Serbia is in the spotlight right now. In November 2024, the collapse of a newly renovated railway station roof in Novi Sad, which resulted in 15 deaths, ignited widespread protests across the country. This tragic event was attributed to government corruption and negligence, leading to public outrage. Initially led by university students, the demonstrations rapidly expanded to include various societal groups, all demanding accountability, transparency, and deep reforms.
“The atmosphere in Serbia is extremely tense. A stark division has emerged – between those who support this new, awakening force and those who cling to the old, decaying system,” says violinist and vocalist Tijana Stanković. Despite the resignation of Prime Minister Miloš Vučević, the protests have persisted, reflecting deep-seated dissatisfaction with President Aleksandar Vučić’s administration and a call for comprehensive political change. Stanković says the protests are not about replacing one political party with another but about demanding systemic alterations.
On 15 March, Belgrade witnessed its largest public gathering in recent memory – up to 325,000 people by some estimates. The crowd stood still and silent for 15 minutes in memory of the victims of the collapse, one minute for each life lost. Around the 11th, however, a sonic weapon was used on the crowd, causing panic, chaos, and a stampede. Stanković sees this as a metaphor for what’s going on: “This juxtaposition of two sounds is terrifying – on one side, the sound of freedom and justice, on the other side, a weaponised sound – one that can stop pacemakers, provoke panic, destabilize bodies and minds. One voice reaching toward freedom and justice. The other, to maintain control.”
Among the many groundbreaking aspects of the student uprising, one of the most significant for culture is the reclamation and occupation of the Student Cultural Center, which the SPS political party took over in the mid-2000s (the same party that led Serbia into war under Slobodan Milošević in the ’90s). A powerful reappearance of cultural and music events in the institution emerged just a few weeks after the students’ occupation of SKC, where they also revived a legendary student radio station.
“We need to start taking seriously how the politics of fear are becoming more and more related to the use (or misuse) of sound. Without any mystification, I see it as a struggle of light against darkness,” adds Manja Ristić, a sound artist and researcher. She mentions a work by Lawrence Abu Hamdan on the ‘Politics Of Listening’, a study on how fearscapes are designed. “What I do is trauma-informed,” says Ristić. “There are references in my work [to] the relations of sound, mind, and body, the psychological effects of sound and musical structures, the synaesthesia of different senses with sound, and the neural pathways affected by sound concerning memory”. Her albums involve placing the sounds directly taken from landscapes that suffered severe trauma or devastation in a new self-regulatory context.
Ristić says that for decades Serbia witnessed complete neglect by governmental institutions – a lack of funds, a lack of cultural spaces, a lack of structural support, and severe neglect of the educational sector. “For years, the music scene was mirroring the overall cultural politics of the country: reactionary, xenophobic, nationalist, and chauvinist flag-waving fossils [in] positions of power were poisoning the public sphere, blocking any attempt for independent and non-mainstream art or music to emerge from the underground,” says Bane Jovančević, co-founder of Polja, a non-profit festival organised by a community of artists and cultural activists around the Belgrade collective Dis-patch. He argues out that only politically suitable and artistically mediocre individuals were receiving funds for their work. Aside from a handful of festivals openly backed by the ruling party, nearly all others are deprived of any institutional support.
A lot has changed with the emergence of a new generation within the last couple of years with festivals like Summit Of The Non-Aligned and Hali Gali, which are beacons of uncompromised raw punk energy that spread far beyond any genre borders: they platform everything from hardcore to freak folk, weird synth wave to turbotronik esoteric music, despite the fact that organising events has become even more precarious during the protests that have been ongoing since November 2024. Jovančević also mentions essential venues such as Drugstore, Karmakoma, Dim, Živa, and Kvaka 22, as well as other festivals such as the country’s longest-standing avant garde music festival Ring Ring, Malomfesztivál, and a new event, Jerma, which had a fantastic premiere last year in the fascinating surroundings of Jerma Canion, officially designated as a nature reserve.
In 2021, when Bane Jovančević’s family’s hilltop farm in the village of Šutci, central Serbia, became vacant, he decided to start a festival, Polja, that he’d been planning for many years, naming after the vast fields surrounding the property (“polja” means fields in Serbian). “Around 2015, I worked for the ill-fated Resonate festival in Belgrade, which imploded a few years later,” he recalls. “For years, Relja Bobić, co-founder of the Dis-Patch festival, and I tried to secure funding for a new festival that would combine all the experiences we had in running and curating festivals and club events.” Around that time, he also began exploring traditional music from the Balkans, Europe and the Global South (he also blends folk traditions with experimental electro-acoustic music under his artistic alias, Kӣr).
“For over 35 years, rural Serbia has been deprived of cultural content. The last traces of Yugoslavia’s socialist plan, designed to bring a cultural centre to nearly every village, dissolved with the country itself, leaving a void that has been hard to fill due to poverty and lack of systemic support from the state or municipalities,” says Jovančević. Polja’s lineup focuses on local traditional acts, aiming to build a trusting relationship with the community and to put their cultural needs first, albeit with each new edition inviting more experimental artists from countries whose cultures and music are more distant from Serbian tradition.
When talking about music in Serbia, one of the norms is to label all traditional music as “Balkan”. “I once read that the term ‘Balkan’ as a genre label is the new ‘Latino’ – an umbrella term, a multi-genre category that unites many different musical expressions,” says Tijana Stanković. “Balkan is a genre, a brand; it speaks to some people, but if someone takes my CD only because it’s from the Balkans, [they’d] better not expect furious trumpets and ‘Kalashnikov’,” she says..
Stanković has been involved in music for over 20 years, spending the last six as a music editor at Radio Belgrade 2. “What interests me – what I sing, play, listen to, and work with as a music editor – is music that is the product of collective creation, whether folk music or free improvisation. We influence each other, share vocabulary, and inspire even when improvising. I like some ‘orality’ and sharing in this scene,” says Stanković.
While studying ethnomusicology, and now through her work at the radio, she had the opportunity to undertake fieldwork – to record both for the Radio Belgrade Sound Archive and an archive of her own. “Listening to these extraordinary people, I’m constantly learning about music – how each syllable colored by sound has its unique place and meaning,” she says. “That melody is created not only from itself or any fixed system of scales, ornamentation or style but carries emotional meaning – meaning tied to geography, memory, a way of life, rituals, age, gender, and so on.”
Another important figure is Svetlana Spajić, who works both in the field of traditional music with her own Svetlana Spajić Group, among others, but also with bands like Gordan, Lenhart Tapes, and Zeitkratzer, with whom she recorded Serbian War Songs. “Traditional Serbian songs of my ancestors are mesmerising for me. The ethics and the messages of my ancestors’ songs are something that I cannot decipher anymore. You always feel the truth. That’s why I believe many youngsters, not only from here but from abroad, are interested in it. It’s like something magical for them,” she admits.
“What makes these songs easier to integrate into contemporary musical contexts is often the abstract nature of traditional songs,” Stanković says of the groups above. She has just recorded an album with Marina Džukljev, Spajić, and Polish guitarist and composer Raphael Rogiński, which is planned to be released this spring by Polish label Instant Classic. “Tradition is something to be respected, but it is also adapted, according to its characteristics, to contemporary musical contexts – as a kind of transdimensional communication,” adds Stanković.
For Spajić, cooperation with Lenhart Tapes is the most typical, traditional way of communal gathering and working together. “Whatever people do, any activity, there is this manifestation, and you can feel whether it’s true. For example, for me, the ultimate traditional singer in the world is Diamanda Galás.” For her, ‘traditional’ is the spirit of truth and humanity that goes from generation to generation. After all, the oldest chain of tradition is humanity itself.
“In traditional culture, when it’s in oral heritage, you cannot distinguish when my voice is there and when, let’s say, the familiar voice of many [sources],” she says. “That’s why, to some extent, the copyright system is absurd. It is always related to everything we learned from the older ones. And that’s the human legacy.”
Tijana StankovićFolk SongsFRIM
Tijana Stanković has been tied to the violin since her early years of education. Technical limitations determine the relationship between instrument and her voice because of the lines drawn between classical and traditional, which Stanković consistently breaks. Even if she takes folk melodies as a starting point, she departs from the source, improvising, preparing her instrument before playing, and bowing in a way very far from the original. The artist plays very wildly and harshly, sometimes ritually, depending on a song’s source. The second of two long pieces that open the record, ‘Za Pčele’ is called a ‘Song For The Bees’, where ‘Kraljička’, that comes immediately before, is a ‘Song For The Queen’, where she explores a longstanding fascination with drones, and emphasises the powerful ‘izvika’ singing style of southwestern Serbia. These are not light and catchy songs but complex and multi-layered stories, sometimes lasting up to 10 minutes. Recorded entirely live, the material shows her spontaneity, flexibility, and her ability to draw on elements that by turns sound frivolous and delicate, wild and impetuous.
The Cyclist ConspiracyMashallah PlanSubsound
According to the band themselves, “this record is about a spiritual journey on a bicycle.”. The collective can be placed next to stoner rock bands like Kyuss and Sleep on the one hand, and on the other to microtonal bands like Hungary’s Decolonize Your Mind Society or the American Sunwatchers, who are inspired by both the rock tradition of the West and the sound of the East. Despite being rooted in the spacious progressive idiom, they sound like they were playing ‘world music’, not in the sense of the genre label but as a post-modernist collages of international aesthetics. Guitar riffs are intertwined with brass parts or choral vocals by singers like Svetlana Spajić. The guitar is the starting point for a ride through inspirations drawn from North Africa and the Middle East, at the same time coherently processed through the character of the band members themselves, allowing endless heavy riffs sometimes take the lead, at others Eastern-inspired solos.
Marina DžukljevLive In Stockholm(Re)konekcija
The 32-minute piano set is a continuous stream of consciousness, an overview of various compositional and performance techniques, a bold and lush improvisation, and, at the same time, a compact and successively developing performance. Džukljev turns the instrument into a fantastic sound box, surprising with its possibilities and the intensity with which she plays. She weaves delicate phrases, vigilantly striking the keys, while also playing densely and intensely, preparing the instrument, exploring its percussive properties, and sometimes almost passionately mistreating it. All this is done to get the most out of the piano, as well as to focus on the lower registers as well as high, poetic tones. However, the most crucial thing in this continuum is the perceptible concept: the unusual timbre of the instrument, the intensity of playing, and the diversity of moods, which do not bore or shock with mere randomness or verbosity but captivate with instrumental artistry, played with sensitivity and striking a balance between delicacy and madness.
Vukašin Đelić’s musical explorations began with the electric guitar, but over the past decade he has gradually broadened his horizons beyond ambient and drone. He uses the guitar only in part on his latest album, making room for synthesisers, beats, and sounds from various electronic devices and mobile phones. It is not static or dark music, it is very rhythmic, maneuvering between different rhythms and warm sounds. Đelić’s percussive layers sometimes touch on the regions explored by Eli Keszler, but he is the closer to the spirit of Sun Araw or Dustin Wong. He experiments with looped forms and sound reduction, but his layering is in the form of melodies that are cheekily drawn out and gradually shaped. Đelić creates instrumental variations in the same simple way, short electronic compositions that, with a lightness akin to indietronica artists, form motifs that are equal parts catchy and casual.
Jan NemecekFog WorldRefractions
Jan Nemeček has been active on the Serbian electronic music scene for two decades. He is very much into ambient, spatial sounds and heavy bass structures. He uses analogue and modular synthesisers, from which he creates layered compositions. Sometimes, his methodology is close to metal music – he looked at new age sounds through this perspective on last year’s Dissolved – and elsewhere you can hear the afterimages of dungeon synth. The sultry bass, lyrical melodies and sound bands build a dreamlike, slightly melancholic atmosphere, which he describes, quite accurately as “Vangelis goes to Silent Hill”. The synthesiser structures have a horror-folk flavor, a genuinely cinematic edge, and a terrifying atmosphere, convincingly built at the intersection of overwhelming sound waves and delicate piano parts, as in ‘An Infinite Grace’.
Gabi Fischer, Milan Milojković, Ivan ČkonjevićMagnoloja XXXIIIIAlmaska
Gabi Fischer, Milan Milojković, and Ivan Čkonjević have already recorded 33 episodes of their never-ending music project, in which they improvise freely on the piano, electronic instruments, and electric guitar every month in the city of Novi Sad. Each track is a freely developing suite, where the musicians focus on the colour of their instruments as they emerge from the silence. The music does not take a simple linear form that escalates, but rather undergoes gradual transformations, with successive instrumentalists coming to the fore while maintaining a constant dynamic, thanks to which the piece retains a free, relatively consistent mood. It reminds me of The Necks. Although the phrasing and musical language are entirely different here, I see similarities in the way the sounds are drawn out, in the way they engage in dialogue with each other, in the way they find each other in constellations, not necessarily through ecstatic playing, but by sounds being reduced to achieve a common minimalist direction.
Manja RisticPurpurna Vresištawabi-sabi tapes
The recordings of Manja Ristic, who releases several albums each year, could be characterised as restless, albeit abstract, crafted from many different elements. Each forms a linear, gradually developing narrative, where sound sources disappear into a multi-layered structure. It gradually draws you into her musical reaction to the modern world in an indirect, metaphorical, beautiful but also overwhelming way. Purpurna Vresišta documents the atmosphere of abandoned industrial sites along the Tagus River in Barreiro, Portugal, the delicate underwater ecosystems of the Great Lake on the island of Mljet in Croatia, and the biologically diverse but endangered rainforests of Thailand. Organic and synthetic sounds – electronics, violin, EMS Synthi 100 – intertwine, building a narrative about environmental trauma, the transformation of today’s world, and the effects of industrialisation. Spatial drone waves in the background contrast with sharp murmurs, micro-interventions, singing and instrumental parts in the foreground, creating an impressionistic, poignant work.
Svetlana MarasLive Performance 2019 – 2020OUS
Svetlana Maraš is a composer, sound artist, and musician known for her innovative approach to live performances. She constructs her sets as exploratory frameworks, emphasizing improvisation and sculptural manipulation of sound rather than repetition. Using samples and the custom Touch OSC interface, she treats her setup like an acoustic instrument, shaping the sound in response to the space and audience. The set she performed multiple times between 2019 and 2020 was the pinnacle of her microsampling work, leading to this live recording from one show in Zurich. “The almost infinite improvisational potential in my performances results from improving technology, using it unpredictably and musically,” she says. Her compositions are reminiscent of sound sculptures, three-dimensional electronics and granular synthesis, exploring intuitive responses which draw attention to live creation, emphasising spontaneity. She also shows the possibility of building drama primarily by employing the interface as an instrument open to errors and accidents, rather than studio-refined electronics.
HolyPalms Duo is a duo of Marko Stricevic, a Belgrade multi-instrumentalist (known from bands such as Dzezbollah and Katastar trio) and Pavel Eremeev, also a member of the rock duo Usssy. Karmacoma is a live recording which captures their live energy and spontaneous wall of sound – made with only two instruments. Their improvised live performances (microtonal guitar and strange looping percussion) are inspired by sufi music as well as modern experimental noise acts like Oneida and Lightning Bolt. The tracks grow, but not outwards – instead they’re characterised by a vertical structure, where guitar and percussion escalate in cascades, keeping up both tension and space, as well as the metallic elements of an industrial, dense, and dark sound.
Jovan RadivojevJust Like That: Serbian GajdašCanary
For years, Canary Records has been reminding the world of releases by American labels from the early 20th century, aimed at the country’s immigrant population (around 15 per cent), including many residents of Central and Eastern Europe. A significant source of material during the first five years or so was recordings made overseas in various homelands by sister companies. In 1913, Columbia released two singles by Jovan Radivojev for the Serbian market, whose official discography consists of only five songs released over two singles. The artist accompanies himself on the ganja bagpipes and sings dreamily, producing minimalist yet captivating, mantra-like work with a unique character.
