Balkan Beats is a drug !

written by Robert Rigney, Jan 2009

It’s a lifestyle; a feeling; and in the last couple of years a European – a world wide phenomenon.
From Bosnia to Brazil, people know Balkan Beats.

"Robert Soko has been putting on his parties in Berlin since 1993. He was the first to coin the term BalkanBeats in order to somehow define the mix of music from the Balkans – Serbian Gypsy brass, ska and ethno rock. Balkan Beats is folk melodies reinterpreted, given electronic beats and blended with western styles. In the recent past the phenomenon has caught on in other cities around the world where Balkan immigrants live. Balkan Beats parties are thrown all the way from Frankfurt and Vienna to New York and Melbourne.

Robert grew up in Zenica, central Bosnia, listening to western music – to rock and roll, to punk, to ska. In 1990 he left Bosnia and came to Berlin. He took a job as a taxi driver and started hanging out at the Arcanoa, a punk bar in Berlin’s immigrant quarter Kreuzberg with his Yugo friends. The Arcanoa became their domicile. Soko put on his first parties there, playing his Yugo music for fifty Deutsch marks and beer for free. He played Yugo rock, new wave, punk, ska, the music he had grown up with. He celebrated socialist holidays: Tito’s birthday, Day of Women. May First. The parties were a mix of irony and nostalgia, and Soko was surprised how many people came to the parties, as nostalgia for Yugoslav socialism was not the ‘in thing’ in those days of growing Balkan nationalism. And yet the parties grew.

And then something happened. After years of listening and playing western derived rock, punk and ska, Soko found himself returning to his ethnic Balkan music roots, the roots he had rejected as a youth in Bosnia. This was largely due to two figures, Goran Bregović and Emir Kusturica – Bregović who revamped Balkan Gypsy melodies, making Balkan music palatable for a western audience, and Kusturica, whose Gypsy inspired films Bregović did the soundtracks for. Soko played this new/old Balkan music. And people loved it. Women grooved to it. Guys pogoed to it. It was a sensation. The press took notice. From the Arcanoa Soko moved to the Mudd Club in Berlin Mitte. Soko began taking his parties to other cities around Europe, to New York and L.A.

The Mudd Club is history now and Robert Soko has a regular DJ night in LIDO in Berlin Kreuzberg and nights in Paris and Budapest as well as many other cities.

The party goes on. The virus spreads. HYPE AGAIN - HAJDE !" in www.balkanbeats.de