DANCEVOLUTION

Posted on November 10, 2011

iCrates interview, November 2011, Berlin >>> ONLINE

When Robert Šoko arrived in Berlin over twenty years ago he wasn’t into traditional Balkan music and he didn’t like the city much either. So how did he end up a resident DJ at Berlin’s Lido with one of the most successful Balkan-influenced parties on the planet? Sitting on a black leather couch next to DJ Florian Mikuta (one of the first Roma musicians to make the transition to the decks) at his home in Kreuzberg, Robert spoke openly to iCrates about his role in the global phenomenon commonly known as Balkan Beats.

Could you tell us bout your own background and how you ended up in Berlin?

I’m originally from Bosnia, at that time Former Yugoslavia. I left the country when I was 19 years old, immediately after serving the army. It was peace time actually. I ended up by coincidence in the Netherlands. Then I was strolling across Europe in order to see countries and I always loved learning languages and meeting other people, just like young people do. I met a German woman at that time and I came to Berlin exactly on the 3rd October 1990, which is like the day of reunion. So I always know exactly how long I’ve been staying in Berlin.

Was music a part of your life before you came to Berlin?

I loved music when I was a young man in Former Yugoslavia. I was always collecting tapes and vinyl and I had always this affection and affinity with music. Once I came to Berlin I had some vinyl with me and it was a way to somehow heal the nostalgia and to stay in touch with my background. Music was a very important substance for me.

What kind of music were you listening to?

At that time I was in love with, lets say, guitar music, be it rock music, be it punk rock music and later on hardcore. Just like many other young people I didn’t really like the traditional songs much. Somehow you reject the traditional background and you like the idea of being a part of Western European culture.

When did you begin to return to traditional Balkan music?

It happened gradually actually. I started DJing in 1993, here in Berlin. I was a cab driver at that time. And in the beginning I was mostly selecting hits from Former Yugoslavia. We actually had a huge rock scene in the country, and this is what I was playing – rock music, be it ska, be it punk rock etc but guitar music mostly, and some electronica.

And due to Emir Kusturica coming out with movies like Underground and Time of the Gypsies and Goran Bregovic’s soundtrack to these movies, we got this new, old music in our collection. I was quite curious at that time to see what would happen if we played “Mesečina” for instance.

How did Berlin react?

What happened was really interesting and astonishing for me, because I saw above all German people going crazy. This music went down quite well, so I was happy and a little bit proud of it. Once you are detached from your home country, you start identifying more with that country, and I loved the idea of we Yugoslavs being part of the nightlife culture in Berlin. And once we discovered that the German punks go crazy to Former Yugoslavian traditional music it was something like a little revolution.

So I thought, OK lets do this. It was not like an abrupt change, as I say it happened gradually. I started collecting ever more traditional songs at that time (1996-97). It was the very beginning of traditional music penetrating my dance-floor. Then came bands like Fanfare Ciocărlia, the Romanian gypsies. They were one of the first who were brought to the Western audiences and we played their songs.

Apart from the German punks going crazy, what did the Balkan scene look like at that time?

The scene consisted mostly of Former Yugoslavs, young people, mostly refugees, and very mixed in terms of national background. And I have to say that not all of them were necessarily happy about what I was doing. You know we had this time with a lot of prejudices and hatred and all this shit. And playing trumpet music is something you somehow identify with Serbia, even though it’s quite wrong, but somehow this is what it represents or what the people think it represents. And some people had a problem with that.

This was exactly the moment I didn’t like. I loved the idea of not being ashamed or embarrassed because of our identity. I found traditional music very interesting and very profound and very essential in a way.

So from seeing traditional Balkan music as a symbol of a culture you had left behind, the music transformed itself into something of a reconciling force?

Absolutely. It was definitely a process of reconciling. The fact that I somehow managed to get various nationalities together on one dance-floor was a little signal for what should somehow follow. You know, let’s dismantle prejudices and at least have a good time together.

Why do you think the Balkan Beats scene has exploded so much since you began introducing traditional music to the dance-floors of Berlin?

It’s related to the new European mentality, which is growing. The borders are diminishing, somehow everything is getting easier and the cultural exchange is accelerated. We are curators of this, who somehow channel it.

It didn’t exist in the Western European cultural landscape and the music itself is quite interesting. It’s quite danceable and it enables you to have a good time. The party is great, and women, they like it. Once women start loving something, guys are happy about that and so on.

Ah, of course…

And culturally, the Balkan is the place where Asia penetrates Europe. In other words this means the influences of oriental music and the Islamic world are very evident and very present. Jewish and Slavic music is also involved, so we have quite an interesting mixture of sounds melting together and creating something which we now call Balkan Beats. I mean, all this plus Western beats. We made it somehow palatable to the Western audiences.

There’s a rumour that you are responsible for the name “Balkan Beats”, which has come to define the whole genre. Is this true?

I don’t want to say I am responsible. Look what happened to me is, I invented a name and series of parties. I was a cab driver at the time as I said and I was listening to a program called “Electro Beats”. So I thought OK, lets call my project Balkan Beats. And the name is quite nice; easy but storytelling. This is how it started and this is what I am responsible for. Sometimes I hear or I read people praising me with me inventing Balkan Beats. I didn’t invent Balkan Beats. The musicians themselves are responsible.

You talk of having tapes and vinyl records with you from Former Yugoslavia when you arrived in Berlin in 1990. Does vinyl still play a role in the scene?

It no longer exists. You don’t have this new old music on vinyl. You can find some old vinyl, but it’s not easy to make use of it.

The internet is a revolution and there is a huge network of Balkan DJ’s and people involved in Balkan music and we are exchanging it. It has to be mentioned that the whole Balkan Beats revolution happened partially also because of the internet.

The internet has certainly changed everything, but other genres of music still maintain some sort of vinyl culture. What’s different with Balkan Beats?

Because, in comparison to electronic bands and dance-floors, it’s not about the perfection of DJing, it’s about choosing the tracks and creating the atmosphere of a smelly bar somewhere in Bulgaria or in Bosnia. You know, by creating this up and down. It’s a mentality of a bar and that’s why it’s not really important to keep a set in a perfect groove and in a perfect pace without any breaks like electronic or techno DJ’s do. I mean I’m not bitching about them, but it’s just different. That’s why vinyl doesn’t play a big role, in my opinion it’s more about the good selection of tracks.

How would you describe the BalkanBeats scene at the moment?

If we say the moment is the last year, somehow nothing new has really happened. There is sort of an overplay happening. I mean we do our parties and people love it, but no real new stuff is coming out. I feel some sort of tiredness in the scene.

So what comes next? How are you planning on waking the scene up again?

It’s a tough question, and we are trying to create something which might have a bassy deep sound. Crystal clear electronica. We will try to reduce traditional influences, we just don’t know how yet. What’s next? Ask me something easier!

Beats from the Balkan Bloc

Posted on June 14, 2011

by Ginanne Brownell (London/Warsaw)

Even if the name Robert Soko doesn’t ring a bell, if you’ve been clubbing recently chances are you’ve heard his influence on electronic music. Soko, a 41 year-old Berlin based DJ, is the man who first dubbed (and started seriously promoting) the genre of Balkan Beats music, a melodic hodgepodge of instruments that include vibrant brass horns, erratic fiddles and, sometimes, throaty mystical vocals, set to thump-thump electronica beats. Though Soko has been mixing these beats in clubs for over a decade, it’s been within the last few years that Balkan Beats has really taken off internationally, becoming a sensation in clubs from LA to London. “Though I think Goran Bregovic has been the main influence in terms of introducing these sounds outside of the Balkans, Robert has been the one who has been collecting this music, mixing it in clubs and making it more adaptable to a pop music audience” says Esther Gronenborn, a German film director, who is producing the documentary “Balkan Beats Musical Journey.” “He was really the first to make it this name on the club scene and introduce the genre to a [wider] audience.”

I’ve been a fan of general Balkan music—hard to define but in a sense a whole mixture of genres that touch upon traditional Turkish, Greek, Gypsy, Jewish, folk and brass band sounds—since I first heard the album “Kayah i Bregovic” (a collaboration between the Polish chanteuse and the Bosnian conductor/musician) back in 2000. There was something about these otherworldly sounds that were a sexy, danceable, frenzied concoction that almost forced you to get up and dance. I started paying more attention to music from this region, going to concerts of bands like Romania’s Taraf de Haidouk and buying compilations of Balkan music that had been remixed and set to more clubby beats. And that’s when I first heard of Robert Soko.

His promotion of music from his homeland—he was born in what is now Bosnia to a Croatian father and Serb mother—is something Soko started out doing as a hobby. “I never expected to make serious business with music,” he tells me as we sip tea in his flat in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin (he stopped drinking alcohol and smoking four years ago). He first moved to Berlin on October 3 1990—the day of German reunification—because he says things back home had begun to splinter and nationalism was starting to take hold across the region. “I always loved music and I took some tapes and vinyl with me to heal my nostalgia, to have something that reminded me of my cultural background,” he tells me. When Soko was not on duty working as a taxi driver (listening to jazz and electronica) he spent a lot of time at a local seedy bar called Arcanoa. “Almost every night someone was spinning some records—everything from Russian polka to punk tunes and medieval music,” he says. “So I asked the owner if I could spin some songs from where I was from like old Yugoslav rock and pop, and she said ‘Why not?’”

As war spread across the former Yugoslavia, upwards of 30,000 refugees from the region started flooding into Berlin, some of whom would come to see Soko DJ at Arcanoa. “People loved it, though it was tricky at that time because there were so many prejudices. People were culturally sensitive and you never knew how these different groups would react when together,” he says, throwing up his hands, bemused by the memory. “But it turned out to be a good idea, this ‘cultural recycling’ as I called it.” Soko DJed in the bar for seven years, getting paid in beer. But after the bar closed, he figured it was time to move on. “I thought, ‘Well, that was fun but it’s over.’” During the next few years, as he played intermittently in a few clubs across the German capital, he figured he needed to give a name this particular kind of feet-stomping club music.

The name Balkan Beats he says, came to him after listening to a show on German radio called Electro Beats—though for a time he toyed with calling it Balkan Beasts instead. He also started experimenting more with the music, moving from just playing straight-up old Yugoslav songs (which appealed to the ex-Yugoslav crowds) to mixing tunes and beats together from all parts of the region, which had resonance with Westerners who were looking for something a bit exotic and different. In 2000, when the Berlin outpost of the New York’s Mudd Club opened, Soko got his big break. “My nights at Mudd Club were crazy,” he recalls. “It was overcrowded, smelly, loud and people would be dancing, freaking out over the music. One guy would come almost every week and dance naked. It was like a bordello, anarchy in the club, and people loved it.”

Soko soon quit his job as a taxi driver—he was now also working as a moderator for German radio—and in 2004 he released his first of several record compilations. But by 2007 Mudd Club had closed it doors, the partnership with his record label collapsed and his marriage ended. “My whole world was broken,” he says. “But music was the god who came up to me and said ‘Come on boy, get up.’ Music saved my life.” An opportunity came up for Soko to DJ at Lido, one of the city’s larger clubs, and soon there were queues out the door for his Balkan Beat nights (which still draws upwards of 1,500 people on the evenings he plays). Soko also started getting gigs in places like France, Brazil and the US—and competition from other Balkan-inspired nights also started happening, influencing the sounds of everyone from Madonna to Basement Jaxx. “Robert put Balkan music on the map, definitely,” says Danijela Albrecht, author of the book, “Bittersweet Balkans”, which looks at contemporary culture from southeastern Europe. “No one outside of the region had ever listened to that kind of music before. He made the music accessible and helped create this mass cultural phenomenon that spread quickly across Europe and North America.”

Interestingly—but maybe not surprising—the Balkan Beats trend has yet to take off in countries of the former Yugoslavia. “I think basically this is music that people there just do not want to hear,” Albrecht, whose mother is a Bosnian Croat, tells me. “While people know that [the wars during the 1990s] were horrible and wrong, they cannot say ‘It was for nothing so let’s hang out and dance together.’” Soko agrees, though he has recently started playing a few gigs in places like Sarajevo and Belgrade and thinks it only a matter of time before Balkan Beats starts to take hold where it originally came from. “We have had a very bad few decades, where our region had this negative connotation and then, all of a sudden, something very sexy and cool starts to [emerge] from the Balkans,” Soko says, as he heads to his computer to play me a new tune he is mixing. “The Balkans is where East meets West. It’s a place where various cultures clash together and those the hip-shaking Oriental sounds just make you happy.”

>>> LINK

NEMA PROBLEMA!

Posted on April 21, 2011

Es war eine dieser Sachen die man heutzutage immer seltener im Briefkasten vorfindet; ein Päckchen dass nicht unbedingt wie eine unbezahlte Rechnung in der tiefen Dunkelheit des unbeliebten Kastens lauert. Denn darin befand sich ein Buch! Was für eine Erleichterung - dachte ich in diesem bittersüßem Moment - öffnete es hastig und hatte das von DANIJELA ALBRECHT frischgeschriebene Buch “Balkan bittersüß” in der Hand.
Da ich aber gerne “von hinten” lese, schlug ich erstmal den letzten Kapitel auf und hatte noch eine süßere Überraschung zu erleben; der letzte Kapitel trug den Namen BalkanBeats und beschrieb auf eine sehr charmante, durchdachte und lehrreiche Art das was man als BalkanBeats Trend oder Szene zu verstehen vermag. Fantastično.

Auf die anfrage des Verlages ob es vielleicht machbar wäre - im Rahmen einer der diesjährigen BalkanBeats Party´s im Lido - die Autorin Albrecht zu eine Lesung einzuladen, antwortete ich spontano und automatski; NEMA PROBLEMA!

Falls Sie sich aber jetzt schon in das herzlichst empfohlene Buch “warm einlesen” wollen dann klicken Sie bitte auf den unten stehenden Link - dort gibt es Leseproben zum herunterladen und einiges mehr!

>>> BALKAN BITTERSÜSS ONLINE

WASCHEN, NICHT KRATZEN!

Posted on March 6, 2011

One of my most beloved magazines in Berlin (TIP), honoured me and my “doings” with a comprehensive article about BalkanBeats DJ SET at the Lido. The title of the article says; “You are in troubles, but you keep on dancing“.

I was trying to imagine all sorts of problems one could possibly have while dancing. And then something very itchy crossed my mind.
I think I got an idea how to deal with it: wash it, don´t scratch it!

AQUA VITAE

Posted on October 6, 2010

© Copyright BLIXICON , 2008 • powerded by wordpress