PROGRAMMES / EVENTS

12 March 2022
The Other Side – Hard Times (Episode 4)

A series of New Wave conversations about time, space and, above all, music at the Aesthetic Laboratory of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Osijek.
Conversation between Marijan Krivak and Goran Rem.

AZRA or… Straight to the Bottom

I was there. Somewhere in the black, boiling darkness opposite the stage where they played, sang, sweated and… made history. “Nights here are strange dilemmas…” Indeed, as if in some film, I immersed myself in “A Woman’s Warm Lips”. (Yes, there was also a certain FILM there, renegades from the band I am speaking about now… Everything, however, begins with A… as in AZRA!) But soon came a sobering that has lasted to this day: “Hard times for old men, my friend” (and they still continue).

Together with a group of fellow “scrapers of city asphalt”, we happened to choose just the right evening (out of seven in a row) to go “Straight to the Bottom”. We allowed the Phantom of Freedom to reveal to us, at Kulušić, the secret, hidden essence of everything. Nothing less… As in the famous, ultimately nostalgic film Stand by Me, we sensed that nothing in our lives would ever be the same again. That Wednesday at Kulušić, 21 October 1981, was my Ereignis, the Kantian “emergence from self-incurred immaturity”… enlightenment, an epiphany of Being-there.

Am I exaggerating? Of course, but “so much the worse for the facts”, as Hegel would conclude. Branimir Štulić was an “eternal grumbler”. And what remains of me, an “old fart”? Precisely, “eternal grumbling” and never being reconciled with the time and space in which I live! “People without calibre or ideas force black-and-white truths upon us.” Hey, look around… Has anything changed since 21 October 1981? My dear comrade Goran posed the question: where did Johnny disappear after 1991? The new, reinvented history of that time and its narrative about our archetypal distinctiveness and ethnic selfhood could not swallow Johnny’s AZRA. Because this was no romantic heroine of Heine… This was about the “urban poetry” of asphalt, as Goran lucidly observed. Even “anthologised” poetry… “Madness, with the power of the ocean, floods my soul and corrodes my mind…” Unlike most of my co-ethnics – who are now supposedly masters in their own house – “… I am here by accident and I AM DAMN ANGRY”.

mk

I know of one, and indeed several, relationships and marriages that began with Štulić’s ballads and nothing ever rolled them straight to the bottom. Instead, they were surprised when, recently, a Croatian Television entertainer delivered an incomparably dignified performance of the song Ako znaš bilo što, fully equal to the hoarse tributes of Marijan Ban in performances of another title.

He is a bad singer, musician, poet, arranger and producer, but he had a creative madness that fascinates and that enabled him to produce around twenty songs worthy of an anthology, art historian Darko Glavan says of Branimir Johnny Štulić. Since Bregović arrived at “authenticity” by denying rock and dressing it up as its opposite, Štulić was needed to save it, reverse the process and give it the future it deserved, writes psychologist Dragan Ambrozić. The game with censors and politics gave Johnny the aura of a man greater and more important than the system that would, within a few years, begin its inevitable and irreversible collapse, writes economist Aleksandar Dragaš. Sociologist Marjan Ogrinc, in his account of Punk among the Slovenes, says: Azra knows that Pankrti brought and liberated the democratisation of society. Grogy adds: …there’s no one better!

For me, the story of Azra begins in the late 1970s, when Ante Batinović, during our outing to Sopot, turned up an exciting demo of A šta da radim on a small crackling transistor radio, and all of us froze in the middle of eating our sandwiches, without hearing who the author was. Then, at Lokosi, during the graduation trip of all Vinkovci schools in 1978, meaning one week later, among a pile of unknown little bands, we heard those songs live, hahaha. The menacing Threat, the death of Emotion, would be heard only slightly later in Cave, in another deeply dark way, but Society as an unethical minefield of unbearable morphology is Johnny’s dehierarchised theme, more surreal than the pioneers from Rijeka – Paraf – or the gun-blazing Pankrti from Ljubljana.

Then the story jumps to the Osijek concert in 1980, where we were all ready to sing every song from the album Azra, only to be left speechless by at least thirty songs beyond those already recorded…

Then came some point in the mid-1980s when the connection broke twice in the middle of the song Anđeli, with pauses for reconstructing the cables, until the stage “finally” collapsed, and Azra continued, on the third attempt, to perform the same song. Everything else was a debate over whether Jura or Štula was the better poet, and the impossibility of answering kept us fired up with arguments until that unfortunate country disappeared.

Then there followed Johnny’s brilliantly bad choice of collaborators, but he played in all the villages and towns where people wanted to hear him (Dado T. sang that, far too quickly losing his strong progressive Time talent from the 1970s), while Ambrozić’s claim could not have been more precise: Azra punk-and-rollised everything that would later listen to the 1990s, along with the conclusion of the first private rock magazine Heroina by Branko Maleš that not listening to rock means living illiterate.

As a bad musician and lyricist, Štula had everything punk needed, as well as everything that New Wave lacked in its repeated attempts to keep the waves of New Wave alive throughout the 1980s. At some point in 1987 or 1988, the Osijek band No passaran performed the best unknown and nonexistent Azra song – Kao u izlogu.

Still, let us leave the badness to the world as the context from which he – derailing media echoes and History in political interpretation – precisely “copied”, while his lyrics “ended up” not only in his own poetry collection, but also, in 1995, in the most important anthology of Croatian poetry of the previous thirty years, Strast razlike, tamni zvuk praznine by Branko Čegec and Miroslav Mićanović; then in the most representative panorama of Croatian art, awarded Book of the Year in Poland in 2005 – Widjec Chorwacje (Seeing Croatia); and he was also included in a monographic doctoral dissertation in 2019. His lyrics had “ended up” even earlier – in 1989 – as intertextual matrices in Mate Bašić’s short-story collection Led & dugi marš, while four years earlier they entered a cult short story by multimedia artist Stanislav Habjan, Johnnyijeva slika ili ljubav gomile.

Then, suddenly, he disappeared; hopelessness killed him.

Goran Rem

10 March 2022
Advanced Philosophy Seminar (2) – Edmund Husserl – The Idea of Philosophy and Its Historical Origin

In the second Advanced Philosophy Seminar of the Aesthetic Laboratory, through which we introduce the knowledge-seeking to philosophy, you can listen to Edmund Husserl’s essay “The Idea of Philosophy and Its Historical Origin”. The editor of the Advanced Philosophy Seminar is Boško Pešić.

14 January 2022
Advanced Philosophy Seminar #1 – Hanna Arendt – The Gap Between Past and Future

In the first Advanced Philosophy Seminar of EstLab Radio, you can listen to Hanna Arendt’s essay “The Gap Between Past and Future”. The essay was read by Vlatka Perković and Maja Ivaniš. The editor of the Advanced Philosophy Seminar is Boško Pešić.

 

21 December 2021
The Other Side – New Wave Package Arrangement (Episode 3)

PAKET ARANŽMAN was a guerrilla joint action by three Belgrade bands. At some point during the 1980s, energy “swelled” in the largest city of the then Yugoslavia. These young people wanted to say something similar to what the punk pioneers from the western part of the land of the “South Slavs” were saying.

Idoli had already prepared the ground through graffiti actions on the walls of the metropolis. At that point, they were still BOYS. They inserted the single “Retko te viđam…” into the magazine Vidici. “Maljčiki” was a true masterpiece of artistic satire, a full-blooded punk-Cossack song.

Šarlo akrobata recorded the first reggae dub-punk in this region. The single “Ona se budi/Mali čovek” paved the way for the best album recorded in this region. Bistriji ili tuplji čovek biva kad… confirmed the ego trip “Niko kao Ja”.

Električni orgazam contributed three “numbers” to PA: “Kad krokodili dolaze”, a comic-book horror transformed into an anthem of Belgrade New Wave, while “Vi” anticipated “Nebo” and ElOrg’s debut album, together with the flash of ironic dance punk “Zlatni Papagaj”.

According to many, this record completely transformed the (sub)cultural image of the then Yugoslavia.

12 December 2021
The Other Side – Punk Pioneers (Episode 2)

The PUNK explosion in the former Yugoslavia? Did it really explode, or did we merely dream it? It had an influence equal to that of Gorgona, New Tendencies, BITEF, the cinematic Black Wave… much was heard about it, but few people really knew what it was about.

“AND THE DAY HAD STARTED SO BEAUTIFULLY”, as the title of Paraf’s first album tells us. It was not the first punk album in Croa… pardon, among Yugoslavs at the time. Yet Croats were, even then – as they are today in everything! – first. Prljavo kazalište by the band of the same name dates from 1979. (Excuse me? Aren’t those the ones invoking “Croatian Rose”?) In any case, before those Ljubljana boys who enlightened Branimir Štulić and AZRA’s first single, Balkan: “I shave my beard and moustache to look like PANKRTI”. Their (third ever!) concert at the SC Gallery in Zagreb in 1977 was the first truly public trace. In the bodies here and on their sharp minds, that “trace” (Derrida) remains indelible. We set off “ON THE OTHER SIDE”…

Thus, in the first episode we talked about PANKRTI, PARAF, PRLJAVO KAZALIŠTE… About Dolgcajt (Boredom), “the beginnings of the day in the city”, about “small municipalities where there are no problems”, somewhere between 1979 and 1980.

It was the “primordial sound” of an urban tribe. Brought over from London, it came alive on the streets and concert stages of Ljubljana, Rijeka and Zagreb.

9 November 2021
Testimony: “Answers to Questions and Without Questions”: MARKO BRECELJ

MARKO BRECELJ is a Yugoslav, Slovenian and Koper-based multimedia artist. A rock musician, poet, chanson singer and persistent performer/entertainer. His work is immensely important to the cultural imagination of artistic and intellectual circles in this region. Marko Brecelj is the author of one of the most powerful singer-songwriter debuts on the Slovenian and Yugoslav scene. His Koktel (1974), arranged by Bojan Adamič (!), is a true “unknown gem” and a masterpiece of eccentric chanson and jazz-rock fusion.

Brecelj is, however, best known as the frontman of the alter-rock giants BULDOŽER from Ljubljana. Their debut album PLJUNI ISTINI U OČI (1975) was one of the most subversive artistic assaults on the Yugoslav rock establishment of the time. It was the first truly conceptual Yugoslav rock album. The record developed its own original rock language, leaving a lasting trace (Derrida!) not only through its music, but also through its conceptual message. As a resolute and uncompromising opposition to the Yugoslav rock “mainstream” of the time, Buldožer paved the way – ON THE OTHER SIDE. Through their avant-garde nerve and Monty Python- and Alan Ford-style humour, Brecelj and the band opened the door for many original young punk and new-wave rock musicians. Brecelj and Buldožer were leaders of the resistance against the “shepherd rock” of Bijelo dugme. The end of Brecelj’s New Wave phase after Buldožer was marked by the masterful minimalist single Parada/Majmuni/Trotoari (1981).

See what it was like when the NEW AGE emerged (Brecelj, 1979). We spoke with him in the form of a “TESTIMONY – answers to questions and without questions” as part of EstLab’s The Other Side programme.

26 October 2021
The Other Side – Prehistory (Episode 1)

A kilometre of sea is very much a wave is a line by Branko Maleš, first performed live, published in a magazine and at readings in 1975, and later included in the 1978 book-album Tekst. Its humorous and absurd cheerfulness, which avoided mockery while – through the fantastic footwork of sonic-rhythmic games – repairing the pathetic world of an increasingly exhausted History, had to exist somewhere else as well. And of course it did: in Sound, in Music, in the Ljubljana band Buldožer, in their Monty Python-esque album Pljuni istini u oči.

The poet Vojislav Despotov from Novi Sad was doing something similar through ultra-irony, while the first punk demolition, or work of deconstructing concrete historical phrases, was performed in 1976 and 1977 by the Rijeka band Paraf! By then, things were already wonderfully – and irreversibly – underway, and all the arriving punks had long been listening to Buldožer and that first album, which they recorded predominantly in the officially active language of the then SFRY. That brilliant move placed the album permanently and prominently on the radio charts of that state.

Thanks to that album, Pljuni istini u oči, one may say in the Yugoslav context that the concrete body of departure from glam and progressive rock genuinely began as Buldožer’s joking NEW WAVE, which enabled all the wise music editors of that region, above all, to provide an alternative to the dominance of Bijelo dugme. The latter had itself just expanded certain boundaries and integrated intergenerational threads, but had settled, in glam fashion, into the heroism of Yugoslav stars and accepted what it was – as Darko Glavan put it – shepherd rock. Buldožer, however, is the Other: melodic, compositionally exciting, while lyrically desacralising, anti-pathetic and thematically astonishingly precise in its playful engagement with and outmanoeuvring of the most worn-out thematic slime – whether it came from music charts or from mass-media programmes broadcast or printed. Buldožer was the most creative deconstructor of socialist realism, which had sophisticatedly converted itself into the most popular Yugoslav band of the mid- and late 1970s. Yet Buldožer’s proto-New Wave brought reserves of Intelligence that liberated punks both from Intelligence and from stupidity and gave them stage space – and so they arrived, unconcerned with intelligence, grinning and getting angry, or proto-aestheticising their dirtiness. But they arrived before, on their second and third albums, accepting the fate of stadium bands. By then it was already the mid-1980s, and that was that.

Goran Rem

→ The conversation entitled “The Other Side – Prehistory”, part of the series of New Wave conversations about time, space and especially music at the Aesthetic Laboratory of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Osijek, can be found at the following address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-aGRCoeseo&ab_channel=EstLabRadio