first and foremost, a vehicle for political, poetic and
philosophical musings of Iztok Saksida Jakac, the whole concept was structured
around the texts Saksida wrote.
Begnagrad,
on the other hand, famously harboured affiliation with the Ljubljana ciné-club
culture producing soundtracks for a number of experimental shorts and feature
films (Franci Slak among others) as well as through Bratko Bibič’s own
involvement in that field.
In
this sense, also characteristic of the Ljubljana RIO three was negotiation with
different contexts in which the bands were performing: Begnagrad, for instance,
were famously attempting to present themselves as authentic folk musicians and
in this way smuggle their highly-idiosyncratic style into narodno-zabavna glasba (Slovenian for “folk entertainment music”) milieu;
D’Pravda played the most of its gigs as split bills with punk bands since they felt a necessity to juxtapose their work
in relation to punk movement; Srp, on the other hand, were close to the
performing arts scene and oscillated between several different music contexts
like RIO, jazz, punk and acoustic music while in the same time considering
themselves a part of the New Simplicity[26] tradition. Whereas
members of Begnagrad and D’Pravda were a few years older than their Srp
compatriots – and similarly to their RIO counterparts – basically hippie prog
rockers trying to retain relevance in an era increasingly defined by punk, Srp,
as music academy kids, had a somewhat of a different perspective and would
often describe their experience with the Ljubljana music scene as ‘unadjusted’[27].
Among the bands belonging to the evanescent late 1970s RIO-momentum in Ljubljana, Begnagrad are
by far the most relevant by the scope of their influence in both local and
international terms. Begnagrad were essentially an avant-prog band with
deviations ranging from folk to jazz, which was in a way fellow traveller of the RIO
movement – even
though they were entirely unaware of its existence. Originating in an Eastern
European country where the flow of cultural information was significantly
slower compared to the West, Begnagrad developed a unique prog aesthetic that was
in a way reminiscent of Western RIO bands in a case of pure zeitgeist at work.
The
history of Begnagrad covers two active phases of six years – the first,
1975-1979 phase, and the second, 1981-1983 phase – which are complemented with a two year
intermission period from 1979 to 1981. Begnagrad formed in 1975 in Ljubljana’s Bežigrad district around the
creative axis of Bratko
Bibič (accordion) and Bogo Pečnikar (clarinet). Although various members came
and gone over the years and even whole the line-up changed at one point,
however the Bibič-Pečnikar duo remained the nucleus of the band.
In
the first phase, Begnagrad’s style is characterized by creative
interplay and amalgamation
of seemingly irreconcilable forms: swing jazz and progressive rock influences
on the one side and Alpine folk traditions on the other. The group plays along
with their narodno-zabavna image and
regularly plays in throughout Slovenia
around folk music festivals. The recordings from this period can be seen on
cassette release Jodlovska Urška
(Nikad Robom-Belgrade, 1990) as well as the CD version of the same recordings
published as Tastare (Bess Pro
Market-Ljubljana, 1993). Later, in the second phase, New Music and RIO movement became a significant influence upon
Begnagrad and the bands avant-prog style gets much more intentionally hermetic.
They continue touring mainly in Slovenia,
but also undertake two major European tours. The recordings from this period
are documented on the self-titled LP Begnagrad (ZKP
RTVL-Ljubljana, 1982) as well as on the CD version of the same material Konzert For A
Broken Dance (AYAA-Reims, 1990)
A more detailed account of Begnagrad and their activities is to be found here.
Srp (Slovenian for “Sickle”) was a fairly unique endeavor in terms of
the post-RIO standards of the time, since its origins are delicately interwoven
with the origins of non-institutionalized theatre in Ljubljana, while its
practice occupied a vast median ground between the performing arts – especially
traditions such as cabaret, variety show or circus – and music – usually various forms of jazz and
improvised music. The influence of the performing arts is particularly visible
upon the very way Srp conceptualized their shows with the introduction of loose scripts and performance segmentation
and even moreso in visual structuring of their shows – employing stage and costume designers, featuring
props, lighting, etc.
Srp
officially began in 1979 with a concert in Galerija ŠKUC on 06.06.1979 which
marked an end of a nearly two-year experimenting period with a number of trial
musicians and exploring diverse music directions under different monikers; the
line up finally stabilized around a core of Matjaž Sekne (viola), Primož
Simončič (saxophone), Gojmir Lešnjak (bassoon, vocals) and Tadej Pogačar
(double bass), the creative direction became less opaque and Srp presented themselves
with a free improv set-up involving a boys choir, a range of modified
instruments alongside classical ones, scrap metal as sound source and collages
of shortwave radio emissions. In the beginning, Srp’s live performances were rather
sporadic; apart from the inaugurate concert – there were only two more concerts
realized by the end of 1980, the first on the occasion of the premier edition
of RIO festival in Ljubljana on 20.06.1980 and the other on a event with Papa
Kinjal Band in Disko Študent at the Rožna Dolina student village on 05.10.1980.
The ensuing period from mid-1981 until late 1983 marked the most
fruitful stage in Srp’s development with a surge of activities regarding more
conventional types of music performances – including festival appearances on ŠKUC-eva Novoletna razprodaja (the follow-up edition of RIO festival in
Ljubljana) on 17.12.1981, 22nd edition of Omladinski Festival in Subotica (SAP Vojvodina, SR Serbia) on 20.05.1982,
Desant na Beograd on 06.06.1982, Rock Otočec in Otočec ob Krki (SR Slovenia)
on 03.08.1983 and regular concerts in Ljubljana, Zagreb (SR Croatia), Kranj and
Novo Mesto (SR Slovenia); as well as the intermedial types of performances – including the Črna Mačka (Slovenian for “Black Cat”) variety show, conceived, written and
performed for the weekly rendition of Kabaret
v Disku Študent in Disko Študent on 07.04.1981 and the self-descriptive “musical
scenic onomatopoeic number“ of Desant na
Rt Dobre Nade (Slovenian for “Raid on the Cape of Good Hope”) performed on
07.04.1982 in Delavski Dom in Kranj.
In
July of 1983 Srp appeared on the television show Pop
Godba (Slovenian for “Pop Bands”), which was their most publicized public
performance yet. By the beginning of 1984, there was a steady decline in Srp’s
activities and a general feeling within the group that it surpassed its zenith.
After a sold-out concert in Ljubljana’s
Slovensko Mladinsko Gledališče on 09.11.1983,
Srp go on a five months long hiatus only to return in the spring of 1984 to record
and release their eponymous LP Srp (ZKP RTVL-Ljubljana, 1984). The release of
the debut album was followed by a string of promotional activities in the form
of an another concert in Slovensko Mladinsko Gledališče, a second appearance on the Pop Godba television show as well as production of a short
documentary film about the group titled Srp, which was directed and scripted by Jan Zakonjšek.
Although Srp haven’t left much material evidence of their six year long
existence, apart from its first and only LP album and a small posthumous CD retrospective titled Zadnja Večerja (Arhefon-Ljubljana,
2002), they were an indispensable part of the vivid landscape of the
heterogeneous post-hippy underground of the late 1970s Ljubljana that survived
the advent of punk and managed to retain its presence in the Slovenian capital
well into the second half of the 1980s.
D’Pravda was the last offspring of a long and often chaotic
anti-tradition of bands which stemmed from a conceptually broad and
organizationally loose collectivist movement that flourished in Ljubljana from mid-1970s until
early 1980s. The said movement included, among other things, a string of rock
bands – D’Pravda’s
predecessors – such as Ljubljanska
železniška postaja (Slovenian for “Ljubljana
railway station”), Dr. Jelka Tottenbrenner, Papa Kinjal Band and many others[28].
Covering a time span of almost one full year – from late 1981 until late 1982 – D‘Pravda was
certainly the longest running project in this lineage and, along with Papa
Kinjal Band, probably the most widely-recognizable of its kin. Although
D‘Pravda boasted an entourage of ever-shifting members like its
predecessor-bands, the creative and ideological spiritus movens was embodied in one man – sociologist and comparativist Iztok
Saksida Jakac.
Similiarly to their RIO counterparts, D‘Pravda’s
1970s predecessor projects like Papa Kinjal Band took a stance against the
processes through which rock music was commodified, integrated into the corpus
of mainstream culture and, finally, transposed into representation. They
maintained almost a Situationist critique of rock music’s role in contemporary
society: not only that it lost its delegation and became a capitalist
enterprise, but also that it turned from a subversive movement of youth
population into an instrument of control and surveilance of the said population[29].
Hence these bands often played with the conventions that surrounded rock music of
their time – like
self-mythologization, personality cult and even band names – and used an
assortment of art theory informed tactics in order to prevent their potential
instrumentalization such as anti-historization and deconstruction. For
instance, the bands had a habit of disbanding and reforming under a new name
every now and then, often utilizing a new band name on a show-to-show basis[30].
In 1979, Papa Kinjal Band announced an all day festival with an impressive list
of performing bands – only to carry out every single of the concerts themselves under
a different
guise[31]. In doing so, the bands within this tradition, together
with the movement which spurred it, are one of the most intriguing examples of
the 1960s counterculture utopianism still lingering in the artistic practices of
1970s Yugoslavia.
The movement was a collective endeavor of fledgling counterculture
radicals, artistic proletariat and hippie intelligentsia – an eclectic mix of conceptual
artists, visual artists, poets, literates, philosophers, musicians, filmmakers, dramatists and
theatre theorists of differing creative approaches and levels of formal
training in the arts – which successfully implemented a series of events in the
Slovenian capital from 1975 to 1980. The movement thrived in its self-imposed anonymity; it had no name
nor any formal membership due to the disidentification policy which prevented any names
being associated with it. The movement fiercely rejected every
attempt of formalization (systematical archiving, preserving records of
activities, etc), institutionalization (exhibitions, exposing in the context of
art) and mediatization of their work in general[32]. Although the
movement acted as an impersonal collective that numbered up to thirty-something
people at some time periods, several prominent individuals – or non-members – were its basic
driving force; in the beginning, these were, first and foremost, Iztok Osojnik,
Jani Osojnik, Dušan ‘Hup’ Pirih and Iztok Saksida Jakac, while towards the end
of the 1970s, people like Andrej ‘Roza’ Rozman, Marko Kovačič and Gorazd
Osojnik also played important roles.
The unified front of the movement was comprised of several distinct
sections that roughly correspond to the variety of artistic media practiced
therein as well as the mélange of individual activities linked with the
movement’s functioning – ranging from publishing (IUPNA) and establishing of communal
spaces (Gradaška, Lahov graben, Žibrše, Kambreško I and II) to leisure
activities such as mountaineering.
The individual sections sometimes operated synchronously with one
another and other occasions completely independently, mostly depending on the
nature of the concrete action or event taking place; the events which were
usually the most collectivist in nature were happenings and installations like Barvanje Čopove ulice (Slovenian for “Painting
the Čop street”), Predsedniški tekač
(Slovenian for “Presidental Runner”), Kuhanje
ujetega Bledoličneža (Slovenian for “Cooking of the captured Paleface”), Šetanje po predsjedničkom sagu (Serbo-Croatian for
“A walk on the presidential carpet”), Avion
(Slovenian for “Airplane”) and so on[33]. An important characteristic
of these events was that due to the
volatile structure of the movement and its highly-permeable nature one often
couldn’t differentiate between a member of the audience and a participant in
the action.
Writing in an essay titled Biti Hup,
an introductory essay to the artistic opus of his long-time friend and
collaborator Dušan ‘Hup’ Pirih[note 14], Iztok Osojnik notes that
there are three sections which we can recognize as the three major currents
within the movement: the visual arts section (Hup, Iztok Šmajs, Vesna Črnivec,
Miran Mohar, Nagy Mirt, Iztok Osojnik, Jani Osojnik, Gregor Zaplotnik), which
formed initially around the group exhibition Mož (Slovenian for “Man”) in Mala Dvorana ŠN Ljubljana in 1975; the
theatre section (Andrej ‘Roza’ Rozman, Aina Šmid, Jani Osojnik et al.), which in itself presents a
sort of a nucleus of non-institutional theatre practices in Ljubljana through
the activities of Pocestno gledališče Predrazpadom – a precursor of Gledališče Ane Monró – operating from
1978 to 1981 and its own precursor in the form of the rather short-lived
theatre pagadajpagapustime (197?-1978); rock group section (Iztok Saksida
Jakac, Žiga Saksida, Roza, Zoran Pistotnik, Bratko Bibič, Veronique [surname
unknown], etc), a tradition of makeshift rock/performance groups heralded by
Ljubljanska železniška postaja, a band featured in the 1975 performance titled Predstavi v ljubljanski operi (Slovenian
for “Present at the Ljubljana opera”) and later continued by one-off bands such
as Carmina Burana, Dr. Jelka Tottenbrenner, Ful ZWare Kavalar, Sedem sester iz
Brna (Slovenian for “Seven sisters from Brno”), Papa Kinjal Band and D’Pravda[34].
Apart from the three main currents there were also a very active
literary section (Jure Detela, Iztok Osojnik, Iztok Saksida) – with the podrealizem
(subrealism) movement; theoretical section – with Alef and queraxtizmetika groups);
drama section –
which produced several live performances such as Nezgoda na otoku Treh Milj (Slovenian for “The
Three Mille Island accident”) and Maska
rdeče smrti (Slovenian for “The mask of the red death”); photo section
(Hup, Vesna Črnivec, Bojan Brecelj, Smiljan Šiška, Borut Šraj) and many other.
However, one of the movement’s most acclaimed and best-documented
exploits was a project-installation named Hidrogizma,
devised and developed by a nucleus of Vesna Črnivec, Iztok Osojnik, Jani
Osojnik, Iztok ‘Muni’ Šmajs, Jani ‘Flavta’ Batista, with the help of Hup, Gregor
Razpotnik, Miran Mohar and Andrej Plahuta among others.
In categorical terms, Hidrogizma is a peculiar mix between a spatial installation, sound
sculpture and a musical instrument in the best tradition of Fluxus-type of intermedialism[35].
Topologically, it is a gargantuan indoor construction, consisting of a basic
frame scaffolding mounted on top of which is a web of pipes, vessels, gutters
and funnels – an
intricate system of elevated water passageways; the plumbing has drippers, shower
heads and purposefully drilled perforations on places so that water could drip
onto an assortment of resonant surfaces placed throughout the room (usually tin
materials like cans, buckets and barrels but occasionally also scrap metal,
tall springs, etc) as well as in large water collecting containers[36],
thus producing a sonic environment in the form of a chance-orchestrated
polyphonic dripping concerto. In later installments of Hidrogizma – innovations in the form of localized water organs (‘played’ by
flowing water) were incorporated into the structure as well as various
experiments with the acoustics of the water collecting containers with the
addition of amplified aquarium pumps, etc. Since Hidrogizma was a site-specific installation, it was different every
time it was (re-)constructed – as many construction factors depended on where it was actually installed[note 15].
From 1975 to 1980 the movement persevered as a unified corpus, while
from 1980 onwards –
coinciding with Iztok and Jani Osojnik's exile into Far
East over a two months prison sentence they received for their
1979 publication titled Vandali
(Slovenian for “Vandals”) – it fragmented into several smaller units that
continued its tradition for awhile into the 1980s. Most notably, these were
Gledališče Ane Monró, painting duo Osojnik-Hup, photography workshops at KUD
France Prešern and last but not least – D'Pravda. In the August of 1980, the bulk of the
movement’s participants had partaken in the Dubrovački
dani mladog teatra (Serbo-Croatian for “Dubrovnik youth theatre days”). The string of
different actions, performances and happenings carried out at the festival such
as Maska
rdeče smrti, Zvukovno
kazalište Hidrogizma (Serbo-Croatian for “Sound theatre Hidrogizma”) and Šetanje
po predsjedničkom sagu among others – present a culmination of the movement’s artistic
practice as a unified corpus. The proceedings also saw a performance of Papa
Kinjal Band at the Lazaretti art space with almost 60 people present on stage
at one point, a show which turned out to be a its final grand gesture.
Somewhere in late 1981, D’Pravda – the last in the line of the movement’s
rock groups’ lineage – came into being. Its founders were two of the
movements’ most enthusiastic participants – Iztok Saksida Jakac and Andrej ‘Roza’
Rozman, the former a sociologist and comparativist and the latter a self-styled
playwright, poet and performer. The idea was to form a project with whom they
would improvise around the texts Saksida wrote. The name of the band was
derived through word play – by juxtaposing ‘D’, the transcribed variant of the English definite
article the – in front of ‘Pravda’,
the name of the Soviet daily which functioned as an official organ of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The name D’Pravda also partly alluded to the XV and XVI century Slovene peasant revolts called Boj za staro pravdo (Slovenian for: "The fight for old rights"). With Roza
as the lead singer and Saksida as the lead guitarist, the two additionally recruited Samo Ljubešić (double bass),
Mitja Veronek (trombone), Matija Pribošič (clarinet) and Zorko Škvor (drums) to
get the band started. However, since Roza left D’Pravda soon in order to
pursue his newly founded theatre troupe Gledališče Ane Monró, the band added Jaša Kramaršič on vocals.
What
was a conceptual cornerstone for the movement’s rock section from Papa Kinjal
Band to D’Pravda, was that none of the musicians involved actually knew to play
any instruments – they were all entirely self-taught, on the very beginning of
the learning process. Their flimsy musicking abilities allowed them to play
only the most rudimentary mixture of jazz-rock with carnival overtones which,
coupled with their knack for improvisation, often made D’Pravda music tantamount to disorderly racket. With their
theatrical presentation and politically charged texts – usually paroles about
the working class and socialst self-management laden with profanities or just
plain nonsense in verse – D’Pravda were known for their confrontational live performances, resulting
in a
large number of interrupted gigs (especially while Roza was their singer[37]). In this way D’Pravda were
essentially doing punk with non-punk means and would often jokingly market their
music as “socialist realist punk”.
The first live outing of Saksida’s squad took place on 17.12.1981 on the
occasion of the second Ljubljana RIO festival – alternatively billed as ŠKUC-eva Novoletna razprodaja – together with
Begnagrad, Srp and Istranova at the Gospodarsko razstavišče exhibition centre
in Ljubljana.
The next performance of D’Pravda was on a fundraising event dedicated to the
plight of the Polish workers brought about by an aggressive government
crack-down on the Solidarity movement. The event titled Koncert solidarnosti z bojem poljskih delavcev (Slovenian for ”A
concert in solidarity with the struggle of Polish workers”) was organized by ZMSS
and the Yugoslav Red Cross and held in Hala Tivoli in front of four thousand
spectators on 04.02.1982[38]. D’Pravda presented themselves together
with punk bands like Paraf, Pankrti, Buldogi, Šund and Martin Krpan, but also a singer-songwriter Jani Kovačič.
Almost
two months after, on 30.03.1982 D’Pravda play a gig at Disko Študent in
Rožna Dolina student village; this performance was the first show organized by
FV 112/15 to be recorded on video. Then came Desant na Beograd mini-festival – a rock-congregation
of Slovenia’s most prominent alternative groups; D’Pravda performed there along
with Begnagrad, Srp, Marko Brecelj, Jani Kovačič and the Netherlands-based
Black Sheep (who stepped in at the last minute instead of the Slovenian punk
prime-movers Pankrti) in a dismally empty hall of Dom Omladine Beograda on
06.06.1982. However, this didn’t stop D’Pravda from delivering one of their
most conceptual performances to date and thus antagonizing little of the
audience members present at the event; one journalist for Džuboks wrote: five blokes in black suits, with black
sunglasses – just singing; or talking while clapping with their hands[39].
On 14.07.1982, D'Pravda enters into a recording studio most likely for
the first and only time in their short lifespan to record a ten-track demo.
Apart from the usual suspects – Iztok Saksida, Jaša Kramaršič, Mitja Veronek, Samo Ljubešić, Matija
Pribošič and Zorko Škvor – the D’Pravda crew at Radio Študent is aided by Žiga Saksida (saxophone
nr.1) and Matjaž Rožič (saxophone nr.2) for the occasion. For the remainder of the
summer, D'Pravda extensively tours Slovenia with their theatre friends
– Gledališče Ane Monró and a punk band – Orkester Titanik, playing joint gigs
in Idrija, Kranj and Jesenice among others. By the end of 1982, D’Pravda
disbands. In 1983 and 1984 Iztok Saksida becomes a chief editor at Radio Študent and from 1985 he’s
made an assistant at the sociology department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Ljubljana.
Sometimes the RIO
bands that Aleks Lenard invited to Ljubljana
would perform in Zagreb and Belgrade in cooperation with the respective
student organizations in each city. However, these performances were more of an
exception than a rule despite the encouragement from ŠKUC as Lenard complained
in Džuboks[40]; the only two bands that managed to play
in Belgrade were Etron Fou Leloublan[41] and Black Sheep, while the only band that
played in Zagreb
was The Work[42]. ŠKUC’s isolation in this respect was
largely due to the exceptionally high level of their organizational autonomy
compared to its counterpart-organizations in the rest of Yugoslavia where the Party
maintained a shadow presence either through a occasional purges or through
bureaucracy-veiled vertical decision-making. Nonetheless, where institutions
fail – friendship and personal contact make up for the loss and that’s how one
of the bands that Lenard hosted in Ljubljana, found his way via Belgrade to
Novi Sad, the capital of SR Serbia’s northern province of Vojvodina – in a
visit that proved to be of historic importance for the development of the local
music scene[43].
How did the Black Sheep arrive to Novi Sad is somewhat of a mystery. According to one version – Srđan ‘Džica’ Ðorđević, the Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi frontman and a Marxism student, brought them over through his connections with the Dutch communes, and according to the other – Ðorđe Delibašić, the drummer of Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi, saw Black Sheep performing in Belgrade on Desant na Beograd mini-festival and invited them to extend their Yugoslavian tour to his hometown of Novi
Sad[note 16]. In any case, in the summer of 1982, The Black Sheep – who were joined by Chris Cutler and Chris Wangro of Circus Janus for their ongoing European road tour – held a memorable concert in the Studio M of Radio Novi Sad together with Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi and after the show had an impromptu all-night long improv-concert with the locals in the back of Stole Janković’s garden. Black Sheep came back with Cutler a few years later (in 1987, this time around without Geoff Leigh) and held another concert, while Chris Cutler did a separate gig with Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer, yet it was this 1982 event which became a legendary happening in Novi Sad’s alternative folklore.
Although a
Belgrade-based label, much of Nikad Robom's history is inextricably intertwined
with Novi Sad, the capital of Socijalistička
Autonomna Pokrajina Vojvodina (or SAP Vojvodina; Serbo-Croatian for “Socialist
Autonomous Province of Vojvodina”), and its peculiar alternative music circles.
More precisely, Nikad Robom were involved in dynamic cooperation with a
thriving sub-scene of local alternative musicians which evolved in between
popular and avant-garde music tendencies of the time, but also as a vital part
of a much wider front of emerging underground artists in 1980s Novi Sad. This unique
current within Novosadian alternativism, together with the endemic music scene
it helped nourish, is here provisionally referred to as the Other Novi Sad
scene of the 1980s due to a lack of any consensual or pre-established designations.
For the
activities of the Other Novi Sad scene Nikad Robom played a twofold role: at
first, while the scene was in its full bloom, Nikad Robom functioned as its
catalyst – whether by promoting it's main protagonists through publishing
activity or aiding distribution of the scene’s own cassette editions (like CirKo
Distribucija) and samizdats, occasional organization of concerts in Belgrade;
eventually, with the scene’s inevitable decline at the beginning of the 1990s
and its subsequent retreat into obscurity in the following decades, Nikad Robom
is retroactively put in a position of the sole chroniclers of the elusive
happenings in the capital of SAP Vojvodina as their releases and archival
records remain a rare source on the Other Novi Sad scene.
In terms of their
overall character as well as status within local context, there are two basic
traits that distinguish projects coming from the milieu of artists billed under
the provisional umbrella term of Other Novi Sad scene of the 1980s, be it music
or otherwise.
The
first trait concerns the format and the nature of experimental music produced
in Other Novi Sad scene and how these two aspects relate. Since a considerable number of these
projects were multi-faceted or multi-disciplinary in approach and a result of wider
theoretic-conceptual reflections, in addition to ‘bands’ – a variety of other
formats are also present such as theatre companies, art collectives, DIY
multimedia projects, etc. In the same time, the aforementioned breadth of scope
that characterized the conceptual basis of Other Novi Sad projects is
responsible for determining music-making process as decidedly synthetic and –
due to the fact that music experimentation wasn’t pursued as a ‘separate’ activity
– lacking a narrow music focus. This strikes a further parallel in the fact
that the Other Novi Sad scene was, first and foremost a collection of marginals
of all sorts, rather than a collection of musicians, painters or any kind of professionals
with a fixed, pre-determined goal. The basic cohesive fabric of the Other Novi
Sad was friendship and the main purpose or raison d'etre – a fertile
exchange of ideas.
The second trait
characteristic for the Other Novi Sad scene of the 1980s is its unofficial
status within its own home town and the conditions of relative obscurity in
which its protagonists worked and created. This kind of low key presence –
which they fought off more or less successfully in the latter half of the 1980s
– wasn’t a matter of conscious choice of any kind, but was instead related to
the current stalemate in cultural policy of the SAP Vojvodina capital and even
more to the general infrastructural issues such as the lack of concert venues,
exhibition spaces, etc. The heavily bureaucratized Savez Socijalističke Omladine Vojvodine (or SSOV; Serbo-Croatian
for “League
of Socialist Youth of Vojvodina”)[note 17]expressed almost categorical disinterest in promoting and accommodating any other artists except those belonging to the current Yu rock consensus, while other institutions of culture in SAP Vojvodina were often headed by former state security cadres[44]. Hence, as the institutional facilitation
of any kind of alternative culture was practically inexistent in Novi Sad,
marginal spaces (such as houses, apartments, etc) became a natural and the only
possible habitat for the Other Novi Sad scene, while the influx of cultural
information from the West as well as the exchange of ideas, skills and
knowledge remained an individualist activity, entirely predicated by
friendships and personal contact[45]. Needless to say, the situation in Novi Sad
at the time stood in sharp contrast to actual state of affairs in Ljubljana in that respect.
Yet, an
underlying reason subsuming all the relevant factors of this imposed
isolationism is to be found in the troublesome history of Novi Sad’s bureaucratic nomenklatura dealing
with proponents of alternative culture.
Throughout
history, Novi Sad’s
unique position, often seen as a middle-ground between large religious,
linguistic and ethnic communities, encouraged its reputation as a vibrant
culture hub. However, as a consequence of the expulsion of the German
population and the severe dwindling of the Hungarian population from Vojvodina
in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Novi Sad together with Vojvodina saw a
strange period of political deprioritization. In practice, this meant that, in
the context of redefined power structures of post-war Yugoslavia its position grew increasingly
detached from the political, economic and cultural centres of the new state.
This condition profoundly shaped the minds of the new generations and will
prove to be fundamental in formulating the basic underlying dynamics in
formation of its alternative culture.
As a direct consequence
of the 1960s liberalization period in Yugoslav politics, in the short period
between 1968 and 1971, Novi Sad
underwent a counterculture renaissance that challenged the main course of
Yugoslav moderate modernism. A number of institutional subjects in the SAP Vojvodina
capital grew increasingly susceptible towards the ideas and beliefs of the
1960s protest movement and eventually became instrumental in their
dissemination: the main engine of these changes in Novi Sad was Tribina mladih (Serbo-Croatian for “Youth
tribune”), a youth platform for social dialogue that facilitated public
discussion on a range of looming political, cultural and social issues; the
activities of literary magazines such as Index,
Polja (Serbo-Croatian for “Fields”), Új Symposion (Hungarian for “New Symposium”) were essential in
introducing and articulating burgeoning tendencies in contemporary literature,
philosophy and art; production house Neoplanta Film, an official Vojvodinian
film company of the time, probably made the most significant impact among wider
public, its controversial catalogue including films that were frequently
criticized in Yugoslav public or often even banned. However, some of the most
radical attempts to mark out a utopian space were, naturally, to be found outside
of the system’s auspices – in the conceptual
art practices of groups (E and Kôd[46].
Although the
spirit of international events of the time shaped this new climate in terms of
growing demands for liberalization, democratization and alike, the said sense
of aloofness, pre-existing in Vojvodina since the early days of Yugoslavia,
skewed the momentum significantly towards ideas of anarchist and horizontalist
provenance. Organizational autonomy became the underlying frame of every
creative endeavour and micro-social functioning – somewhat of a collective
fantasy of everybody involved regardless of their background[47]. This type of discourse ultimately
resulted in an outsider critique of the system and soon the youthful idealism
found itself on a collision course with the provincial authorities. Through a
series of trials and imprisonments, editorial purges and orchestrated public
persecutions aimed at the most prominent individuals, the movement was
effectively suffocated in 1971 in an institutional showdown with alternative
culture unprecedented in the cultural practice of the former Yugoslavia[48].
The new
circumstances caused artists and liberal-minded individuals to develop an
ambivalent relationship towards public space and public manifesting to say the
least. Eventually, it led to creating a radically different cultural climate
where alternative practices will become a clandestine activity, something that
is to be concealed from the eyes of the general public. From 1972 onwards, conceptual
artists Slobodan Tišma and Čedomir Drča – one of the few remnants of the Novi
Sad’s 1960s counterculture active after the crush – realize projects like Nevidljiva umetnost (Serbo-Croatian for “Invisible art”), Nevidljivi Umetnik (Serbo-Croatian for “Invisible artist“) and Nepostojeći
bend za nečujnu muziku (Serbo-Croatian for “Inexistent
band for inaudible music”) that reflect the spirit of the times in the capital
of SAP Vojvodina[49].
However, as the
1970s drew to a close, this shadow grip had loosened and atmosphere in the city
had somewhat altered. Punk happened and changed Novi Sad forever. An important tell-tale sign
that times were changing was that the formation of the city’s late 1970 punk
and new wave scene was largely fronted by the same people involved with the
Novosadian conceptual art practices that were so brutally persecuted nearly a
decade before – Branko ‘Andrla’ Andrić from Imperium of Jazz (formed in 1979),
Predrag Vranešević from Laboratorija Zvuka (formed in 1977) and Slobodan Tišma from
La Strada (formed in 1979).
With the onset of
the 1980s, a plethora of new bands began popping up around the city, soon stratifying
themselves around several major sub-scenes – post-punk scene around Pekinška Patka, Luna,
Obojeni Program, electro pop scene around Boye, Grad, Heroina and hardcore punk
scene around Vrisak Generacije, Dva Minuta Mržnje, Neon Vojnik, etc. There were also some minor subscenes
around individuals like Mitar Subotić alias Rex Illusivi and his programme at
Radio Novi Sad, Boris Kovač – the founder of Ritual Nova ensemble and his compatriots who
rallied under the leitmotif of Nova Panonska
Umetnost (Serbo-Croatian for “New Pannonian Art”) movement he spearheaded,
and a small hometaping clique mainly centred around
Božidar Kecman alias Čovek-zec (Serbo-Croatian for ”Man-rabbit”) and the
conglomeration of individuals he collaborated with on various projects (Čovek
pauk i Čovek zec, Zugbari, Agonija Proleća, etc).
Amid this ongoing surge of underground activity
in Novi Sad, on
the margins, a loose group of individuals (artists, poets, painters and
musicians) form a nucleus of what will later grow to become the Other Novi Sad
scene of the 1980s. This vastly heterogeneous and free-flowing group was mostly
focused around the home and estate of Stojan ‘Stole’ Janković – a local
sculptor and painter – at Jovana Subotića 15, where they organized gatherings which included not only
music sessions, but also collective paintings, poetry readings, various types
of happenings, theoretical discussions and alike[50]. The group tentatively originated
sometime around 1979-1980, reached its peak activity period by mid-1980s, only
to slide into a gradual decline in the latter part of the decade.
Although the
preferential mode of collaborating was working in collective units of varying
sizes, the group inhabiting Stole Janković’s home couldn’t be considered per se
a collective akin to the ones that were permeating Yugoslavian pop culture of
the time as the participants of the Other Novi Sad scene shared, by and large, only
cordial artistic goals and ideological agenda. Instead, the group’s nature was
much more informal and functioned more as a circle of friends or a tight
alliance of disgruntled individuals that shared a common frustration with the
cultural and artistic status quo in Novi
Sad of the time. The emphasize on the heterogeneity
and overall chance character of the Other Novi Sad scene is further underlined
by looking at of some of the individual members’ occupations and professions: Stojan Janković – painter and sculptor, Tibor Bada –
graphic artist and poet, Zoran Pantelić – art historian and judoist, Béla
Máriás – ethnomusicologist, Aleksandar Carić – writer and multi-instrumentalist, Miroslav Šilić – dentist and painter, László
Rátgéber – basketball coach and musician[51].
In the context of the Other Novi Sad scene, Stole Janković’s house functioned as a sort of a community hub where a considerable part of social interaction and vital exchange of ideas took place; and from these sessions at Stole's house that a number of important artistic and/or musical formations emerged, the latter of which more or less gravitated towards improvisational music. Although the homestead of Stole Janković was the main focal point of the Other Novi Sad scene in a sense that it was the place where bulk of the scene’s activities were going on at one point, the total of creative activities in the Other Novi Sad scene of the 1980s can’t be narrowed to this space, nor strictly associated with the circle of people that were notably affiliated with it. From circa 1982-onwards, the activities of the Other Novi Sad scene begin to disperse across other private spaces throughout Novi Sad and thus gradually reduce the critical importance of Stole’s house. Among these spaces is the house of Srđan ‘Džica’ Ðorđević at Kraljevića Marka 17 – a major socializing locus active from about 1982, the Petrovaradin fortress atelier of the painting collective Emisao which – starting from 1983 – grew to became an important concert venue for the Other Novi Sad scene and the cellar-gallery of Tibor Bada at Tolstojeva 5 which was a regular rehearsal and concert spot for bands as well as an occasional exhibition venue from 1984 onwards.
On a local level,
the individuals involved with the Other Novi Sad
scene were predominantly influenced by a section of the programme of Dani džeza u Novom Sadu (Serbo-Croatian
for “Days of jazz in Novi Sad”) – the annual jazz festival held in the
province capital since 1979[52]. Namely, alongside the main festival programme which harboured a more
traditional approach to jazz, Dani džeza
also featured Slobodni program (Serbo-Croatian
for “Free programme”) section curated by Zoltán Bicskei
– back then an editor at the Új Symposion magazine and
later a keen chronicler of jazz in Vojvodina – where a number of
trendsetting acts from the experimental jazz underground made their appearance.
These were, among others – Art Ensemble of Chicago, Workshop de Lyon, Phil
Minton, Peter Kowald and Anthony Braxton, etc.
Another
important, lopsided influence for the creative activities of the future Other
Novi Sad scene was the emergence of Boris Kovač’s Ritual Nova[53], a group which significantly expanded the
mental seams of Novosadian alternativism with its bold introduction of
metaphysical concepts in an alternative art context, its use of
universal-archaic imagery and its fervent interest in local folk music
practices. Boris Kovač started Ritual Nova in 1982, a year after Begnagrad had
their first reunion concert in Novi
Sad which influenced Kovač greatly[54]. Through his work with Ritual Nova
ensemble as well as the Nova Panonska
Umetnost movement he founded, Boris Kovač sought a way to breathe new life
into the rich folkloric heritage of Vojvodina by emulating some of the
mechanisms that were intrinsic to the ritual music of the so called ‘primitive’
societies and appropriating them in a contemporary music context[note 18]. Although somewhat of an outsider figure
in Novi Sad due
to his self-taught education, his jazz-fusion roots and his Bukovac home, Boris
Kovač soon established himself as a towering presence in the capital of SAP Vojvodina.
In the context of
its formation, one event was particularly incentive for the future Other Novi
Sad scene. The 1982 visit of Chris Cutler – the prime mover of the Rock in Opposition movement and one
the chief architects of alternative music of
the era – marked a turning point for the
isolate group as it gave them the much needed feedback as well as providing
them a necessary outside perspective of their work. As a result of this and
subsequent meetings, Novi Sad will become somewhat of a Recommended Records
stronghold in the years to follow and a number of Novosadian musicians will
become associated with Chris Cutler’s main record label – namely Boris Kovač, Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer and Ernő
Király[note 19]. On the other hand, inspired by discoveries
made during his travels to Eastern Europe,
Chris Cutler will establish Points East in 1988, a Recommended Records sub-label
entirely dedicated to new experimental music from the communist countries.
While the first release on the newly-founded label
will be Ritual Nova 2 by Boris Kovač
& Ritual Nova ensemble, one of the two distributor addresses
appearing on Points East releases’ sleeves will
feature a Novi Sad address of Ðorđe
Delibašić of Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi[note 20]
next to the address of RēR Megacorp’s London headquarters.
At the beginning,
the group situated there was particularly known for its oblique status (or
non-status) within their Novi Sad
hometown, which in itself was due to a mixture of reasons encompassing
infrastructural issues and inherited cultural policies previously described. In
practical terms, the group’s seclusion from its immediate environment – the
most basic context of its operation – meant that virtually everything that was
created inside the house – stayed inside the house. However, as the 1980s
marched forward, the circumstances gradually changed in Novi Sad and it became
significantly easier to organize events even for the Stole’s group; instrumental to this change
was the appearance of several alternative art spaces such as Žuta kuća (Serbo-Croatian for “Yellow house”), Galerija
Nosorog (Serbo-Croatian for ”Rhinoceros gallery”), Studio za kreativno angažovanje mladih (Serbo-Croatian
for ”Studio for creative engagement of youth“) in the second half of the 1980s.
Individuals like the well positioned
Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer and hyperactive Aleksandar Carić were instrumental making a push for
the Other Novi Sad scene, the former, especially with his involvement with Festival novih umetnosti (Serbo-Croatian for ”New arts festival”) and the
subsequent Muzika danas (Serbo-Croatian for ”Music today”).
From the
mid-1980s onwards (starting from 1985 approximately), the philosophy as well as
the prevailing profile of the projects appearing on the Other Novi Sad scene changed
slightly from small, self-contained and house-orientated projects towards more ambitious,
outwardly sorts of projects. Probably the most indicative step in the said
direction was the founding of the Other Novi Sad super-group Dr. Zsivago Dark
Stars and its successor Naučnici (Serbo-Croatian for “Scientists”), but also
more immediate projects like CirKo Della Primavera.
Stevan Kovacs
Tickmayer, a composer and multi-instrumentalist is probably the most acclaimed
musician from the Other Novi Sad scene internationally; in the same time,
Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer is somewhat of an atypical representative of the group
as he is practically the only academically educated musician on a scene
overwhelmingly comprised of musical self-taughts and dilettantes alike. Even
though the Other Novi Sad scene functioned more as a conglomerate of quaint
individuals which would render any pre-existing differences irrelevant in the
course of its practice than any kind of coherent whole, Tickmayer remained an
outsider for this group of outsiders in one crucial aspect: due to his links in
the music academia and Új Symposion
magazine, Tickmayer was influential in all the right places and thus, in
position to take up organization of seminal events such as Festival novih umetnosti and Muzika danas;
ultimately, through Tickmayer’s editorial involvement and influence with these festivals,
Other Novi Sad artists eventually got some much needed profile their hometown
[note 21].
In 1987, Dušan
Mihalek – the music editor-in-chief at Radio Novi Sad and Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer
in front of Új
Symposion in cooperation with Novosadsko
pozorište initiated Festival novih
umetnosti, an event dedicated to contemporary trends in music and theatre
with an emphasis on Eastern European practices. The festival was even billed as
Istočno-evropska iskustva (Serbo-Croatian
for “Eastern European experiences”) at first, but the name was quickly dropped
due to absurd political issues[note 22]. Instead, Festival
novih umetnosti was held from 26.03-29.03.1987 featuring Ansambl za Drugu
Novu Muziku of Dragan Žeravac (Belgrade, SR Serbia), contemporary composers
Zygmunt Krauze (Warsaw, Poland) and Victor Ekimovsky (Moscow, SSSR),
avant-garde theatres Kugla Glumište and Igra Peridot (Zagreb, SR Croatia),
Hungarian free jazz musicians György Szabados and István Grencsó-Katalin Kovács
duo (Budapest, Hungary), Zoltan Radics (Sombor, SAP Vojvodina, SR Serbia), figures
from the Yugoslav industrial underground Mario Marzidovšek and Lokalna
Televizija (Slovenska Bistrica, SR Slovenia), but also local underground
protagonists from Other Novi Sad scene – Stole Janković, Aleksandar Carić, Béla
Máriás, Dr. Zsivago Dark Stars and Tickmayer Formatio (Novi Sad, SAP Vojvodina,
SR Serbia).
The follow-up
festival to Festival novih umetnosti –
Muzika danas was held in 1988 on a
somewhat smaller scale due to a drastically cut budget. For the same reasons Új Symposion withdrew from the funding
pool and Muzička Omladina Vojvodine (Serbo-Croatian for Music Youth of
Vojvodina) instead stepped up as the main organizer[55]. Muzika
danas was held from 25.03-27.03.1988 in Studio M of Radio Novi Sad and KUD
Petefi Šandor with participation of the following artists: Agon Orchestra
(Prague, Czechoslovakia), Dresch Quartet (Budapest, Hungary), Hans-Karsten
Raecke (East Berlin, East Germany), Phil Minton and Roger Turner (London, UK),
Tickmayer Formatio and Jackie Jackie Jackson (Novi Sad, SAP Vojvodina, SR
Serbia). The 1988 was the year of the so-called Jogurt revolucija (Serbo-Croatian for “Yogurt revolution”) in SAP
Vojvodina, an event where Milošević’s men seized power took power in the
provincial government[note 23]. In
the following year the festival was discontinued along with Dani džeza[56].
Both Festival novih umetnosti and Muzika danas events present a one of the
few and very unique efforts of establishing common ground between the academic
and non-academic experimentalists in the former Yugoslavia.
The individuals
active in the Other Novi Sad scene were, for the most part, born in the first
half of the 1960s and thus, belonging to the same generation of people
spearheading the bustling punk and new wave scenes in Novi Sad as well as the
rest of Yugoslavia. However, a closer look at the variety of their music influences
– spanning everything from contemporary classical music (particularly labels
like ECM Records and Brian Eno’s Obscure Records) and improvised music on one
side, to vestiges of the RIO movement published on
Recommended Records and punk-derivatives on the other – suggests a considerable
lack of focus, one that is probably unsurprising given the group’s original
non-musical character. In this way, instead of the linear introduction and absorption
of trends that characterized the development of punk-infused experimentalism in
Yugoslavia (for instance the usual transitioning from basic punk-rock sound to more
post-punk and eventually into industrial and post-industrial types of music),
the heterodoxy of influences and musical approaches cultivated within the group
was a virtual guarantee of exciting musical outcomes.
One figure which perfectly
encapsulates the innate eclecticism of the Other Novi
Sad scene is Tibor Bada (1963-2006) or Bada Dada. Exceptionally productive, Tibor
Bada was the driving force behind much of the Other Novi Sad exploits, bands
and art collectives alike – and probably its most recognizable ambassador. Aside
from Bada Dada and his projects, there were two formations from the Other Novi
Sad milieu that gained some exposure among wider audiences and took a life of
their own. These are Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi (Serbo-Croatian for “This Season
Colourful Tones”) – percussions-based collective established by Ðorđe Delibašić
(and later led by Srđan ‘Džica’ Ðorđević), half-way between new wave praxis and
experimental rock, and CirKo Della Primavera – variety free improvisation
project led by Aleksandar Carić with eclectic influences ranging from ritual
music to avant-garde jazz. Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer also
participated in several music formations in the context of the Other Novi Sad
scene, most notably as Abacus with Zoran Pantelić and Béla Máriás, with whom he
made one recording in 1984, and as Intellectual Cabaret with Ðorđe Delibašić,
with whom he released a double cassette
titled Intellectual Cabaret/Résumé
1984-86 (CirKo Distribucija-Novi Sad, 1986) among others things.
Other, less prominent projects, evolving directly from the same surroundings of Stole Janković’s house (or at least working in close proximity), include a couple of Aleksandar Carić’s pre-CirKo Della Primavera projects like Obično putovanje šuma (Serbo-Croatian for “An ordinary journey of forests”), Neo Merz/Zeromen, a string of collaborations of Zoran Pantelić and Béla Máriás in the form of an art collective Testa di Shakespeare (Italian for “Head of Shakespeare”) – together with Tibor Bada in 1983, Abacus with Jovan ‘Toba’ Milinkov between 1984 and 1986 and Pre i posle tišine (Serbo-Croatian for “Before and after the silence”) from 1986 to 1990 with Zsófia Nády and Jaroslava Benka, but also in the first line-up of Telal Viig – a project of Nikola Ignjatović preceeding Zapisi Tišine (Serbo-Croatian for “Inscriptions of silence”). Other memorable projects include an assortment of acts involving Vladimir Sekulić, Siniša Sekulić and Voja Savkov, namely – Da capo tutti (Siniša Sekulić, Voja Savkov, Vladimir Sekulić and Jovan Milinov), Festival (Siniša Sekulić, Voja Savkov and Dragan Nastasić) and Kaod Zudeneš (Voja Savkov and Vladmir Sekulić), Kozoder u akciji (Serbo-Croatian for “Goatskinner in action”) – collective dedicated to performing live music for theatre performances (Aleksandar Šumar, Zoran Lekić, Vladimir Sekulić, Zoran Petrović and Predrag Pribić), Človek (Slovenian for “Man”) of Ljube Živković, Petar Galić and Zoran Pantelić, Kora (Serbo-Croatian for “Crust”) of Ištvan Rajčan, Anglo rif of Mira Knežević and Goran
Ivičić Tukša as well as many others.
Most of these projects were free-form experiments between improvisation and conceptual music traditions, usually relying on a broad specter of instruments, so in addition to the regular setup of guitars and drums there were also saxophones, clarinets, oboes, faggots, various metallophones, harmoniums, marimbaphones, found objects, self-built percussion instruments as well as synths, but the latter were more of an exception then a rule.
Tibor Bada
(1963-2006) alias Bada Dada, was the enfant terrible of the Other Novi Sad
scene. Tibor Bada was a multi-layered persona – prolific graphic artist, maverick wordsmith, autodidact savant, an avid alcoholic, an enormously empathic identity and in general a larger-than-life character. Tibor Bada
was a man obsessively delved into his own world and due to which he naturally
assumed – together with Vladimir ’Oreško’ Orešković – a liminal presence within the Other
Novi Sad’s scene.
An active artist
since 1977 as Bad Art, Tibor Bada’s
main interests in the beginning lie mostly with
poetry and painting; in 1982 he changes his moniker to Bada Dada and gradually
expands his field of activities to music, comics, fanzines, sculpture, performance art and, eventually, animated
film. When it isn’t delved into his own
fantastic world, Bada Dada’s visual work mostly functions as a comical and
carnivalesque disparagement of established values (whether authorities from art
history, intellectuals, pop culture) – a rudimentary form of social criticism,
while his visual expression mainly oscillates between crude punk poetics and
outsider art imaginativism.
Musically, his
main vehicle was Bada Dada, the default name attributed to all of his bedroom
hometaping efforts and probably the most experimental among his recordings.
After the initial stint with Zoran Pantelić and Béla Máriás in Testa
di Shakespeare art collective (1983-1985), the collective soon transformed into
a band called Dr. Zsivago Dark Stars with the addition Zsófia Nády, Igor Jolić, Robert Mora and Goran
Ivičić Tukša to the line-up. Dr.
Zsivago Dark Stars was a space rock/noise band, a sort of an Other Novi Sad
scene super-group that left only a couple of live tapes before dissolving in
1987. In the same year, Bada Dada forms another two projects: first he founds
Naučnici together with Mića Šilić, Zoran Pantelić and Béla Máriás and then
establishes Jackie Jackie Jackson with László Rátgéber. Jackie Jackie Jackson
were an attempt of Residents-oriented experimentalism with whom Bada produced
two self-released tapes and most notably performed on Muzika danas festival.
After Tibor Bada and
Béla Máriás immigrated to Budapest
in 1991, they changed the name of the band to Tudósok (Hungarian for “Scientists”)
and continued recording with that name.
Formed in spring
of 1981, Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi were among the first bands that arose from the
context of Other Novi Sad scene of the 1980s and certainly the first that made
significant breakthroughs in reaching wider public. During their peak activity
period from late 1981 to 1983, Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi performed frequently
around Yugoslavia, appearing
most frequently in Zagreb
– the city where they felt most comfortable. The band had a knack for being at all the right places at the right time and managed
in great deal to seize the hype in Yugoslav rock press surrounding the
country’s nascent new wave scene. In this way, Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi evaded
the stigma of a house band that characterized the bands of the Other Novi Sad
scene.
In the summer of
1981 – shortly after their humble beginnings at Stole Janković’s house – Ove
Sezone Vedri Tonovi played a gig in Studio M of Radio Novi Sad supporting the
Chris Cutler-reinforced line-up of Black Sheep on its extended Yugo-tour. However,
Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi were catapulted into the spotlight when they were
invited by Branko ‘Andrla’ Andrić to play on his YU-Wave festival in Vienna, a seminal happening for the Novosadian new
wave scene of the time; the event, held from 06.03. to 07.03.1982 at the Arena[note 24], was colloquially referred to as the Novosadski novi talas (Serbo-Croatian for “Novosadian new wave”) as
it featured a line-up entirely comprised of Novosadian new wave and post-punk
bands – Luna, Imperium of Jazz, Kontraritam, Obojeni Program, Boye, Grad and Ove
Sezone Vedri Tonovi (who played although they weren’t originally scheduled).
In December of 1982
they participate in the finals of second edition of the Yu Rock Moment (or YURM)
festival in Zagreb,
a competition-format festival for up-and-coming bands organized and sponsored by
the youth magazine Polet. The appearance
on the YURM festival is followed by a
considerable amount of press attention in Croatia (with Polet and Studentski List
in the forefront). At some point in the first half of 1983, Ove Sezone Vedri
Tonovi move out from their base at Stole Janković’s house and continue
practicing at the home of Srđan ‘Džica’ Ðorđević, their frontman.
However, due to
string of setbacks completely unrelated with music, the band is eventually discouraged
from further engagement and by the end of year ceases all activities[note 25]. Although Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi left no official releases, apart
from several live bootlegs, bedroom demos and one studio recording, their short-lived,
but tumultuous career eventually plunged them into a
local lore and legend.
In contrast to Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi, who managed to perform on a number of important festivals throughout Yugoslavia during their heyday and certainly seized upon the general media frenzy surrounding Yugoslav new wave scene at the time, CirKo Della Primavera were more of a local phenomenon, owing this reputation a lot to the proliferation and fragmentation of the said scene that occurred during their time (1985-1991) as well as due to the perceived ‘inaccessibility’ of their sound.
CirKo
Della Primavera were founded in 1985 by Aleksandar ‘Car’ Carić as a radical
theatre and music improvisation company, with an intent to pursue a more immediate
contact with its audiences than its predecessor projects stemming from the surroundings
at Stole Janković’s house. To this end, CirKo Della Primavera principally
oriented themselves towards live performances – entering studio only once
during their entire lifetime – and adopted a
policy of carrying out loosely scripted shows that were, as a rule, rehearsed
only once. This gave a strong emphasize on originality and spontaneity to the
group and soon enough CirKo Della Primavera became notorious for its versatile
live exploits. During the course of their existence they released two official
releases: a 24 cassette box set – Muzika za letnju dugodnevnicu (CirKo Distribucija-Novi Sad, 1988) and a cassette Faima Vinovo (Nikad Robom-Belgrade,
1990).
Although Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi and CirKo Della Primavera occupied different musical niches as well as time frames, they still shared personnel; in fact, of the eight people that were at one point full-time members of Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi (Ðorđe Delibašić, Srđan ‘Džica’ Ðorđević, Olivera Sabljarević, Predrag Pribić, Vladimir Sekulić, Vladimir Orešković, Mile Ranin, Aleksandar Šumar and Zoran Lekić), four were also members of CirKo Della Primavera from its inception in 1985 – Delibašić, Pribić, Janković and Orešković, with the exception of CirKo’s chief ideologue Carić.
A more detailed account of CirKo Della Primavera’s activities is to be found here.
During the first half of the 1980s, the Other Novi Sad scene maintained a pivotal
role in the underground circles of Novi Sad acting as a connective tissue of
sorts that integrated different corners of the city’s alternative culture – popular music, serious
music, art scene, alternative
theatre, etc. The network of the Other Novi Sad’s clandestine spaces provided a much needed forum for poets, artists and musicians alike in a city plagued by a lack of alternative spaces and with a troublesome history of ambiguity towards public activities. The Other Novi Sad scene reached its peak activity period in early to mid-1980s and went into a gradual decline in the latter half of the 1980s with the proliferation of alternative spaces in Novi Sad and opportunities of communicating with wider audiences. The latter half of the 1980s and the very beginning of the 1990s mark a transition period for the Novi Sad scene as it changed from a private endevour of like-minded individuals into a rudimentary underground scene.
However, this transition was abruptly cut-short by the Yugoslav dissolution wars of the 1990s. In the summer of 1991, Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija’s (or JNA; Serbo-Croatian for “Yugoslav People's Army”) Novi Sad regiment was deployed to the neighbouring city of Vukovar (SR Croatia) in a bid to prevent the newly-proclaimed Croatia from claiming the ethnically mixed city. This campaign will be the first in a series of armed conflicts that will eventually grew into the War in Croatia. The drafting of the newly-conscripted recruits and reserve corps for the Novi Sad regiment that ensued meant that Novosadians lived in an atmosphere of permenent fear of street roundups and night raids by the JNA military officials looking for manpower to fill the army units. This prompted the decission of many people to leave Novi Sad for good. A number of the artists associated with the Other Novi Sad scene emigrated westwards: Bada Dada, Béla Máriás and László Rátgéber went to Budapest, Stole Janković to London, Aleksandar Carić and the whole line-up of Zapisi Tišine to Italy, Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer to France, Đorđe Delibašić to Amsterdam and Boris Kovač to Ljubljana. The large Novosadian artistic
emigration in Budapest significantly revamped the local art scene and influenced generations of future artists. In 2011 there was even an event-exhibition titled 20 éves az újvidéki emigráció (Hungarian for “20 years of the Novosadian emigration”)[57].
In Novi Sad itself, the artistic exodus had an effect of creating a cultural and generational gap which caused much of the city’s 1980s history – and thus the projects and personalities associated with the Other Novi Sad scene – to simply fall into oblivion in the years that followed. However, one
of the lasting legacies of Other Novi Sad scene in Novi Sad is certainly the
Interzone festival, a music festival dedicated to improvised and experimental
music held in Novi Sad since 1997 which hosted the likes of Limpe Fuchs, Jason
Kahn and Otomo Yoshihide, among others.
Established in
1982, Skeleton Crew was a multi-instrumentalist combo of Fred Frith, Tom Cora,
Zeena Parkins (since 1984) and formerly Dave Newhouse (1983-84) best known for
their unlikely mixes of rudimentary improvisational rock with a strong smack of
ethnic music interspersed with taped atonal collages or 1970s-style psychedelic
electronica.
Skeleton Crew was,
together with Art Bears (1978-) and Massacre (1980-), a part of a string of
Fred Frith's bands following the abandonment of his most ambitious project – Henry
Cow. Unlike the pompous prog-rock virtuosities and overdramatic anthems of
Henry Cow and the Art Bears' awkward attempts to smuggle his ostentatious style
into realms of folkloric surrealism, the Skeleton Crew's rather crude garage sound
and improvisational edge gave Frith's and Cora's amazing technical skill and
prowess almost a semi-magical aura of carnival-type one-man orchestras. The new
orientation also provided clear song-structure and, in this way, finally spelt
disassociation with the progressive rock stigma for Frith and offered
opportunities of communicating with younger and, more importantly, wider audience.
Skeleton Crew
released two studio albums on vinyl Learn
to Talk (RecRec Music-Zurich, Rift-New York, 1984) and The Country of Blinds (RecRec Music-Zurich, Rift-New York, 1986), a
collection of samples on CD entitled Etymology
(Rarefaction-San Francisco, 1997) and at least four live concert recordings on
cassettes: Skeleton Crew (self-released-New
York, 1982), Live Im Kulturkeller
Würzburg 10/82 (RecRec Music-Zurich, 1984), Front Rock 1 split with Polish band Reportaż (A.R.S.-Warsaw, 1984)
and Esta es la victoria (Nikad
Robom-Beograd, 1985), recorded in Yugoslavia. They abandoned their activity in
1986 after Fred Frith said that they started sounding as a conventional rock
outfit.
Esta es la victoria (Spanish for “This is the victory”) tape from 1985
was the first tape released on Nikad Robom and it was assigned catalogue number
NR 002, although there was no NR 001. The Esta
es la victoria concert happened in Ljubljana
on 07.10.1984. It is interesting to note that the cassette’s title track Esta es la victoria is actually a
mondegreen of the phrase Hasta la victoria
(Spanish for “Until the victory”). The cassette’s B side closes with one of
Nikad Robom trademark jingles, credited to something called Spontani Telepski
Duo (Serbo-Croatian for “Spontaneous Telep Duo”), indicating it originated on
Telep sessions organized by Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer. The tape was ripped at
320kbs by pop3 from Svi Marš Na Ples forum in February 2008.
NR 003 is an interesting
split tape of two fairly unrelated concert happenings in Belgrade during the
spring of 1986, titled April u Beogradu
(Serbo-Croatian for “April in Belgrade”). The concert recording on the A side
is by French double bassist Joëlle Léandre taking place in the Cvijeta Zuzorić
art gallery and the B side we have art rockiness of David Thomas & The
Wooden Birds in Studentski Kulturni Centar (or SKC), also in Belgrade. The B
Side features a short jingle by the Serbian experimental music-prodigy – Larynx.
Performing since
the late 1970s, Joëlle Léandre is a classically trained French double bassist,
vocalist and composer, an acclaimed name in world of New Music and contemporary
improvisation with over one-hundred fifty recordings to her name and for whom
even the likes of John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi had specially composed pieces.
On this concert Joëlle
Léandre mainly performs works by other composers such are Jacob Druckman, Betsy
Jolas, Steve Lacy, Giacinto Scelsi and John Cage, displaying a variety of
styles as well as vocal capabilities, but also performs her own pieces like Termoignage or Taxi, the latter especially standing out from the rest of the
repertoire. The performance highpoint is a track Episode Huittieme by Betsy Jolas where double bass becomes an
exceptionally ominous tool in the hands of Miss Léandre, while John Cage's The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
provides a remarkable closure for the encounter with the Belgrade audience.
The work of David
Thomas with the Wooden Birds present the last chunk of his 1980s solo
discography shortly before reforming Pere Ubu in 1988. The Wooden Birds started
around 1985 as a continuation of the evolution process that started in 1982
with The Pedestrians, a band that formed on very the
ashes of Pere Ubu, stepping away from their trademark mix of punk infused avant-rock
to a more serene, impressionist waters. If there are significant differences
between The Wooden Birds and its previous incarnations like The Pedestrians or
His Legs, these are quite unclear and, if anything lay in a member or two, since
the great majority of the participating musicians remain the same. Also, the confusion
is stirred further with the fact that the repertoire of Pere Ubu successor bands
often included original or reworked songs of Pere Ubu.
For the 1986 Belgrade concert of The
Wooden Birds the line-up included Tony Maimone, Daved Hild, George Cartwright,
Allen Ravenstine and David Thomas. The Wooden Birds here play a rather laid
back performance, a homogeneous mix of jazzy, art rock and folk influences with
occasional flashes of brilliant sonic interventions by Allen Ravenstine. David
Thomas sometimes strands into awfully long and strenuous conversations with
audience during medleys and in between songs. The tape was ripped at 320kbs by
pop3 from Svi Marš Na Ples forum in March 2008.
The Camberwell
Now live in Ljubljana tape entitled Dejavnost
v Študentskem is one of the two rarities from the Nikad Robom edition, since
it’s the only live concert, bootlegged or otherwise, of The Camberwell Now that
is in circulation.
Following the
demise of This Heat in 1982, several bands sprung up to continue it's legacy
like Charles Hayward's Les Batteries, Charles Bullen's Lifetones, Gareth
Williams project with Marie Currie which had a wonderful one-off cassette titled
Flaming Tunes (not on label-London,
1985), yet none of the aforementioned acts would have as much impact as The
Camberwell Now. The Camberwell Now was, like its predecessor – a trio,
consisting of Charles Hayward, Trefor Goronwy and Steve Rickard – and again, like
This Heat – renowned for Rickards' use of a mobile sampling unit, a pioneering achievement
of its sort which added a lot of character to the band’s sound. In describing
the sound of The Camberwell Now, the usual nametags like "post-RIO"
and "art-rock" usually fail to capture the kind of articulated
balance that blends all those diverse influences and styles that music of
Camberwell Now has. Apart from cassette Dejavnost
v Študentskem presented here, The Camberwell Now recorded two 12” singles –
Meridian
(Duplicate Records-London, 1983) and Greenfingers
(RecRec Music-Zurich, INK Records-London, 1987), an LP Ghost Trade (RecRec Music-Zurich, INK Records-London, 1986) and a
CD collection All’s Well (RecRec
Music-Zurich, 1992).
Recorded in Študentsko
naselje (Slovenian for “Student’s village”), Ljubljana on 13.02.1987 and released on Nikad Robom as NR 004 the same
year, Dejaunost v Študentskem (Slovenian
for “Live in Student’s”) with a misspelling of Dejavnost as Dejaunost.
The the cassette is almost a hour and a half long The Camberwell Now live
experience, interspersed with couple of Nikad Robom trademark jingles – Das
Kapital’s Nikad Robom (verzija) on
the end of the A side and Fred Frith’s One,
Two, Three, Four, Nikad Robom and Larynx & JMAA’s Nikad Robom 15.07.1987 on the end of the B side. In the cassette booklet "Dejavnost" is twice misspelled as "Dejaunost", probably due to Nikad Robom duo’s poor command of Slovenian. The tape was ripped at 320kbs by pop3 from Svi Marš Na Ples forum in March 2008.
The second rarity
from the Nikad Robom collection is a This Heat split tape with Eliot Sharp Duo
titled Izgon bojazni iz komune (Slovenian
for “Banishment of fear from the commune”), featuring previously unreleased and
elsewhere unavailable This Heat demo material from their Cold Storage archives,
recorded from February of 1976 until December of 1977. The B Side comprises Elliot
Sharp live set recorded in Ljubljana
in 1987. The cassette was released in 1987 as NR 005.
This Heat are,
alongside Throbbing Gristle, David Jackman and Metabolist, a unique act in
musical history because they present one of the rare links between two
principally different generations of British experimental musicians: the 1970s
generation which converged influences ranging from prog rock, psychedelic folk
and the Canterbury scene, with the 1980s generation of punk-infused musicians
which mainly ignored any pre-existing musical practice in an attempt to reset and
start over. Although their debut LP This
Heat (Piano-Houghton-le-Spring, Atem-Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Metronome-Hamburg,
1978) presents a landmark album in experimental music of the 20th century,
they are regularly more acknowledged for their second LP Deceit (Rough Trade-London, Base Record-Bologna, 1981), with the UK press
regularly hailing them as forefathers of all things Indie.
The year 2006 saw
the publishing of Out Of Cold Storage
(This Is-London, 2006) – the definitive This Heat box set – on six CD’s which
featured a number of their previously unheard tracks. If the material featured
on Izgon bojazni iz komune didn't see
the light of day then, we can only guess it wasn't even intended to be properly
released. The tape offers an interesting glimpse in the early evolution of the
band presenting us with an extraordinary early take of Not waving (with a tape-looped intro and outro) as well as a track
titled The rough and the smooth, which
is obviously a recording of Friendly Rifles – a proto-This Heat formation from
1975-76 – as it completely stands out from everything else that This Heat recorded.
The track holds a reference to Friendly Rifles it in the lyrics:
Deep inside the Guggenheim factory I sat down for
awhile,
Rest my legs, break the rules, make up the whole of
myself,
Selfishly people high five me, they all take me for a
ride,
They know I cannot hide – how can I? I'm not invisible,
Friendly rifles don't exist when friendly rivalry
becomes extinct.
An acquaintance said "You cannot pick and chose,
You must take the rough with the smooth,
Take whatever comes along – like it or not, right or
wrong",
Not for me such triviality, I walk the road called
friendly rivalry,
Friendly rifles don't exist; scratch them from your
shopping list.
Elliot Sharp is
an academically trained musician, acclaimed multi-instrumentalist whose name is
alongside John Zorn's, practically synonymous with 1980s New York improvisation scene. The endless
list of his more or less expected creative collaborators during the last 30
years does include some interesting names like John Duncan, Thomas Dimuzio,
Merzbow but also Bachir Attar of Master Musicians of Jajouka.
Elliot Sharp Duo
was a one-off moniker for an Elliott Sharp performance with David Linton at
Križanke hall in Ljubljana
on the 26.07.1987. Elliott Sharp is on vocals, double neck bass guitar,
keyboards and wind instruments, while David Linton is on drums. The tape was
ripped at 320kbs by pop3 from Svi Marš Na Ples forum in February 2008.
Wondeur Brass was
an art-rock group from Montreal,
Canada that
evolved from a much bigger feminist art collective of the same name. The group
was active from 1980 to 1987 in something that was then colloquially regarded
as musique actuelle scene in Quebec. The term musique actuelle is bassically the
French variant of New Music – which was a rather intuitive and audacious
umbrella-term that enveloped all of these new and diverse trends that sprung up
the 1980s: contemporary classical music, new trends in avant-jazz territories, New York's
Fluxus-infused improvisation as well as some post-RIO impulses. Unlike the New
Music term which is seldom used nowadays, musique
actuelle is still in active use.
Since its
clamorous beginnings as a nine-piece theatre troupe in 1980, Wondeur Brass
performed live numerous times and went through a number of internal
reorganizations, from personnel-changes to significant shifts in musical direction.
The band consolidated as a quintet around 1984 and subsequently released their
first LP Ravir (Ambiances Magnétiques-Montreal,
1985) – an idiosyncratic bland of jazz influenced art-rock vaguely reminiscent
of Pinheads on the move-era
Tuxedomoon. After the 1985-86 tour following the release of Ravir, a side project called Les Poules
(French for “The Chicks”) was created around a nucleus of Joane Hétu, Diane
Labrosse and Danielle Palardy Roger, a line-up that would provide a permanent
basis for creative collaboration in the next twenty years (including the
following three years of Wondeur Brass). The Les Poules' first LP Les Contes De L'Amère Loi (Ambiances
Magnétiques-Montreal, 1986) was probably the closest Wonder Brass crew ever got
to a punk sentiment as it was a deliberately tacky and rather playful take on
autistic electro-pop in the best vein of Renaldo & the Loaf.
In 1986, this line-up
– with the addition of Marie Trudeau on bass guitar – sets on a North American
& European tour where they performed Ljubljana,
Zagreb and eventually Belgrade, on a concert organized by Nikad
Robom. Upon their return to Montreal, Wondeur Brass recorded its second LP album Simoneda, Reine Des Esclaves (Ambiances
Magnétiques-Montreal, Recommended Records-London, 1987) that kept the original kink and humour of Ravir, but with a refinement of a genuine 1980s pop-product. By the
end of 1987 all music activities were ground to a halt as Wondeur Brass members
formed the Les Productions Supermemes, an art promoting organization
with a feminist agenda. The Wondeur Brass’ spirit was only to be partially
revived with establishment of Justine in 1990, a formation that would also play
in Belgrade in 1997 on second edition of the Ring Ring
festival and release two more CD albums during the 1990s – Suite (Ambiances Magnétiques-Montreal,
1990) and Langages Fantastiques (Ambiances
Magnétiques-Montreal, 1994). In the 2000s, the same line-up of Danielle Palardy
Roger, Diane Labrosse and Joane Hétu founds Ensemble SuperMusique and releases
its premier CD Canevas «+» (Ambiances
Magnétiques-Montreal, 2004).
The Belgrade concert took place on 28.05.1987 on a well-known Belgrade venue Fakultet Likovnih
Umetnosti (or informally Akademija) and an authorized audience-bootleg titled T'as vu mon coing (French for “You've seen
my quince”) was made and distributed by Nikad Robom with a catalogue number NR
006. The tape was ripped at 320kbs by pop3 from Svi Marš Na Ples forum in
February 2008.
Black Sheep was
one of several by-products of a much wider English-Dutch co-op – Mass Culture
Control Bureau (or MCCB) stationed in Maassluis – a remote Rotterdam suburb –
and, for one reason or another, Black Sheep was the only MCCB band that managed
to ’click’ with a wider audience. In the first phase of it's existence (1981-1982)
it was concentrated around Geoff Leigh, a former Henry Cow flutist and saxophonist,
Loek Van Saus, who organized Henry Cow concerts in Netherlands and bassist
Colin Mclure, later of Dutch art-rock band Dull Schicksal. During the first
phase of its existence, Black Sheep relentlessly toured Europe, released it's
only release Animal sounds volume one
12" single (MCCB-Maassluis, 1981) and went on a hiatus shortly thereafter
as it's founders went to pursue other musical engagements. After a few Recommended
Records compilation appearances it was finally revitalized in 1986 with a
slightly different line-up and set on yet another tour of Europe
before permanently disbanding in 1987. In 2005, Geoff Leigh resurrected Black
Sheep once again in the form of X Black Sheep, releasing a free online mini-album
Out of quarantine (not on label- Hastings, 2010).
Originally from
England and as of 1978 situated in Netherlands, MCCB projects – Red Balune
(which actually preceded MCCB), the short-lived Kontakt Mikrofoon Orkest and
Black Sheep – were characterized by a idiosyncratic mixture of DIY ethics of
the 1980s with an unmistakably Henry Cowean
type of theatrical avant-rock poetic. The MCCB bands are a hysterical rollercoaster
of styles and genres even on a song-to-song basis, let alone as individual
projects or any sort of coherent whole. However, this conceptual schizophrenia
is especially applicable to Red Balune’s 7” singles Capitalist kid-Spider in love (MCCB-Maassluis, 1978) and Maximum penalty (MCCB-Maassluis, 1979)
and Geoff Leigh's solo 7” single Chemical
bank (MCCB-Maassluis, 1979). These releases still hold some vague
indebtedness to progressive rock’s rambunctious lucid harmonics, while the two
subsequent releases from the MCCB laboratory – Kontakt Mikrofoon Orkest’s 7”
single Do the residue (MCCB-Maassluis,
1981) and Black Sheep’s 12” Animal sounds
volume one (MCCB-Maassluis, 1981) – are much more stylistically even and categorizable
as some sort of New Wave-influenced avant-pop.
In 2004, RēR
Megacorp’s American sister-company released a CD collection of MCCB’s releases
titled Things From The Past (Ad Hoc
Records-Denver, 2004), putting together all material MCCB ever released in
reverse chronological order plus some previously unreleased Black Sheep songs
as well as Geoff Leigh's 1990 ultimate minimal wave hit – Childhood Dreams.
On 13.08.1987,
Nikad Robom arranged a Black Sheep concert at the Akademija venue in Belgrade. Having
previously toured Yugoslavia
in 1982, this was their second Belgrade
concert, yet this time the line-up was without Geoff Leigh but with the help
from Chris Cutler and Maggie Thomas. The sound is quite different from what we
could hear on Animal sounds volume one
as Alive in Beograd is more of a
garage sounding art-rock with a vibrant rhythm-section. The Alive in Beograd cassette was released
as NR 007 in 1987 and it is certainly among the poorest Nikad Robom releases in
terms of sound quality. The cassette’s B side closes with a Nikad Robom
promotional jingle of unknown origin. The tape was ripped at 320kbs by pop3
from Svi Marš Na Ples forum in March 2008.
Tickmayer
Formatio was a the name of a musical ensemble of Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer that
was active from 1986 until 2001, that recorded music for various contemporary
dance and theatre plays, performed on numerous concerts and festivals and even released
3 official releases to it's name: the LP Moments
To Delight-Music In Memory Of Kassak Lajos/Urban Music (Produkcija „M”
Radio Novog Sada-Novi Sad, 1988) and CDs Comedia
Tempio (Théâtre Jel-Orléans, 1991) and Wilhelm
Dances (RēR Megacorp-London,1992). Although the first couple of years they
were based in Novi Sad, they relocated to Orleans, France in 1991 due to
ongoing war in their native country. The line-up was comprised of musicians of
fairly diverse musical education and backgrounds ranging from classical music –
Borislav Cicovački, Milan Vrsajkov, Branislav Aksin, Laura Levai-Aksin, Dušica
Polovina, contemporary jazz – István Grencsó & Mihály Dresch
as well as improvised rock – Đorđe Delibašić from the Novi Sad's experimental
new wave formation Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi – to name a few. Until its
discontinuation in 2001 some forty-something musicians played in Tickmayer
Formatio.
Stevan Kovacs
Tickmayer is an academically trained contemporary composer, multi-instrumentalist
and an author of Hungarian origin living and working in Orleans, France.
Born and raised in Novi Sad
in the multicultural environment of SAP Vojvodina as a member of Hungarian
national minority, he spent much of his formative years addressing the issues
of centre-margin as well as issues of cultural
identity. A friendship with another hungarophone musician, the largely unknown Yugoslav
avant-garde composer and ethnomusicologist Ernő Király – who spent his entire
creative existence in his own country largely unaware of what was going on contemporary
music – influenced Tickmayer greatly in traversing these issues. Tickmayer
spent his youth years studying piano and double bass and went on studying
composition under tuition of Rudolf Brucci on Academy
of Arts in Novi Sad. In 1982, during his studies,
he formed a close partnership with Serbian multi-instrumentalist Boris Kovač in
his newly founded ensemble Ritual Nova, taking participation in a 1984
multimedia performance titled Bivstvovanja
Arhelija Panonca (Serbo-Croatian for “The Abidings of Archelius Panonian”).
Throughout
the 1980s, young Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer was delicately balancing between two
worlds, namely the world of popular music, to which he was primarily exposed in
his formative years in Yugoslavia,
and the world of classical music, to which he was inevitably drawn in the
course of his music studies. In a creative sense, the influence of the former
had been mainly mirrored through collaborations with Boris Kovač, the greats of
Hungarian free jazz like György Szabados and Mihály Dresch as well as various
individuals from the Other Novi Sad scene, while the influence of the latter
was exemplified in his mentors – Ernő Király and Rudolf Brucci. Thus, in order
to reconcile these apparently disparate creative tendencies, he formed
Tickmayer Formatio ensemble in 1986 as a basis for collaboration of classically-trained musicians alongside self-taught
rock and jazz musicians. The same principle was also employed in the so called
Telep sessions[note 26] that Tickmayer also organized.
While Tickmayer
Formatio provided a permanent base for his future works, in the meantime, Tickmayer's first compositions are being premiered at
festivals in Opatija and Novi Sad.
From 1984 onwards he becomes a member of the editorial board of Novi Sad-based Új Symposion[58] (Hungarian for “New
Symposium”), a prestigious Hungarian literary magazine. As a minority language
magazine, Új Symposion played a disproportionately
important role in the alternative culture formation in SAP Vojvodina as well as
in the culture of neighbouring Hungary,
particularly during the late 1960s and early 1970s ban on Western culture.
The
years of 1986-87 saw the full blooming of Tickmayer's composing activity as
well as Formatio's concert performances reinforced by two greats of Hungarian free jazz – István Grencsó & Mihály
Dresch. In 1987, Tickmayer Formatio participated on the four-day long Festival novih umetnosti (Serbo-Croatian
for “New arts festival”) he co-organized with Radio Novi Sad and his Új Symposion associates at Studio M of Radio Novi Sad. In 1987, Intellectual Cabaret, Tickmayer's
side-project with his Formatio drummer Đorđe Delibašić, published a double
cassette release titled Résumé 1984-86
(CirKo Distribucija-Novi Sad, 1987) and contributed to a Recommended Records LP
compilation Rē Records Quarterly Vol.2
No.2 (Rē Records-London, 1987) with one the tracks from the cassette-album.
However, the following
year, 1988, was a year of definitive materialization for all of Tickmayer's
efforts: he recorded his first solo LP SPES
(Produkcija „M” Radio Novog Sada-Novi Sad, 1988), a collaborative LP Chamber Music (Libellula Records-Paris,
1990) with István Grencsó and published the first Formatio LP in a time-span of
just few months. In 1989, Tickmayer received an invitation for post-graduate studies
at the Royal Conservatory in Hague under Louis Andriessen & Diderick
Wagenaar. In wake of war in the former state, Tickmayer departed for Orleans, France
and during the 1990s he mostly composed and performed music for choreographies
for yet another Hungarian expatriate from SAP Vojvodina – the renowned theatre
director and choreographer – Josef Nadj. The end of the 1990s and beginning of
2000s saw a fruitful collaboration with Chris Cutler and Bob Drake in the form
of The Science Group.
Monumentomanija maleroznog prvoborca (Serbo-Croatian for “Monumentomania of
the hapless frontliner”) tape was released in 1987 as NR 008 and it was the
first tape of Yugoslav artists to be published on Nikad Robom. The Tickmayer
Formatio concert happened on 09.10.1987 in Studio M, Novi Sad with eighteen musicians on the stage
at one point. The Formatio presented themselves with a versatile mix of jazzy
minimalist interpretations, folkloric miniatures from Balkans and Mitteleuropa,
free jazz ethics oscillating from menacing to whimsical, but also occasionally very
melancholic (for instance, the piano-solo on Molto Semplice). The three bonus tracks featuring on the end of Side
B are, in order of appearance, are Past
by Isailo, Black Sheep’s Nikad Robom
jingle and last but not least – Oblačari, with their excellent low-fi apoca
folk track O zmajevima, roblju nebeskom
(Serbo-Croatian for “On dragons, the slaves of heavens”). The tape was ripped
at 320kbs by pop3 from Svi Marš Na Ples forum in February 2008.
Buga Up was a
fairly obscure, short-lived act from the provisionally understood wider ring of
Recommended Records conspirators named after the Australian culture jamming
pioneers and a civil disobedience group from the late 1970s – B.U.G.A. U.P. (or
Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions).
The line-up was
comprised of Tom Cora (cello), Guigou Chenevier (saxophone, percussion), René
Lussier (guitar) and occasionally Christiane Cohade (voice). Although the majority
of the band members were francophone, the lyrics were sung in English with just
a few exceptions (Le zebre et l'etalon).
They acted towards the end of the 1980s, approximately the between late 1987
and early 1989 and left no official releases, not even a compilation
contributions, thus leaving Présage de lapin
de la maison (French for “Forcing the rabbit into the cage”) concert
recording on Nikad Robom the only document of their activity. In addition to
this tape the band has two semi-official videos made from concert material by
MirkoSimić
of V.S. / Video Forum Ljubljana that documented various alternative practices
in the capital of Slovenia.
The Présage de lapin de la maison concert
happened in Kulturni Dom Poljane, Ljubljana
on 08.02.1988 and Buga Up played an unusual flavour of art rock, interspersing
the sleek and melodic song base with segments of nerve twitching and often
spasmodic outbursts of improvisation. In the best vein of politically correct RIO rockers, each of the musicians has one solo
improvising sequence. Released as NR 009 in 1988[59]. Nikad Robom obtained the approval for the Présage de lapin de la maison cassette from Buga Up during the third edition of Festival MIMI in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence later that year. The tape was ripped at 320kbs by pop3
from Svi Marš Na Ples forum in March 2008.
Begnagrad is,
undoubtedly, one of the most exceptional bands that sprung up from 1970s counterculture
in Yugoslavia
and present an important missing link in the evolution of Yugoslav alternative
music. Yet after numerous attempts at contextualizing, examining and re-examining
the history of Yugoslav rock music, Begnagrad were considered to be little more
than a footnote peculiarity in its evolution. Although sustaining a
considerable degree of anonymity throughout their lifetime outside of the
narrow subculture milieu of freethinkers in their native Slovenia – Begnagrad were
in the same time one of the better known (of the otherwise downright obscure)
Yugoslav rock bands abroad as their records were distributed by Chris Cutler's
Recommended Records.
Musically,
conceptually and ideologically detached from the creative mainframe of
then-current bands operating in Yugoslavia that were mostly bending over backwards
in efforts to sound as 'Western' as possible, Begnagrad were a highly eclectic
bunch of skilled musicians that converged different influences ranging from
diverse folk music traditions and classical music to 20th century avant-garde
and ECM-type jazz. This was particularly true in the first phase of their
existence where Begnagrad gravitated slightly towards the prog camp, their
music featuring elaborate folkloric themes structured around jazz-bound
improvisations. In the second phase, Begnagrad's music came much closer to RIO bands, the sound became much more complex, their
style more elaborate and their treatment of folk music more insidious. The whole raison d'etre changed as a new spectre of radical ideas was
introduced from the RIO movement, the then-blooming
new music scene as well as contemporary jazz.
When Begnagrad
began in the mid-1970s, Yugo rock was still going through its mimetic phase and
a there were a lot of boundaries waiting to be broken: issues of authentic
creative expression outside of few previously popularized rock music genres
that innovative Yugo bands faced at the time weren’t a clever marketing
manoeuvre – but a serious ideological and representational problem for those
who would dare to tackle them[60]. The situation in question arose mainly due to the
overwhelming scarcity of information on rock music and a general slow pace by
which youths in Yugoslavia
were getting familiarized with the trends and youth culture of the West. The
status of rock music at the time was rather undefined as the Party didn't have
an official policy towards it[61]and its mass popularization relied entirely upon foreign radio stations (first and foremost Radio Luxembourg) and rock-specialized press (such as Džuboks)
to more mainstream media.
Thus, Begnagrad
were stuck in a semantic limbo of sorts very early on; a factor which
particularly added to the ambiguity and the dubious reception with certain
audiences was their appropriation of various folk music practices.
Among rock music
audiences in Yugoslavia, the
mid-1970s were the time when the mainstream success of Bijelo Dugme – a folk rock group from Sarajevo
with a repertoire which borrowed heavily from Balkan folk music traditions – triggered a fierce debate in the Yugo rock press on the role and dosage of folk music in Yugo rock bands. This was a part of a specific dialectic of rock music’s commercialization in Yugoslavia where, unlike the fully-industrialized capitalist societies of the West, to be
perceived as commercial – meant to be more traditional music-lenient or simply more folksy. Folk music and its derivatives still had greater commercial appeal than pop and a sentiment began to grow among the alternative music audiences which viewed folk music as a sort of a dungeon keeper of Yugoslavia’s modernity.
In Slovenia,
Begnagrad’s home country, this was the time when the genre of narodno-zabavna glasba (Slovenian for “folk
entertainment music”) was slowly getting out of its original setting of the
rural dance parties called veselice
and started receiving considerable exposure from the Slovenian state media.
Initially, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Communist Party officials in Slovenia
were mainly suspicious towards narodno-zabavna
whom they considered potentially counter-revolutionary due to its perceived
primitiveness and had given their endorsement to schlager-inspired popevka instead, but all of this changed
in the 1970s when numerous festivals dedicated to narodno-zabavna began to sprout. One particular style of narodno-zabavna championed by Avsenik
Brothers Ensemble became so popular in the German speaking world that, over a
period of time, it began being widely referred to in Slovenia
by its German name – Oberkrainer, induced
from Oberkrainer volksmusik (German
for “Upper Carniola volksmusik”). The Oberkrainer style is a mix between polka
and waltz that is rooted in Alpine folk music traditions.
Since Begnagrad,
like many of the Oberkrainer ensembles,
were a modified jazz combo which used an identical instrumentation of an
accordion, a clarinet and a guitar (and a set of drums too, but this is where
Begnagrad diverge), this would often stir a kind of confusion which Begnagrad
were eager to exploit. Begnagrad played along with the image of an Oberkrainer country band by performing
on the streets during festivities, popular taverns and even full-blown narodno-zabavna festival, thus playing with
people’s expectations on the basis of their appearance. This sort of antics
prompted Tribuna journalist Marko
Uršič to call them “narodno-zabavna vanguard… at the root of Commedia
dell’arte”[62]. In order
to boost their bogus Oberkrainer
credentials further, Begnagrad’s Bežigrad-born and raised coterie even recorded
Kranjskagorablues nazaj – a song
about Kranjska Gora, the Upper Carniola landmark (which is also a staple in
every Oberkrainer band’s repertoire).
By doing these
tours throughout Slovenia performing in narodno-zabavna
or folk music context, Begnagrad were the among the first bands in Yugoslavia
to break some of the conventions surrounding rock music shows and anticipate
certain global trends that came with the world music festivals like WOMAD or Fête de la Musique. However, this wasn’t intended, since for
Begnagrad the displacement of rock music from its quotidian context and space
of happening and playing with the accepted modes of its cultural appropriation
was of primary importance rather than to exploit the subversive potential of
folk music; Begnagrad often performed in other odd contexts like, for instance,
in half-times of friendly football games[63]. This sort of actions, in
Begnagrad's case as well as their RIO contemporaries like Srp and Papa Kinjal Band
(D’Pravda) – or the entire generation of Ljubljana
artists active in 1970s, for that matter – point to a strong anti-institutional
drive that shaped the creative sensibility of the era.
In reality,
Begnagrad were never fascinated with Slovenian folk music heritage (except, in
part, with its vocal music tradition)[64] and instead they used it as a convenient resource
for interpretation and elaboration of their own musical ideas. However, if
there was a tangible link with folklore in Begnagrad's music it was surrealism – not as a historical
art movement, but more as a code-word for a poetic of the imaginal and the
supernatural – as this sort of vernacular surrealism is deeply rooted in South
Slavic folklore and also present in their music through experiences such as
daydreams, night dances and memories[65]; and this isn't only a characteristic of Begnagrad –
the same influence can also be found with some of their contemporaries, namely
the psychedelic folk groups such as Konj, Kladivo In Voda and Sedmina.
Begnagrad’s
career spanned some 8 years in two major phases: 1975-1979 and 1981-1983.
Chronologically, that history goes as following.
Begnagrad formed
in summer of 1975 in Bežigrad district of Ljubljana (Slovenia), in the time
when the first wave of counterculture had long passed, destroying whatever was
left of this fragile illusion of the 1960s that art is capable of large-scale
social changes, the two high school friends – Bratko Bibič and Bogo Pečnikar,
felt they couldn't really correspond to these austere conclusions and opted for
doing what youths usually do: following their own instincts. They've been
practising and sporadically performing for a while as Begnagrad (Slovenian for
“Escape-to-the-city” in its compound
form), a name chosen partly in reference to these medieval situations where
inhabitants of the villages would rush to the nearby castle-cities in face
upcoming adversity and partly to the Bežigrad quarter from which they originate.
At one point Andrej Trobentar, famous Slovenian poet & singer-songwriter of
Sedem Svetlobnih Let (Slovenian for “Seven Light Years”) joins the band for a
brief period, renaming it Šest Kilometrov na Uro (Slovenian for “Six Kilometres
per Hour”) and it was only after his departure, the first line-up of Begnagrad
solidifies with Vlado Špindler on bass and Igor Muševič on drums.
Very early on
Begnagrad record their first set of demo songs in restrictive conditions at Ljubljana’s
Radio Študent and play them at their first performances. These recordings
caught the attention of Serbian journalist Anđelko Maletić and he subsequently invites Begnagrad to perform on the
17th edition of Omladinski
Festival in Subotica (SAP Vojvodina) in May
1977, the most important youth
music festival in former Yugoslavia.
After this, they make their Belgrade debut in November of 1977 alongside established
prog rockers Buldožer and the newly formed Pankrti – which had spearheaded the
embryonic punk movement at the time – on the Belgrade Dani mlade slovenačke kulture (Serbo-Croatian for “Days of
Slovenian youth culture”), a manifestation organized by Peter Mlakar in front
of Zveza Socialistične Mladine Slovenije (or ZSMS;
Slovenian for “League of Socialist Youth of Slovenia“). In December of the same year, Begnagrad travel to Novi Sad (SR Serbia) where Anđelko Maletić arranged them studio time at Studio M, probably one of the
best-equipped recording studios in Yugoslavia at the time. However, for
reasons unknown, the Studio M sessions with Maletić as
the producer were aborted in the middle of the process and the album was never
finalized[66]. Instead,
the Studio M recordings were left to dwell in the archives of Radio-televizija Novi Sad for years to
come.
Throughout 1978
Begnagrad remained a solid presence in Yu-rock scene playing a lot of concerts
around the country, appearing on Slovenian National Radio and even a doing a
half-hour TV show. The end of the 1978 sees the group embark on an almost three
year long hiatus as Vlado Špindler, the bass player, departed for mandatory
military service. During the course of the break, Bratko Bibič and Bogo Pečnikar experiment with a host of different
ideas with a variety of different musicians, but don’t settle until the arrival
of two versatile musicians – Nino De
Gleria, a bass player and percussionist, and – Aleš Rendla, a drummer and violinist in mid-1981. Parallel to their
engagement with Begnagrad, De Gleria and Rendla were active as support
musicians with Srp, another Slovenian RIO band of the era.
Begnagrad
officially reformed in the summer of 1981. In winter, they play on the second
Yugoslav RIO festival in Ljubljana,
which featured an entirely
Slovenian line-up of D’Pravda, Srp, Begnagrad and Istranova. Additionaly
Begnagrad recruit their old friend Boris Romih on guitar and percussion, thus forming the classic
Begnagrad line-up which goes on to record their LP debut Begnagrad (ZKP RTVL-Ljubljana, 1982) in May of 1982. In June of 1982
Begnagrad also appears on the third RIO festival in Ljubljana, which featured
Art Zoyd, Black Sheep, Andrea Centazzo, Peter Frohmader’s Nekropolis, Christopher Wangro’s
Circus Janus, but also fellow Slovenians D’Pravda and – oddly enough – Laibach.
Meanwhile, the LP Begnagrad is released in autumn of 1982 and
instantly hailed as a quintessential RIO
album. Shortly after the release of the LP debut Aleš Rendla also leaves the band
to serve in the military and is replaced with Zoran Kanduč
on drums. By the end of 1982, Begnagrad was joined by guitarist Igor Leonardi with whom
they recorded new material and performed the Konzert for a Broken Dance tour. With Rendla back from his military
service, the band undertook a second European tour in 1983, during which
Begnagrad split in the summer of 1983[67]. Unlike the first Begnagrad line-up, the second rarely
played in Yugoslavia outside
Slovenia, mostly
concentrating on touring abroad (Italy,
Austria, Switzerland, West
Germany, Netherlands,
Czechoslovakia,
etc), mainly due to the unbearable punk euphoria back home[68].
After the band had
split, the members of Begnagrad soon dispersed each in their own direction. In 1984,
Begnagrad’s rhythm section, comprised of Aleš Rendla, Nino De Gleria and Igor
Leonardi – formed Quatebriga, a
band that carried the legacy of the Ljubljana RIO scene well into the second
half of the 1980s. In the meantime, Begnagrad’s frontman, Bratko Bibič, started cooperating with the
Swiss-based group Nimal, founded by ex-members of Debile Menthol Jean 20
Huguenin and Jean-Maurice Rossel plus Tom Cora and Pippin Barnett, while
Begnagrad’s founder Bogo Pečnikar retired from music
altogether. Although the band has been lying dormant for several years, the
beginning of 1990s sees a slight revival of interest for Begnagrad as their
1977 Studio M recordings resurface in March of 1990 on a tape-release Jodlovska Urška
(Nikad Robom-Belgrade, 1990) and, later that year, their 1982 self-titled LP is re-released on CD as Konzert For A Broken Dance (AYAA-Reims, 1990) with some bonus
tracks. In 1993, the 1977 Studio M recordings are further re-released on
CD as Tastare (Bess Pro
Market-Ljubljana, 1993) with a new mastering and addition of few bonus tracks.
Almost a whole decade had
passed, until Bratko Bibič and Bogo Pečnikar started working together again.
This happened in somewhere in 1993, when Pečnikar joined Bibič in Nimal studio L'Usines
in Neuchatel to record material for his new project. This is essentially how Bratko
Bibič and The Madleys began, a band that still continues to perform in 2013 and
which has released two CD albums so far – Of Bridko Bebič (LabelUsineS-Neuchatel, 1995)
and Na Domačem Vrtu (Serija SyHaPA
Silents-Ljubljana, 2002). The Madleys line-up eventually grew to include former
Begnagrad members Aleš Rendla and Nino De Gleria as well as former Srp viola player Matjaž Sekne. In December of 2012, on the occasion of
the 30th anniversary of the publishing of their self-titled 1982
debut album, Begnagrad had officially reformed to play a one-off gig in Ljubljana. The event
happened on 12.12.2012 in Center kulture Španski borci and featured the
original Begnagrad line-up from the era of Bratko Bibič,
Bogo Pečnikar, Boris Romih, Aleš Rendla and Nino De Gleria[69].
Jodlovska
Urška (Slovenian for “Yodeling Urška”) was released in 1990 on Nikad Robom as NR 010. The 1977 Studio M sessions it
contains remain to this day the only document of the first phase of Begnagrad’s
existence. The recordings on Jodlovska Urška
feature the original 1977 studio mix made Studio
M, with whom members of Begnagrad were unsatisfied, thus leaving the material
unreleased for thirteen years. The picture featured on the front cover is the
bell tower of Gospa od Zvonika church in the complex of Diocletian’s Palace in Split old town (SR Croatia).
Inside the tape’s sleeve there is a small note in Slovenian, probably written
by some of its members, which includes an interesting error; somewhere near the
bottom of the text, it is written: Zrihtano
pa zdelano pri založbi Nigdar Robem; marec 1990; Otroške novine, Gornji
Milanovac; implying that the cassette edition was somehow affiliated with publisher of the Nikad Robom comic edition – Dečje novine from Gornji Milanovac (SR Serbia). The cassette rip here featured is either incomplete or the bonus tracks mentioned on the sleeve were never included (a track each by Steve Feigenbaum & Friends, Black Sheep and Oblačari).
The music on Jodlovska Urška characterized complementation
of the otherwise irreconcilable elements, giving away a sense of extraordinary
eclecticism. The quirk of Alpine folk music together with the vigour of
Istrian-Mediteranean musical traditions and the cerebral rhythmicity of jazz
with the physicality of rock band blend so naturally in Begnagrad's music as if
relieved of any previous contexts of they might have had. Akin to medieval
minstrels, Begnagrad's music inhibits this thinly woven space in between phantasmagorical
and the real; a place of poetic rumination and magical allure. The tape was
ripped at 320kbs by pop3 from Svi Marš Na Ples forum in December 2007.
CirKo Della
Primavera was the name of the improvised music and theatre troupe led by
Aleksandar Carić that emerged in the lively Other Novi Sad underground of the
late 1980s. Praised as much as ridiculed, CirKo Della Primavera was a strangely
revered bunch in their hometown, their impromptu performances with its odd
conceptual set ups, bizarre mises-en-scène and disjointed harmonics are almost
proverbial in Novi Sad’s
alternative folklore. They were also, somewhat erroneously, remembered as the
crass alter-ego of the long lost, but never forgotten Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi.
In terms of its artistic
influences and especially regarding its basic conceptual setup as an
idea-conveying vehicle, CirKo Della Primavera stood mainly between two disparate
artistic traditions. With their subversive culture jamming ethics and
intermedial nature (combining poetry, music, film and
theatre), the events staged by CirKo Della Primavera undoubtedly belong to the
diverse landscape of the post-Fluxus avant-garde, however, since they were
primarily preoccupied with music production – they were also a music act
occupying a rather unwholesome position in the pop culture spectrum. From
today's perspective, the conceptual bent of their sound reveals an inclination
towards some of the marginal trends occurring in the experimental music scene of
the 1980s with the rise of shambolic free improvisation acts like
Smegma, Mnemonist Orchestra and particularly New 7th Music.
CirKo Della Primavera (Italian for “Circus of Spring”) came into existence in 1985 as a result of collaboration of five people: multi-instrumentalist/poet Aleksandar Carić, painter/sculptor Stojan ‘Stole’ Janković, percussionist Ðorđe Delibašić, painter Vladimir Orešković and guitar player Predrag Pribić. The hearth of its ideological and theoretical inception was the homestead of Stole Janković, where since the onset of the 1980s, an informal coterie of poets, artists and musicians has been working together with the goal of exchanging ideas and cultivating a collective creative experience. Even prior to CirKo Della Primavera, its members were involved with a number of experimental music groups that surfaced in the same surrounding, most notably
its predecessor mega-group Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi (in fact, all CirKo members except Carić were members of Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi), but also many others like Pre i posle tišine, Neo Merz, Zeromen, Obično putovanje šuma, etc; the rest of these projects were usually either impulse-driven manifestations of temporary character or were stubbornly focused on its own production, without any intent of communicating with its immediate environment.
However,
this wasn’t the case with CirKo Della Primavera (nor Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi for that matter)
as its main preoccupation was precisely performing live. In the course of its six year existence, CirKo Della Primavera staged around dozen performances in Novi Sad and other places in Yugoslavia; all of these were, as a rule, rehearsed and performed only once.
In respect to
their context, setting and the general idea, these events could be categorized
into several different, but mutually complementary groups: regular concerts or
gigs, action performances and manifestations. In the beginning, regular youth
concerts or gigs (in venues such pubs, jazz clubs and alike) made up a
significant part CirKo Della Primavera’s activities; these shows were noted for
their spontaneity and anarchic spirit and this is where CirKo Della Primavera would
usually display the full oeuvre of their rock deconstructivist programme – from
diluted, eerily atmospheric ritual music to shambolic improv jamborees and similar
awkward attempts in jazz territories. Another of their antics were action
performances, that is, making impromptu appearances on various public sites
such as city buses, squares, abandoned spaces and performing miniature oddball
concertos which had a “hit and run” modus operandi akin to modern day
flash-mobs.
However, when
attending festivals and large auditoriums, CirKo Della Primavera undertook a
much more elaborate approach. For such occasions, CirKo Della Primavera would
employ theatrical elements, such as costumes, scenography as well as adding
non-musical elements in the form of an array of Cagean props used onstage for
extracting sounds; since these were usually odd found objects, mundane household objects or furniture, this gave Cirko’s already
marginal appearance a clear hint of Arte Povera. Although improvisation
and its workings would remain pretty much the key underlying focus in that kind
of settings, their concerts would become musical inscenations more than
anything.
The
first official CirKo Della Primavera manifestation took place in 1985 in the form of a twelve-hour long open-air
concert at Katolička porta[note 27] titled Koncert za letnju
dugodnevnicu (Serbo-Croatian for “Concert for the summer solstice”). The
concert was conceived as a whimsical tribute to the pagan festivity, but also
as an all day happening where CirKo Della Primavera and their friends would
play continually; occasionally visitors and passers-by would be persuaded to
join in the proceedings[note 28]. In total there were four more events held as Koncert za letnju dugodnevnicu, the
other three being significantly shorter than the initial. Subsequently, these
concerts were collected and released as Muzika
za letnju dugodnevnicu (CirKo Distribucija-Novi Sad, 1988) a twenty-four
cassette box set in a wooden case, with Nikad Robom in charge of the
distribution.
In 1989 they make
their only studio appearance in and publish the recordings on a cassette Faima Vinovo (Nikad Robom-Belgrade,
1990). One of CirKo Della Primavera's most acclaimed performances was in 1988/89
in an art gallery in Belgrade
in the Knez Mihajlova Street;
they were invited on the occasion of an anniversary event of a Serbian
sculpting colony and played an improvised set wholly on terracotta instruments.
CirKo Della Primavera one and only appearance abroad happened in the 1991 edition of West-East
festival in Győr (Northwest Hungary), which had, soon enough, turned out to be one
of the last performances they had.
With the onset of
war in former Yugoslavia
in 1991, CirKo Della Primavera – like many of its like-minded Yugoslavian
projects of the time – got simply overran by the political circumstances. In
the new reality setting that was quickly enveloping everyday existence in
Yugoslavia, what they were doing was getting increasingly redundant and soon as
much as three of its members soon left Novi Sad: Stole Janković headed for
London, Ðorđe Delibašić relocated to Amsterdam[note 29] and Aleksandar Carić settled down in Italy.
While in Italy,
Carić embarked upon a creative collaboration with a street theatre troupe '90
Teatro Movimento as musician and actor which drew him closer to buskers’
lifestyle and the career of a street performer. Soon enough, in 1994, Carić
formed his own Tatamata Teatro Company with Serena Galella and went on
performing in various countries around Europe, Asia and South
America. In addition to his performing activities, he organized
several festivals dedicated to open air theatre and street performance like Coast to Coast festival of Palmi and
Gerace in Calabria.
Since 2001, Aleksandar Carić is the artistic director of Novi Sad’s Internacionalni Festival Uličnih Svirača (or IFUS; Serbo-Croatian for “International Street Artists Festival”),
a festival dedicated to the art of street performing that saw its 13th
edition in 2013.
Since departing
to Italy,
his involvement in the experimental music field remained sporadic. In 2000, he realized a multimedia
performance with Branislav Petrić titled Can you overcome war with Your stereophonic
capabilities?. In 2001, Carić
staged its
Italian edition with Amy Denio and Sabina Meyer and subsequently released CD documenting
it – Puoi Sconfiggere la Guerra con la tua Capacità Stereofonica? (self-released-Rome, 2001). Throughout
2001/02 he performs with StrixAluco,
a project of Sabina
Meyer and Daniela
Cattivelli, on various
festivals throughout Europe, including the 2002 editions of Ring Ring and
Interzone, in Belgrade and Novi Sad, respectfully. In 2001, he also records a CD album with
Meyer and Cattivelli titled AnteNata (Ambiances Magnétiques-Montreal, 2005), a similar-minded project
that represented a continuation of the explorations begun by StrixAluco. In 2003, Carić delivers a memorable
one-off performance on a string of promotional concerts for Bojan Đorđević’s Srbija: Sounds
Global
project, where he used the
same Situationist set-up characteristic of his 1980s work with CirKo Della
Primavera: voice, recorder, a washbowl and a mattress air pump.
Apart from Muzika za letnju dugodnevnicu, CirKo Della
Primavera only official release to date is Faima
Vinovo cassette from 1990 that came out on Nikad Robom as NR 011. The
cassette consists of two structurally and stylistically different segments: the
first corresponds with the opening track on A side Muzika za ples i probavu (Serbo-Croatian for “Music for dance and
digestion”), which is a sparse ritualistic track, extracted from a live performance
recorded in the hall of the Novi Sad Faculty of Agriculture in April of 1989 and
the second, comprising the remainder of the tape, which is a mishmash recording
of improvised music and free jazz made in Boris Kovač’s Barbaro studio in
Bukovac made during the winter of 1989. On Faima
Vinovo, CirKo Della Primavera are dubbed as Ansambl za istinitu kućnu
muziku CirKo Della Primavera (Serbo-Croatian for “Ensemble for true house music
CirKo Della Primavera”), while the names of performers appear in pseudonyms, so
we have a line up of Apolon Česterton, Celestin Hulahop, Ištar Aerodinamik, Branko Brama and Kaspar
Hauzer in this particular order corresponding to Đorđe Delibašić, Stole Janković, Aleksandar Carić, Predrag
Pribić and Vladimir Orešković, who was also in charge for the tape artwork.
Last but not
least, side B closes with one of the best Nikad Robom jingles Nikad Robom (verzija) by Das Kapital, a
Novosadian hometaping duo of Božidar Kecman and Boris Jocić from the latter part of the 1980s. The tape was ripped at 320kbs by pop3 from
Svi Marš Na Ples forum in March 2008.
In
Yugoslavia it wasn’t uncommon for individuals engaged in experimental music to
meticulously create volumes and sometimes entire bodies of work without ever
making any serious effort (or in some cases – even intent) to make their output
available to any sort of public. In fact, there are numerous cases of this practice
and some whole anti-careers were made in this way – especially in the punk
dominated 1980s cassette experimentalist scene – but to wait eighteen years to get a first release published is a sort
of a landmark case even for Yugoslavian standards, which is precisely the case
with Institute from Belgrade.
Institute, on the other hand, could hardly be considered a part of this scene,
since rather than utilizing the technological possibilities that facilitated
the growth of DIY experimentalism, their principal interest remained with live
improvisation and above all the colour, texture and resonance of the percussive timbre. In addition
to this, the fact that the Institute’s whole archive was throughout the years systematically
kept on magnetic reels instead of cassettes makes them a stand-alone phenomenon
in Yugoslav music.
Institute
are traffickers of world music exotica, psychedelic frontiersmen in search for
the perfect head trip, sonic anthropologists suffering from a severe case of
nostalgie de la boue. Over the years Institute has expressed interest in a
palette of different music traditions extending from sub-Saharan polyrhythms
and sparse sonorities of Eastern music traditions to proximal Indo-European
heritage as well as apocryphal paleo-Balkanic archaica. With interest in the
latter, Institute came very close to Boris Kovač and the Nova Panonska Umetnost (Serbo-Croatian for “New Pannonian Art”) movement at times,
however their fascination with world music remained a constant throughout their
career. With its artistic imaginarium entirely immersed in distant cultures and
with a regular influx of collaborators – nationals of various Non-Aligned countries
(Zaire, Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde among others) who came to study
in the Yugoslavian capital, one is almost tempted to think about Institute in relation
to the thirdworldist tendencies present in Yugoslav popular culture of the 1960s[note 30]. Still, the truth is that by the time Institute appeared in mid-1970s,
Yugoslav culture policies facilitated and fostered its own variety of
rudimentary Western style pop culture; and not only that Institut stems from this
Yugo pop culture matrix, but paradoxically, their own interest in the Third
World – as a band that actually
exists in the Third World – is entirely westernized as it's rooted in the exhausted imagination of the
capitalist First World.
There
are two main, mutually complementing creative
currents which remained a fixture during Institute’s almost forty year
existence. The first current, just a few years older, is jazz music. Throughout
the years, jazz has retained its influence on Institute in a variety of forms:
in the 1970s, this was usually the then-popular jazz fusion genre (or sometimes
free jazz) and in the 1990s and 2000s this was mainly ethno jazz with motifs
from a wide range of music traditions. The second major current in Institute’s
oeuvre is DIY improvisation, the presence of which we can trace to the very
beginning of the 1980s. Characteristic for Institute’s music-making
process in regard to this current are
investigations into specific musical materials which usually result in
custom-built instruments or accumulation of purposeful objects which could be
used as found instruments. The recording or performing sessions are regularly
site-specific, often involving field trips.
Institute
was founded in 1974 around a nucleus of Veljko Nikolić alias Papa Nik and Srđan
Aleksić alias Sai Fraparega, two students at Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade. In the
beginning, the group was named Gandharva, after the famous institute of Indian
Classical music – Gandharva Mahavidyalaya (only later it will be established that Gandharva was only a phase of the Institute). Along with the founding duo of Papa Nik (electric
piano, synth, recorder, etc) and Sai Fraparega (drums, percussions, etc), the
line-up eventually solidified around Milan Milićević (bass guitar), Dušan
Gamser (violin) and Vlada Minić (flute). The fledgling band's repertoire mostly
consisted of conventional jazz-rock routines that were popular in the day
contrasted with elements ethnic music as well as free jazz. However, towards
the end of the 1970s the duo will eventually come to an understanding that
their true musical interests in fact lie with what made up most of their intros
and medleys in Gandharva – spontaneous DIY improvisation; improvisation on
pots’n’pans, beer bottles and literally anything they could lay their hands on.
The most imporant recordings of the first Institute phase are Počeci (Serbo-Croatian for "Beginnings")
and Veliko putovanje (Serbo-Croatian
for "The great travel"), both unreleased to date[70].
After
a couple of brief stints with projects such as Bridge and Visoka Vegetacija (Serbo-Croatian
for "High Vegetation"), the group morphed into Rabut on the turn of
the 1980s. Rabut, as a formation, came about when Veljko Nikolić and Srđan
Aleksić did a project titled Grad Rabut
Doline (Serbo-Croatian for "The City of The Rabut Valley") as a
part of their studying course at the faculty of Architecture under the
mentorship of Bogdan Bogdanović, the great mystic of Yugoslavian architecture. Grad Rabut Doline dealt with the
recreation of a lost civilization with the use of symbolic forms. The basic
media were slides, drawings, photographs and video, however the two expanded
the original idea with the addition of live music, prepared masks, costumes,
etc. The project was originally presented at the 14th BITEF festival at Belgrade’s SKC venue on 17.06.1980. In wider
context of Institute’s evolution, the main innovation of Rabut in regard to the
music making process was that the entire repertoire was delivered on an
assortment of self-made instruments such as rabutfon, zojnica and jaguarovi
brkovi; it was also the first time that the group used traditional Oriental
instruments such as saz, zurna and tabla. All in all, both Rabut and the
project Grad Rabut Doline were an
important formative experience for Papa Nik and Sai
Fraparega and thus, crucial for establishing Institute’s identity. The main
recording in this period is Grad Rabut
Doline (unreleased)[71].
From
the mid-1980s onwards, a classical Institute period follows. By this time the
Institute duo’s interests with traditional music (Yoruba music, throat singing,
etc) and especially world music (Fela Kuti, Ravi Shankar, Stomu Yamashta) peak,
resulting with a more commercial jazz fusion sound. The group performed for the
first time as Institute during the inaugural Druga nova muzika (Serbo-Croatian for "Other new music") festival
at SKC on 02.11.1984 as well as the follow-up mini-event Druga nova muzika (Ten years after) on 28.12.1984 also at SKC.
Further performances include Povratak Džona Fruma (Serbo-Croatian for "The Return of John Frum") at SKC in 1986, Kiva 1 and Kiva 2 at the BIP brewery in Skadarlija district in 1986, Institute-Guinea Bissau and Sedam Zimskih Pokrivača (Serbo-Croatian for "Seven Winter Blankets") at SKC in
1987, Avangarda XXI Veka at SKC in
1988 and Pomoć Jermeniji event (Serbo-Croatian for "Help to Armenia") at Studentski dom
Karaburma in 1988.
From this period this period there is also an appearance on Lična muzika, the first Yugoslav computer music festival from 01.06.-05.06.1987. Papa Nik and Fraparega did a set with two joysticks attached to a computer with percussion software and a little live ducky which was wired to produce digital noises. There are many unreleased recordings from this period, however a recording from the 1986
concert Povratak Džona Fruma was recently released on a self-titled CDR
(self-released-Belgrade, 2011)[72].
Towards
the late 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, Institute enters into its Yap phase which is easily one of the most-accessible
stages in its development. The Institute Yap phase is characterized by frequent
collaboration with a number of African musicians and abundant concert
activities in the Museum of African Art in Belgrade
or the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade.
During this time, Institute puts out its first releases – the two cassettes Minijature (Nikad Robom-Belgrade, 1992)
and Kutubombo Naturara (L.V.O. Records-Belgrade, 1994) as well
as a CD release Kompilacija I (self-released-Belgrade,
199?)[73].
Minijature is a collection of Institute
short live-numbers released as a cassette on Nikad Robom (catalogue nr. NR 012) in December of 1992. The idea for the tape release came earlier that year when Nikad Robom started frequenting Institute’s Friday evening gigs at Muzej afričke umetnosti in Belgrade. Nikad Robom invited Papa Nik of Institute to perform a series of radiophonic miniatures live-on-air on their Pomen Crvenom Patuljku radio show on Radio B92. Since the show aired every second Sunday in a month and lasted only about an hour, the sessions for the Minijature
release took over six months to record (09.05-28.11.1992) as Institute could
play only about fifteen minutes in each broadcast. In the process of recording
tracks for Minijature everything was
an improvisation – from the basic musical setup to the choice of instruments to
personnel involved. The cassette release is accompanied with a booklet
featuring an elaborate tabular scheme displaying all the relevant information
regarding participants of the sessions as well as instruments utilized for
individual tracks. The tape was digitalized to a CDR media by Papa Nik and subsequently ripped at 320kbs by
Hogon in July 2011.
Csak a Ősbadadadaarchiv vol.1
84-90 (Bahia
Music-Budapest, 1998) is one of the very few cassette releases documenting the
first, 1980s phase of Tibor Bada's main music vehicle, Bada Dada – a moniker
that covers all of his private DIY audio experiments. Although it was his
default and most prolific project, Bada himself didn't seem to bother too much
to release any of these recordings even in a semi-official form probably due to
the inaccessible nature of the material. The Csak a Ősbadadadaarchiv vol.1 84-90 (Hungarian
for "Only old Bada Dada archive vol.1 84-90") is a collection of Bada's
work encompassing the 1984-1990 period, when he still lived in Novi Sad. Besides Bada’s bedroom audio
experiments which constitute the bulk of the tracks on the cassette, there are
two live recordings by Doktor Živago Dark Stars, his official band of time,
that were added to the mix – Megjött a
Vegeta (Hungarian for "Vegeta arrived"[note 31]) and Budapest. The cassette was published in 1998 on Attila Bognár and
Ernő Mesterházy’s Bahia Music, one of the main alternative music publishers in Hungary during
the 1990s and early 2000s.
The
techniques and procedures Bada utilizes on Csak
a Ősbadadadaarchiv vol.1 84-90 are remarkably basic and the song structures
are quite barren, even for sound poetry standards. As he himself implies on the
cover art ("A Viszontagság veteran"), Bada is indeed a well-versed conjurer
of cheap tricks, however none of his Fluxus-type gimmickries serve self-gratificatory purposes or present an end in
themselves, but rather provide a necessary atmosphere for his poetry recitals.
In two of his most stark examples of dark surrealism on the album Bada’s
narration is accompanied by a haunting performance of primitive zither plucking:
Gyönyörű Vak Lány (Hungarian for
"Beautiful Blind Girl") is a fragment from provincial childhood about
a beautiful blind girl who was, still, deemed lucky in the song as she couldn’t
know how ugly her suitors are and Szabó
Rozáliát is a Kharmsean account of another unfortunate girl of the same
name who was "deathfucked by
lightning" on her way home from the fish market.
Zither
is used throughout the cassette and one of its more humorous deliveries are to
be found on Direktorok (Hungarian for
"The Directors") – which tackles the socialist cult of public company
managers and I Never Go – which seems
to be a personal story related to Bada. On several of tracks like Jaj, de Kicsi (Hungarian for "Oh,
how small"), Tavasz (Hungarian
for "Spring") and Küzdelem
(Hungarian for "Fight"), Bada plays the guitar by merely picking notes up and down the low E string and in Apa Kocsit Hajt (Hungarian for
"Dad Drives a Car"), apart from the introduction and coda, Bada plays only two
alternating chords on harmonica. In the beginning of the 1990s, Apa Kocsit Hajt was re-recorded with Tudósok,
Bada’s band with Béla Máriás, which has become over the years a cult classic in
the Hungarian underground. The only tracks on Csak a Ősbadadadaarchiv vol.1 84-90 where the experiments aren’t
subordinated to the lyrical order are Ó
Milyen Jó (Hungarian for "Oh, how good"), the only track
featuring synthesizer – a mood number about a strangely beautiful day – and Antikrisztus (Hungarian for "Antichrist")
where Bada resorts to a proper tomfoolery: he plays a whole Jean-Michel Jarre
piece (Equinoxe pt.5) and sings his
demented karaoke over it: Gyere ide Anti,
vár téged a tanti! (Hungarian for "Come over Anti, the auntie wants to
see you"). The tape was
ripped at 128kbs by nychale in April 2010.
Igrokaz u
Zmijarniku (Serbo-Croatian for "A play in the snake-burrow“) is one of the most mysterious formations to arise
in the so called Nikad Robom circle and certainly one of the most inventive
acts in SAP Vojvodina’s 1980s independent music scene. Igrokaz u Zmijarniku was
an attic-bound duo of two
friends – Siniša Nenadić and Nebojša Raičković,
active in a relatively short
span of approximately two years, from 1987 to 1989. The group developed their unique DIY aesthetics
in
the relative isolation of their hometown Bačka Topola, a remote place in North-Central
Vojvodina. Although Igrokaz u
Zmijarniku were geographically closer to Subotica,
the duo had, as a matter of fact, much stronger ties to Novi Sad and its music scene due to a few
factors. In the early 1980s, Nenadić was introduced to the RIO scene in Novi Sad through Bojan Đorđević of Nikad Robom whom he met
after spotting an
advertisement for Đorđević’s hometaping operation in the Džuboks
music magazine[74]. For the duo, Novi Sad
was also a place where all sorts of interesting concerts and festivals occurred
(Dani džeza, Muzika danas, etc) as it was a city with a vibrant alternative
music scene. Finally, it was in Novi
Sad (or more precisely Bukovac) where Igrokaz u
Zmijarniku recorded bulk of the material for Drvored sumraka
(self-released-Bačka Topola, 1989), their one and only cassette release.
As a project,
Igrokaz u Zmijarniku was conceived and carried out in its entirety in the attic of Siniša Nenadić's
house. There were no conventional concerts apart from a two or three of
exclusive performance-sessions arranged for friends only. Correspondingly,
the creative approach was characterized by a set of features
typical of the 1980s era DIY dilettantism such as pristine recording
conditions, an assortment of found and self-built instruments, primitive sampling
techniques and the use of synthesizers, as well as a leisurely attitude towards
the music-making process. The main idea behind Igrokaz u Zmijarniku was to
produce songs that have a more or less apparent pop structure with a DIY cassette
experimentalist ethos. The concept revolved around a metal frame of children's bed attached
to which were various bits and pieces taken from the local military scrapyard (tanks,
tin chunks, different metallic objects, etc). The distinctively cold sound of
Igrokaz u Zmijarniku derives from an arsenal of percussive metallophone and
idiophone instruments used on its recordings such as xylophone, glockenspiel,
triangles and bells, in addition to a synthesizer and a bass guitar[75].
The only Igrokaz
u Zmijarniku release, Drvored sumraka
(Serbo-Croatian for "Tree-row of twilights") was published in 1989 as
a self-released cassette. The majority of cassette tracks were hand-picked from
a two recording sessions at Boris Kovač’s
Barbaro studio in Bukovac in
December of 1988 and March of 1989, respectfully. Making the sessions work for
Igrokaz u Zmijarniku anecdotaly involved the feat of moving the beds construction from Bačka
Topola to Bukovac, much to their producer's amazement. On the other hand Peščana ljubav (Serbo-Croatian for "Sandy love"), Napuštena stvarnost (Serbo-Croatian for "Abandoned reality") and Stari grad (Serbo-Croatian
for "Old town") were recorded live at the attic in Bačka Topola. The regular Igrokaz u
Zmijarniku line-up of Siniša Nenadić (percussion, vocals, recorder on Napuštena stvarnost) and Nebojša Raičković
(bass guitar, vocals, lead guitar on Kristalni
krst and Vodena šuma) was aided
by Tijana (synthesizer) and Sanja (metallophone on Peščana ljubav) for this release. Featured on the front cover of Drvored sumraka is stylized drawing of Igrokaz’s infamous bed metal frame. The tape was ripped at 320kbs by
Alter-Malter blog in December 2010.
The 1982 Radio Študent demo is the only studio work D’Pravda produced
and, in all likelihood, the only recording of D’Pravda there is. The
eleven-song recording was produced on 14.07.1982, towards the end of their
year-long existence with a following line-up: Iztok Saksida (guitar, also vocals
on Tata, Život nije san, Dakle draga,
Želja [vokalno] and Untitled [Viktor]), Samo Ljubešić
(double bass, also guitar on Život nije san
as well as vocals on Socijalizam and Majko bajko), Mitja Veronek (trombone,
also harmonium on Eto već je sve poprskano
and Untitled [Viktor]), Žiga Saksida
(saxophone), Matjaž Rožič (saxophone), Matija Pribošič (clarinet), Zorko Škvor (drums)
and Jaša Kramaršič (vocals). When not wholly or partially improvised on the
spot, the lyrics were written by Iztok Saksida and were predominantly on
Serbo-Croatian with a couple of songs on Slovenian.
The Radio Študent demo justifies D’Pravda’s daunting reputation as
notoriously lousy musicians and self-styled socialist realist punks of the
Ljubljana RIO scene. Although some of the tracks are actually very elaborate in
structure (most notably the prog-oriented Stražar
in država and Život nije san),
the Radio Študent demo is fairly under-produced and D’Pravda’s performance is
rather sloppy throughout the recording – thus keeping consistency with their
punk philosophy and primary function as an idea-conveying vehicle. Since
D’Pravda was first and foremost a live act, not particularly keen about studio
work – the Radio Študent demo with its rehearsal-like traits such as disjointed harmonics, off-key vocals
and occasional outbursts of buffoonery, fares pretty well in approximating the immediatism
and the rambunctious charm of their live shows. This accounts for tracks like Dakle draga – a post-punk track which
seems to be a take on Azra’s rock poetics and Eto već je sve poprskano – an another parody of popular rock
standards of the time. However, two particularly glaring examples of this
drunken licentiousness that plagues the Radio Študent demo are Socijalizam and Majko bajko.
Here are the lyrics for Socijalizam:
Bit ću kratak. Socijalizam,
Socijalizam, Socijalizam. Socijalizam,
ti si večan. Socijalizam ti si majka naroda. Socijalizam, moraš biti voljen. Socijalizam,
ti si vođa našeg puta. Ti si zvezda, Socijalizam. Ti si, Socijalizam, sve. Socijalizam,
ti si aura Božija. Ti si od ovog i od onog sveta. Nijednog nema boljeg od tebe.
Socijalizam, ti si gutač radnika, ratnika, patnika, putnika. Ti voliš da jedeš
dobru svetinu. Da, gurmane si, Socijalizam. Ti si klasa, Socijalizam. Tako si
lep, lepši od prirode, lepši od napretka, lepši od snova. Socijalizam, bolji od
samoga sebe. Socijalizam, prijatelj svih koji umiru. Ali Socijalizam, samo
nešto, samo nešto, samo jedan mali, upravo sićušni prigovor. Kako si mogao, kako
si mogao da zaboraviš, kako si mogao da zaboraviš urnebesni kliker ? Kako si
mogao da zaboraviš nogu svoju nogu, nogu, nogu ? Gde ćeš da staneš ? Neoprostivo
! Nečuveno ! Kako si mogao da zaboraviš ?
Socijalizam, ti
si sve što se očekuje. Ti si sve što treba i najmilijem robu i najomrznutijem
kućevlasniku. Socijalizam, ti si rajska livada, ti si drvo saznanja.
Socijalizam, ti si dika našeg bića. Ti si budućnost, ti si sadašnjica puna
volje za boljim životom. Divota, divota. Ti si uspeh, ti si sreća – sada i ovde.
Socijalizam, voljeni drug – velika
matica čovečanstva. Ti si sjajna ljubavnica punačkog tela i jantarnih grudi.
Čvrstog hoda. Ti voliš da ti se mazi. Voliš da maziš ! Ti, maza svojih
podanika. Socijalizam, ti si voljeni otvor. Ti si sve što treba, ti si sve što
čovek želi kada je na umoru. Ti si sve što čovek želi kada nije na umoru.
Socijalizam, Socijalizam, tvoja krasna stražnjica. Da, krasna, opasna, jestiva,
slatka i miriše na čokoladu, kao ustalom i sve grane tvoje privrede. I tad kada
se ne zna, Socijalizam, plačeš li ili se smiješ za svoje podanike kada traže da
se utope u tebi ? Socijalizam, ti koji ne voliš lagati. Nečuveni poredak. Sav
istina bez ostatka. Ti si sve što treba i najcrnjem stvoru na kugli zemaljskoj.
I tako zaista
ne mogu shvatit, zaista ne mogu shvatit, Socijalizam plavog oka, zelenog oka i
punačkih ustiju i nežnih ruku. A šta će se tek reći o tvom glasu ? Vitak si kao
turska vojska, Napoleonova šaka i Staljinove orgulje. Razigrane kose, crne
kose, smeđe kose. I zaista ne mogu da shvatim ? Kako si mogao da zaboraviš ?
Kako si mogao da zaboraviš urnebesni kliker ? Kako si mogao da zaboraviš sićušnu
nogu svoju ? Nogu na koju ipak možeš da staneš kad zatreba ? Kako si zaboravio
svoj kraj, kraj svoj, kraj tvoj, urnebesni kliker i tvoje propasti, napasti,
sablasti ? Kako si zaboravio ? Kako si se utapao, pao, pao, pao, zreo, veo, beo,
beo... Ali ipak, ali ipak ! Ostani mi zdrav, sretan i voljen. Socijalizam, Socijalizam,
sudbino tvoja.
The tape was
ripped at 256kbs by a sound engineer from Radio Študent in March 2012 and
subsequently ended up on Svi Marš Na Ples forum.
Zadnja Večerja (Arhefon-Ljubljana, 2002) is
a multimedia CD collection of Srp’s archival material that includes both the
unreleased recordings mostly from the band’s pre-LP era (1981-1982) as well as
the surviving video documentation from the same period. Zadnja Večerja (Slovenian for “The Last Supper”) was published in
2002 as an enhanced CD by Arhefon – a joint project of Društvo za raziskovanje
popularne glasbe (Slovenian for “The Society for the study of popular music”) and
Nika Records – with an assigned catalogue nr. Arhefon 02. Accompanying the
release is an extensive twenty three page booklet with a plethora of
information about Srp both on Slovenian and English. Featured on the front
cover is a still from Srp’s 1984 video Svuda ljudi, svuda zastave (Slovenian for “People everywhere, flags
everywhere”) directed by Jan Zakonjšek. The personnel featured on Zadnja Večerja are a regular Srp line-up
of Matjaž
Sekne (viola), Primož Simončič (saxophone), Gojmir Lešnjak (bassoon, vocals)
and Tadej Pogačar (double bass).
The
audio part of Zadnja Večerja contains
original versions and alternative takes of the songs that were selected for
Srp’s 1984 LP like Blues, Drugovi Omladinci, Zdravo!, Zadnja Večerja, Kritična as well as a couple of songs that weren’t considered for
the LP release such as Narodna, Vsem Mojim Prijateljem, ECM-Dva Prašiča Iz Verone, Tango and Omladinci. The song Maturantski
Izlet, on the other hand, is the same version of the track that appeared on
the LP. For the major part, the recordings derive from two sessions – at Radio Študent 14.06.-15.06.1981
sessions and the Metro studio session from 06.07.1982. As Maturantski Izlet was recorded on the sessions for the LP, the only live
track on the CD is Omladinci, which
was recorded on 22.04.1981 on the Philosophical Faculty of Ljubljana. The video
part features three music videos for Opera-Zadnja
Večerja, Zadnja Večerja and Svuda Ljudi, Svuda Zastave.
The CD
was ripped at variable bitrate by Za Ljudi! blog in April 2009.
[note 1] - ^ The New Music term as a genre designation originates from the New Music, New York conference and festival held at The Kitchen in New York in the 08.06.-16.08.1979 period. During the 1970s, the term New Music was used somewhat simultaneously with the Downtown scene term to mark out the specific melange of Fluxus-infused, minimalist and
other non-Darmstadt types of music that were proliferating there. However, after the New Music, New York conference this meaning had been gradually lost and the term had evolved into a
synonym for contemporary classical music.
[note 2] - ^ Hometaping in the original meaning of term
–
indicating an unauthorized production and distribution of copyrighted material.
Nikad Robom was one of the several well-known hometaping hubs for Western
alternative music in the former Yugoslavia.
These were a necessity in the Eastern Block considering the slow pace at which
cultural information arrived from the West and label owners would often take up
such enterprises. One of the earliest and most prominent of these hometaping
hubs by scale as well by scope was that of a Zagreb-based journalist Damir
Tiljak. Tiljak turned his personal plight into an occasional source of income
(and, by chance, into a nation-wide alternative music enlightenment mission) by
spending the settlement money he got from an automobile accident to supply
himself with a state-of-the art gramophone and tape recorder along with a
couple of thousand LPs. Another important hometaping hub was operated by the
Mario Marzidovšek for Krautrock, punk as well as various sorts of experimental
music.
Nikad
Robom’s hometaping activities were suspended at one point in 1996, after their “five year plan” that concerned keeping their prices unchanged for a
period of five years; they kept up with the plan even through the
hyperinflation of 1993 when the postage ended up being more expensive than
ordering 20 tapes from them.
[note 3] - ^ This number includes Izgon
bojazni iz komune split
tape which is actually only partially recorded live in Yugoslavia
(namely, the B side with Elliott Sharp). The A side,
on the other hand, features This Heat home recordings.
[note 4] - ^ Jodlovska Urška was published with the approval from Begnagrad[76], Faima Vinovo features cover art made by Oreško, a Cirko Della Primavera member, so it was most likely approved, while Minijature (NR 012) were commisioned by Nikad Robom.
[note 5] - ^ Vojin
‘Chubby’ Kovač famously penned a 1968 pamphlet titled Manifest kulturne revolucije calling for the rise of the oppressed
lumpenproletariat, while Ivan ‘Feo‘ Volarič authored a haiku rock poetry
collection Desperado Tonic Water and
was a frequent collaborator of Buldožer and other Slovenian rock bands of the
time. Since the OHO group was somewhat of an all-encompassing platform for
contemporary art forms in 1960s Ljubljana
both Chubby and Feo were among its ranks. However, their inclination towards low
culture had clearly set them apart from the reist (Kranj) nucleus of the OHO
group.
[note 6] - ^ The
Slovenian branch of Savez Socijalističke Omladine Jugoslavije
(or SSOJ; Serbo-Croatian for “League of Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia”), the
official youth wing of the Savez
komunista Jugoslavije (Serbo-Croatian for “League of Communists of
Yugoslavia”).
[note 7] - ^ As for instance – Etron Fou Leloublan, Guigou Chenevier, Ferdinand & Les Philosophes,
Hellebore (France), The Work, Fred Frith, Skeleton Crew, Camberwell Now (UK),
Gruppo Folk Internazionale, Havadia (Italy), Wondeur Brass (Canada), Cassiber (West
Germany), Debile Menthol (Switzerland), Present (Belgium), 5 UU´s (USA)[77][78].
[note 8] - ^ The Rio inn was named after the city
in Brazil and, apart from hosting its namesake festival, had nothing to do with the Rock in
Opposition movement.
[note 9] - ^ This
honour in fact belogs to the eigth edition of the Pražské jazzové dny (Czech for “Prague jazz days”) festival in 1979
which billed Art Bears as well as Fred Frith and Chris Cutler for an improvised
set. In context of the inaugural edition of Ljubljana RIO festival as the first
RIO festival in Eastern Europe, it is intersting to mention that the tenth
edition of Pražské jazzové dny – originally scheduled for the second half of May of 1980 – was supposed to be solely
dedicated to the RIO movement with performances by Art Bears, Art Zoyd, This
Heat and Etron Fou Leloublan. Since
it was planned a whole month before the Ljubljana RIO festival – which was to
take place second half of June of 1980 – it would hypothetically predate its Ljubljana counterpart as the first of its kind in Eastern
Europe, if it had actually happened. The tenth edition of festival, however, didn’t
take place due to the Party’s tacit opposition to the event; the culture
officials in Prague
had set up an unsurmountable bureaucratic obstacle before the organizers by
stalling the concert registration process, in this way preventing them to
obtain the necessary permits on time[79].
[note 10] - ^ In fact,
four acts were headlining the second Ljubljana RIO festival, but
only the mentioned three (Begnagrad, Srp, D’Pravda) were relevant in the RIO context. The fourth headliner was Istranova from
Izola in the Slovenian Istria, who were inclined towards folk music within a more
general singer-songwriter paradigm.
[note 11] - ^ Which is
understandable considering the fact that all three bands were active in some
form prior to the RIO movement’s worldwide onset in March of 1978 – Begnagrad in 1975, Srp in
1977 (as Odpad) and D’Pravda in 1975 (as Ljubljanska železniška postaja).
[note 12] - ^ Although
not an immediate association with the Rock in Opposition, the performing arts –
and theatre in particular – had a fairly significant influence upon the RIO
musicians. Since RIO was a movement which placed a strong emphasis on
virtuosity and musical artisanship, theatre – as an exemplification of true
performativism – captivated the creative imagination of many RIO
and post-RIO bands. Some of the projects like Red Balune or Circus Janus were concieved
as mixed media exploits which, in conceptual terms, had stood somewhere half-way
between performing arts and music practice. Chris Cutler acknowledges group’s theatre
experience as playing a vital role in creative consolidation of early Henry Cow[80].
[note 13] - ^ In fact not transformed, but rather split
into two factions – one with Neven Korda, Zemira Alajbegović, Samo Ljubešič,
Marina Gržinić which became FV 112/15[81] – and the other
with Marina Gržinić and Dušan Mandič which became Lenjinove sanje o kokosih
(Slovenian for “Lenin’s dreams of coconuts”) with the addition of Aina Šmid[82].
[note 14] - ^ The essay was prepared for the occasion of
the 2012 Istanbul-Isfahan
retrospective exhibition of Dušan ‘Hup’ Pirih’s work in MGLC gallery (Ljubljana) [83].
[note 15] - ^ Hidrogizma
was realized several times from 1979 to 1980. Its’ premier presentation was at
the Galerija Emonska vrata of the Architectural museum in Ljubljana in 1978, followed
by several others also in Ljubljana – one among them in ŠKUC Gallery in 1979 – after which the final two incarnations
were installed in SR Croatia in 1980; the first at SKC Zagreb and the second at
Rozarij church in Dubrovnik on the occasion of Dubrovački dani mladog teatra (Serbo-Croatian
for “Dubrovnik youth theatre days”). On its 25th anniversary in
2004, Hidrogizma was erected once again in Moderna galerija Ljubljana on the occasion of Sedem grehov (Slovenian for “Seven Sins”)
exhibition[84].
[note 16] - ^ The first version is according to Zoran Pantelić of Testa di Shakespeare and Pre i posle tišine fame[85] and the second is according to a Other Novi Sad scenster. The Black Sheep went from Ljubljana to Belgrade only to replace Pankrti on the all-Slovenian alternative music mini-festival Desant na Beograd and this is where Đorđe Delibašić most likely spotted them and invited them to prolong their Yugoslav tour to Novi Sad.
[note 17] - ^
The Vojvodina branch of Savez
Socijalističke Omladine Jugoslavije (or SSOJ; Serbo-Croatian for “League of
Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia”), the official youth wing of the Savez komunista Jugoslavije
(Serbo-Croatian for “League of Communists of Yugoslavia”).
[note 18] - ^ Boris Kovač even released a book called Novi Ritual (SKC Niš, 1989), a poetic-perspectivist treatise in
which he commented on the resurgence of ritual music in contemporary context
and outlined the main philosophical principles behind his Ritual Nova project[86].
[note 19] - ^
Ernő Király was originaly from Subotica, but lived in Novi Sad since the 1950s.
[note 20] - ^
For a while, Đorđe Delibašić
ran a short-lived Recommended Records distribution in Novi Sad
which he established with the help of Nikad Robom,
but it went quickly bankrupt[87].
[note 21] - ^ Setting up a gig of Jackie Jackie Jackson,
a painting exhibition of Stole
Janković, projecting films of Aleksandar Carić, etc.
[note 22] - ^ As Stevan
Kovacs Tickmayer recalled in an interview, the local Party cell almost banned the
entire manifestation under allegations that its original title Istočno-evropska Iskustva was supposed to secretly
evoke the spirit of the Warsaw Pact[88].
[note 23] - ^ The event
was called Jogurt
revolucija since at one point the protesters started throwing packeges of
yoghurt at the building of the province authorities.
[note 24] - ^The Arena (or Wiener Arena) is a venue located in the Landstrasse
district of Vienna and one of the oldest alternative culture centres in the
Austrian capital. Branko ‘Andrla’ Andrić’s activities in Vienna are mostly connected to Arena, since
he was one of its founders and original occupiers (the
space was an abandoned slaughterhouse)[89].
[note 25] - ^
The hapless Ove Sezone Vedri Tonovi hastily sent a badly recorded cassette
for participating in third YURM
festival in 1983 which led to a ludicrous smear campaign conducted by Polet journalist
Boro Kokan. Kokan questioned the authenticity of the recordings they sent and had
repeatedly accused the band for plagiarism. Furthermore, Ove Sezone Vedri
Tonovi entangled themselves in an informal boycott on playing in Novi Sad due to a row they
had got into with a half of local New wave scene[90].
[note 26] - ^
Telep sessions was the name given to a series of weekly jams held
at the KUD Petefi Šandor venue in Telep, a Hungarian neighbourhood in Novi Sad.
The Telep sessions ran for a few years in the mid-1980s and served as an
important platform for exchange of ideas among various Novosadian musicians as
well as a section of the Other Novi Sad clique.
[note 27] - ^ Katolička porta (Serbo-Croatian for “Catholic
churchyard”) refers to the churchyard of the Crkva Imena Marijinog, a regular
venue in Novi Sad
for public concerts since the late 1970s to the present day.
[note 28] - ^ There is an interesting
account by a visitor who didn’t like the concert too much about how at one
point a gypsy musician (who – according to this visitor – “actually knew to play
music, unlike CirKo Della Primavera”) joined in the jam session and practically stole the show for CirKo with his virtuoso display, so they had to send him away after a while.
[note 29] - ^ During the war in Yugoslavia, Amsterdam as well as
the Netherlands in general, were a frequent emigration choice for a number of
SFRY alternatives as for instance SeXa, Mario Marzidovšek, Dejan Vlaisavljević
Nikt, Petar Milić and many others. In a way, it became a temporary continuation
of the Yugoslav cultural space
[note 30] - ^ After the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, the communist Yugoslavia found itself
in a state of political limbo as the newly founded country went separate ways
with its Warsaw pact allies. For Tito’s culture-commisars, this meant
disassociation with the cultural models of the Soviet
Union and its satellites, namely – Socialist Realism in the arts
and Soviet films and music in popular culture. Throughout the late 1940s and
1950s, Yugoslav foreign policy makers went on a series of frantic diplomatical
missions to a number of Third World countries in quest for strategic
partnerships and the culture officials followed suit in finding adequate
rolemodels that the rogue Eastern bloc country could emulate. In popular music
of the time, this was reflected in the efforts to familiarize the Yugoslavian
public with music
of the faraway, Third World
countries like Mexico
(corrido and son), Cuba (cha
cha cha and rumba), Brazil
(samba) and even Hawaii
(hula). One
particularly glaring legacy of this period is the Yugoslav people’s infatuation with Mexican music, which
resulted in a phenomenon known as the Yu-Mex music, where a number of Yugoslavian musicians
tried to imitate Mexican performers of corrido and son.
The geopolitical adventure of Yugoslav foreign policy reaped its
greatest success at the 1961 Belgrade
conference where the Non-Aligned movement was officially declared. In the
following years and decades, Yugoslavia
developed substantial relations with a number of countries of the Third World
and became an important education hub for the Third World.
However, as for the Yugoslav cultural policy, by the beginning of the 1960s,
the thirdworldist
agenda had already given way to a rudimentary Western-style pop culture.
[note 31] - ^
Vegeta is a popular Yugoslav condiment, a mixture of spices and various vegetables
most frequently used as a soup base.
[2] - ^ Represija
nad duhom (in Serbian), Marinko Arsić Ivkov interview with Dragan
Banjac in Glas Javnosti, 20.12. 2004.
[4] - ^ Looking back,
Chris Cutler essay for the programme of BIG EAR Festival-Budapest, September
2000.
[5] - ^ Bojan Đorđević, personal e-mail communication,
19.12.2009.
[6] - ^ Bojan Đorđević, personal e-mail communication,
19.12.2009.
[7] - ^ Bojan Đorđević, personal e-mail communication,
23.11.2009.
[8] - ^ Bojan Đorđević, personal e-mail communication,
23.11.2009.
[10] - ^ From Social Movements to
National Sovereignity, Tomaž Mastnak essay in Independent Slovenia:
Origins, Movements, Prospects edited by Jill Benderly and Evan Kraft, page
93 (Macmillan Press-London, 1994).
[12] - ^ Kaj so mi prinseli Dnevi
mlade slovenske kulture v Beogradu (in Slovenian),
Vladimir Memon article in Problemi
(year 15, nr. 176), pages 50-51, December 1977.
[13] - ^ Večni študent, Siniša Gačić TV documentary, segment with former ŠKUC music editor Stane Sušnik
10:10-10:34, (RTV Slovenija-Ljubljana, 2009).
[14] - ^ Aleks Lenard, personal e-mail communication,
27.10.2010.
[15] - ^ Aleks Lenard, personal e-mail communication,
27.10.2010.
[16] - ^ Aleks Lenard, personal e-mail communication,
27.10.2010.
[17] - ^ Mark Jung and
Bratko Bibič’s essay in liner notes for the
CD re-release of Begnagrad’s 1981 album Begnagrad
(Mio Records-Giv'atayim, 2003).
[18] - ^ Aleks Lenard, personal e-mail communication,
27.10.2010.
[19] - ^ A propos de la
scène Yougoslave segment
with ŠKUC employee Zorko Škvor (03:20-03:40) in Planeta:
revue sonore des nouvelles musiques, nr. 8 (Planétarium-Strasbourg,
1986)
[20]
- ^ Koncert
skupine Etron Fou Leloublan u Lublan (Laibach) (in Slovenian), Andrej
Drapal article in Tribuna (year 30, nr.7-10),
page 30, 29.12.1980.
[21] - ^ Aleks Lenard, personal e-mail communication,
27.10.2010.
[23] - ^ Akrobacija
Klovna (in
Serbo-Croatian), Aleksandar Žikić article in Džuboks nr.147, pages 52-53, 13.08.1982.
[24] - ^ Vlado Šav in aktivna kultura (in
Slovenian), Aleksandra Schuller essay in Annales.
Series historia et sociologia (in Slovenian), volume 21, issue 2, pages
397-412 (Zgodovinsko društvo za južno Primorsko-Koper, 2011).
[26] - ^ Oni to vole alternativno (in Serbo-Croatian), Drago Vovk article in Džuboks nr.146, pages 45-46, 30.07.1982.
[27] - ^ Ičo Vidmar essay in liner notes of Srp's retrospective CD release Zadnja Večerja (Arhefon-Ljubljana,
2002).
[28] - ^ Iztok Osojnik, personal e-mail communication, 25.02.2013.
[29] - ^ Iztok Osojnik, personal e-mail communication, 25.02.2013.
[30] - ^ Iztok Osojnik, personal e-mail communication, 25.02.2013.
[31] - ^ Biti pri
sebi (in Slovenian), Iztok Osojnik interview with Jure Novak in Mladina nr.40, 09.10.2001.
[32] - ^ Iztok Osojnik,
personal e-mail communication, 25.02.2013.
[33] - ^ Biti Hup (in Slovenian), Iztok Osojnik essay on Dušan ‘Hup’ Pirih written on the occasion Istanbul-Isfahan
retrospective exhibition of Hup’s work, September
2012.
[34] - ^ Iztok Osojnik,
personal e-mail communication, 25.02.2013.
[35] - ^ Hidrogizma (in Slovenian), Ksenja Hahonina
article in Mladina nr.2, 12.01.2005.
[36] - ^ Hidrogizma (in Slovenian), Ksenja Hahonina
article in Mladina nr.2,
12.01.2005.
[37] - ^ Oni to vole alternativno (in Serbo-Croatian), Drago Vovk article in Džuboks nr.146, pages 45-46, 30.07.1982.
[38] - ^ Solidarnost verboten (in Slovenian), Božidar
Založnik article in Tribuna (year 31,
nr.17-18), pages 8-9, 18.03.1982.
[39] - ^ Akrobacija Klovna (in Serbo-Croatian), Aleksandar Žikić article in Džuboks nr.147, pages 52-53, 13.08.1982.
[40] - ^ Oni to vole alternativno (in Serbo-Croatian), Drago Vovk article in Džuboks nr.146, pages 45-46, 30.07.1982.
[42] - ^ Oni to vole alternativno (in Serbo-Croatian), Drago Vovk article in Džuboks nr.146, pages 45-46, 30.07.1982.
[43] - ^ Zoran Pantelić, personal e-mail
communication, 24.05.2011.
[44] - ^ Zoran Pantelić, personal e-mail
communication, 25.05.2011.
[45] - ^ Zoran Pantelić, personal e-mail
communication, 25.05.2011.
[46] - ^ Trajni čas
umetnosti, publication prepared for the occasion of the 2005 Trajni čas umetnosti retrospective
exhibition of Novosadian Neo-Avantgarde of the 1960s and 1970s produced and organized by Centar
za nove medije_kuda.org in Museum of the Contemporary Art Novi Sad (Revolver –
Archiv für aktuelle Kunst-Frankfurt am Main, 2005).
[48] - ^ Trajni čas
umetnosti, publication prepared for the occasion of the 2005 Trajni čas umetnosti retrospective
exhibition of Novosadian Neo-Avantgarde of the 1960’s and 1970’s produced and organized by Centar
za nove medije_kuda.org in Museum of the Contemporary Art Novi Sad (Revolver –
Archiv für aktuelle Kunst-Frankfurt am Main, 2005).
[50] - ^ Zoran Pantelić, personal e-mail
communication, 24.05.2011.
[52] - ^ Zoran Pantelić, personal e-mail
communication, 24.05.2011.
[53] - ^ Zoran Pantelić, personal e-mail
communication, 24.05.2011.
[54] - ^ O začecima i počecima world music
u Srbiji tokom 1980-ih i 1990-ih godina (in Serbian), Oliver Đorđević article in Etnoumlje magazine special edition (nr.19-22) titled World music u Srbiji: prvih 30 godina,
1982-201, pages 98-133,
October 2012.
[58] - ^ Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer, personal e-mail
communication, 29.04.2010.
[60] - ^ Bratko Bibič, personal e-mail communication,
29.05.2010.
[61] - ^ A tale of two subcultures,
Gregor Tomc essay in Remembering Utopia:
The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia edited by Breda Luthar
and Maruša Pušnik,
page 169 (New Academia Publishing-Washington, 2010).
[62] - ^ Beg an grad (in Slovenian),
Marko Uršič article in Tribuna (year 31, nr.12), page 11, 23.12.1981.
[63] - ^ Nogometni show ! (in Slovenian), B.C. article in Novi Tednik (year 31, nr.23), page 20, 09.06.1977.
[64] - ^ Bratko Bibič, personal e-mail communication, 29.05.2010.
[65] - ^ Mark Jung and
Bratko Bibič’s essay in liner notes for the
CD re-release of Begnagrad’s 1981 album Begnagrad
(Mio Records-Giv'atayim, 2003).
[66] - ^ Moderni nomad (in
Slovenian), Jure Aleksič article in Mladina
nr.46, 19.11.2003.
[67] - ^ Mark Jung and
Bratko Bibič’s essay in liner notes for the
CD re-release of Begnagrad’s 1981 album Begnagrad
(Mio Records-Giv'atayim, 2003).
[68] - ^ Moderni nomad (in
Slovenian), Jure Aleksič article in Mladina
nr.46, 19.11.2003.
[69] - ^ Begnagrad
– 30 let prezgodaj (in Slovenian), concert announcement on Center
kulture Španski borci, December 2012.
[70] - ^ Institute music (in Serbian),
Oliver Đorđević article in Etnoumlje
(nr.15-16), pages 4-9, 25.04.2011.
[71] - ^ Institute music (in Serbian),
Oliver Đorđević article in Etnoumlje
(nr.15-16), pages 4-9, 25.04.2011.
[72] - ^ Institute music (in Serbian),
Oliver Đorđević article in Etnoumlje
(nr.15-16), pages 4-9, 25.04.2011.
[73] - ^ Institute music (in Serbian),
Oliver Đorđević article in Etnoumlje
(nr.15-16), pages 4-9, 25.04.2011.
[74] - ^ Siniša Nenadić, personal e-mail communication,
10.09.2013.
[75] - ^ Siniša Nenadić, personal e-mail communication,
10.09.2013.
[76] - ^ Bojan Đorđević,
personal e-mail communication, 19.12.2009.
[77] - ^ Aleks Lenard,
personal e-mail communication, 27.10.2010.
[78] - ^ Aleks Lenard,
personal e-mail communication, 06.11.2011.
[79] - ^ Pražské
jazzové dny (in Czech), Petr Hrabalik article for Bigbít Internetová encyklopedie rocku, date unknown.
[80] - ^ Henry Cow,
entry from Chris Cutler’s official website, date unknown.
[82] - ^ The Video, Film, and Interactive
Multimedia Art of Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid, 1982-2008, Marina Gržinić
essay in New-media
technology, science and politics edited by Marina Gržinić and Tanja Velagić,
page 153 (Löcker Verlag-Vienna, 2009).
[84] - ^ DE.fragmentacija,
catalogue prepared for the occasion of 2013 Pixxelpoint
exhibition in Kulturni dom Nova Gorica, November 2013.
[85] - ^ Zoran Pantelić,
personal e-mail communication, 10.03.2014.
[87] - ^ Chris Cutler,
personal e-mail communication, 22.05.2011.
