tomaten im wohnzimmer ziehen

it’s that time of year again –migratory birds are moving south, our nans are grinding peppers for ajvar and dubioza kolektiv are setting outto record another album. everyone thinks that making an albumis a romantic undertaking whereby muses whisper sweet inspirationin the musicians’ ears, creating new music pieces. but the buggering truth is somewhat different. every recording session startswith manual labour: load-in.

i was born to a typical hippie family. my dad collected tapes, music on tapes. i was officially hooked on music when my old mangave me a mix tape of eddy grant and bob marley tunes. when i was twelve or thirteen i hit puberty. i learnt how to play, i think guitar was my first instrument. of course, as soon as i learnt my first three chordsi started to dream about playing gigs with my own band. my name is brano.i’m fourteen. i’ve been a musician from a child.

the only problem was that i lived in sarajevo, a besieged city hit by300 shells a day on average. in 1994, on my first day at thesecondary school of civil engineering i ran into brano in a hall full of futureconstruction workers, bricklayers and plasterers. he was the only guy with a long hair in the room, and we instantly scanned each otherand went, “aha, he’s into music.” i think the only reason we didn’tstart a band immediately was the fact that we bothplayed bass at the time. soon after, we shared a practice space

in the basement of a skyscraperon darovalaca krvi street, some 100 metres from the front linewhich ran along wilson’s promenade. jeopardising our parents’ mental health, and our own lives, in attempt to gofrom suburbs to the city centre we often went to the club obalaat the academy of performing arts where generator-powered concerts were held. in 1992, when the war started, there was no power, and my mates and i were all hookedon hip-hop and dance music.

on those rare occasionswhen the power was on we couldn’t wait to tune in tomtv raps to hear new songs by beastie boys, public enemy,and run dmc. but our happiness would be short-lived, because the power would soon go out again. almir and i grew up in the same tower blockon the mokuå¡nice estate in zenica. during the war we’d hang about by the entrance rapping and beatboxing all day long. sometimes we’d stay out late,well into the curfew,

hen leg it when the police patrols came. all kinds of things were happening... a crew was gathering round us in the neighbourhood, trying to do the same thing as we did, and so a small wartime hip-hopscene emerged in zenica. i started my first band with some matesin 1993, in the middle of the war, and of course we played death metal, which was an obvious choice for a wartime band. we recorded our first demos on a 4-track taperecorder in adi lukovac’s improvised home studio.

i think he recorded every single localunderground band in that studio. he was at it the whole time till he left sarajevotowards the end of the war. bands would send those demo tapes toradio zid’s “no sleep till…” hit parade show, and they’d organise and mobilise all their matesfrom the estate to phone in and vote for them. so they could win that weeklydemo-bands competition. if it hadn’t been for the “rock under the siege”compilation cd and concert, this whole story would’veremained an urban legend about rock n’ roll in a besieged cityand a very vivid scene that was, i guess, resisting the armed aggressionthat was happening all around us.

at one point we organised a streetrap battle in a dilapidated building, there’s a shopping centre there today. a huge number of kids our age turned up who were doing what we were doingand believed what we believed. we were completely fascinated and that motivatedus to start a band and get off the streets, move into some kind of a rehearsal space,perhaps even in a studio. we started a band that wasa strange combination of four mcs and a standard rock line-up. however, the musiciansweren’t into it as much as we were,

so the line-up changed constantly. we named the bandgluho doba (witching hour), because we formed it in the small hours, when you could only hear us in the street,the witches and nobody else. we changed it later togluho doba against deaf age, as the line-up changed so did the conceptof the band and the direction we wanted to take. we had our first concert in the winter of 1993,at the “29 november” cinema in zenica. the screening room was packedand i remember our honorary: a kilo of flour, a kilo of sugar, a litre ofcooking oil and a bar of chocolate. per member.

between 1993 and 2000,we played lot of shows in bih: travnik, tuzla, sarajevo,mostar, quite a fewin zenica, and we did a short tourof france and switzerland. that gave us further motiveto keep up the good work. in 1997 we played a concert in zenicain the gymnasium of the industrial school, and we saw on the poster that a dj from england,was supposed to play a set after us. we played our show and decidedto stick around and hear the dj. it was really good, we dancedand pogoed all night. and we went home oblivious to the factthat the dj wasn’t the brit, but brano.

as a matter of fact, i was there because my matejoss crooks was supposed to play, the man who taught meall those turntable tricks, and he was the one announced on the poster. anyway, he had to leave for prague urgently,so they asked me to fill in for him, and that’s when i first sawgluho doba from zenica live. i remember i was impressed immediately, somehow they sounded likethe bosnian public enemy. when the war was over and the siege lifted, when the city was unblocked

food started arriving, all kinds of aid,construction material and new music from the east and the west. at the time, the most popular genre of musicthat surged into the city as if from a tap was electronica and everyoneembraced it wholeheartedly. so we set out towards a new musical experience and along the way we learntabout this device called a sampler. which, according to the magazines,could perform miracles. in the classifieds we found the onlysampler that was for sale in the city. we went to the address,we knocked on the door,

and adi lukovac opened... he had just returned from germanywith a little sampler. we went to buy that sampler but instead we lefthis flat with the plan that we’d buy some other gear,and with that gear and adi’s sampler we would build a small demo studioto record ourselves and other people. we named this demo studiopost war sound, symbolically. and this thing that we called a studiocomprised an atari computer with a black-and-white screen,two speakers, one keyboard,

one sampler and one hard disk recorder. we decided to have a go at it because adihad already had some sort of intuitive knowledge, a way of figuring out how technology works. in those days there was no youtube,nothing to help you along, and nobody in town could explainhow something worked, how you were supposedto use a certain gadget, but adi was able to figure it out intuitively. we spent our twenties in settings like this, clicking away on computers and tryingto learn more about the technology

and what it had to offer. from adi we learnt a lot about productionand other things related to studio work but the most important thingwe learnt from him was that you should never saythat something couldn’t be done. that, and the premise thatexploration was endless. of course, since we were spendinginordinate amounts of time together, we came up with the idea to start a band. we named it adi lukovac i ornamenti. i was doing all kinds of thingimmediately after the war.

i played in a few underground bands, enrolled in music school, tried to learn the double bass, started architecture school,played in a kud "baå¡äarå¡ija". than brano rang me one day and saidornaments needed a bass player, so i decided to give up onall the other stuff and join the band. one of the first things i was tasked withwhen i joined the band was assembling the cdswith the album “pomjeranja” which had just arrived fromthe pressing plant in the czech republic. the jewel cases and bookletswere delivered separately,

and so we made a little assembly lineto put together that first cd by ornamenti. that was my first, crucial lessonon the diy approach to operating as a band. all the production workwas done in our studio, with our capabilities and our know-how. after we moved the studio from flat to flat,for nobody knows how many times, we finally settled at the efm student radio in the former marshall tito barracks. fittingly, the studio was set up in a roomthat had been used as a doorman’s booth. it’s a copy shop today.

we made dozens of songsand recordings there for sarajevan bands like konvoj and laka, and i thinka few of the songs that later ended up on dino merlin’s album“sredinom” were recorded there. the band existed from 1997 to 2002, and in that period we put outtwo albums, “fluid” and “pomjeranja”, appeared on several compilation cds, played a lot of concerts, and everything we did back thenwe did ourselves the publishing, the promo, the booking,

and everything elsethat had to do with the band. during those five years,adi lukovac i ornamenti constantly changed their formand structure and modus operandi. to be more specific, i was the drummer, then the dj, the saz player, the keys player and finally the drum machine operator, because we changed roles weekly.

i think that’s why the bandultimately fell apart, we just kept experimenting and we never defined a specificdirection we wanted to move in. the last concert we playedas adi lukovac i ornamenti was in 2002, we were opening for manu chaoin front of the city hall in sarajevo. as early as the beginning of the war, gluho dobahad some minor opportunities to work in a studio, but those were all demos. we’d record 4-5 tracks per session,but we never had a whole album in our hands. we wrote a lot of songs over time,

so we finally decided to record an album. pavarotti centre in mostarwas the best studio in bih at the time. we spent a month there and recorded an albumin english, of course. what band can afford 30 days of studio time? so many hours in the studio - that’s quite the tab, not to mention weed, food, drinks… that’s the way we were back in the day. but we never got the tapes, we didn’t havethe money to buy them from the studio.

we were supposed to save up, but… at the end of our stay in mostar we realized we didn’t have the moneyto pay for the recordings, so we didn’t get them. we returned home empty-handed. later we heard that somebodyhad erased the tapes. i don’t know if that’s true. if it is, that’s a real shame, i believe those recordings would holdsome sentimental value for us today.

after all of that we had a huge argument and the band fell apart. when a band falls apartit’s always a traumatic experience and we were shocked becauseafter five years in the studio we suddenly had a load of time on our handsthat we didn’t know what to do with. when the ornaments fell apart, i stayed at home withmy laptop and audio card and i just worked on,i don’t know, some kind of music, some kind of demos, beats, whatever,

and i had no idea what to do with any of that. after a while brano phoned and saidhe had remembered some blokes in zenica... i went to zenica and i decidedto play those recordings to them, just to see what they thought, but in fact i was hoping thatwe could do something together. when brano knocked on my doorfor the first time he was carrying a laptop and a little tote bag witha soundcard and a mic in it. i was all, “what’s up with that,what are we gonna be doing now?” we immediately, automatically startedto overdub melodies and write lyrics...

...actually, this was somethingwe wanted to hear all along. the whole crew was really anxiousto start a band, to do the proper stuff. when we worked with gluho doba we always had to tell the musicians what to play,what riffs and so on, but when brano turned up you didn’t have to tell him anything. we recorded in my sitting room, then in brano’s bedroom, going back and forth, we saweach other more and more often,

we were really into it, we realisedit was the right thing for us. for his part, he foundsome kind of inspiration in us, something that pushed him,and pushed all of us together. we had no idea at the time that what we were doing on the laptopcould result in a studio album. the chemistry and the desireto record something sparked off the albumdubioza kolektiv. it’s quite normal for bands to gothrough a long initial underground phase, it’s normal for a few years to passfrom the formation to the first cd.

most bands fall apart during this initial periodand they never have their first release. we were lucky that edin zupäeviä‡,at the time when we started the band, launched his record label “gramofon”, he heard some of our demos and literally six months fromthe idea to start the band we held first dubioza kolektiv cd in our hands. - d’ you need any help with that?can you manage? - äœile, go pluck us some tomatoesfrom the garden, will ya. - which greenhouse is that then?

- the farther one, up the…gah, the fire is out. the farther one, pluck us a few green ones. - there’s more pie if anyone’s game. spinach pie. - nah, i can’t even lookat food anymore. - if i don’t fall asleep today,i never will. - oh, is that so? - how ambitious are you with these? - i was watching some educationalyoutube clips about music production.

they say that high-calorie breakfast is crucial for mixing a good album. - does it have to be full english,or will the bosnian do? - depends, if your tunes arein english, you need full english. we’re recording in bosnian,and i’ve got an excellent idea. my mother-in-law senta new batch of travnik cheese, and we’ll put it to usein today’s production session. they say nikå¡a bratoå¡ producedhis best mixes after breakfasts which included travnik cheese.

- what, is nikå¡a from travnik? - nikå¡a is from travnik, indeed. just take one on the plate... let’s not have too much,lest we overproduce. - how do you like travnik cheese? now, then? stop dodging the question. how do you like the cheese?- it’s the best. i started my first band in 1986in mostar, with atila aksoj,

who now plays guitar in zoster. back then my ambition was to bethe loudest drummer in the neretva valley. one day a local drummer, asked meto fill in for him with his bar band. i knew all the folk music beatsand patterns, but not the songs, so i winged it somehow and people noticed i played folk musicin a rock and roll manner. i didn’t have a steady job then,i worked odd jobs, here and there... and the bars offered a steady gig. so i accepted the invitation by some fellow musiciansto play bars with them on a regular basis,

and that was my sourceof income for a few years. at the same time i had side bands where i played music i liked better, like hard rock, metal, and so on. it happened that the bar i playedwas frequented by famous singers, they played gigs there. i played with them, they noticedmy peculiar style and they invited meto play bigger shows. i played both drums and percussions.

some of these singers werehalid beå¡liä‡, hanka paldum, miroslav iliä‡... - on percussions, seno from mostar. not sevdah but... he plays in that rock bandcalled dubioza kolektiv. i knew the dubioza crewfrom different contexts. for instance, when i played with sarajevo drumorchestra, i met brano and vedran, and the other i met while workingat the pavarotti centre studio in mostar. in 2006

they asked me to join dubioza and since i was sick and tired of playing bars i came to sarajevo withmy drum kit for a rehearsal, and because i liked their styleand their commitment to social issues, my story as a member of dubioza began. when å uta turned up for the first practice,he set up his huge drum kit... we had some pa speakers made by rcf... and when å uta started to clobber the drums, we knew we had to get a new pa.

- everything sounds good to me, except the garage. - is that so? - it’s metallic-sounding. not like what we had before.. - doesn’t seem that way through the headphones. - i don’t know. it’s got these harshreflections, i don’t know what’s up. - drale… has this mic always been like this? didn’t we use to keep it like this? didn’t we?

- i think it was a bit higher. - maybe it’s the boat, you know. maybe the boat is reflecting. - go on, tilt it. tilt it. - it’s light.it’s not that heavy. - ok, that’ll do. - (mock slovene) go on, the indians are coming. - hoka-hej - that boat is from prekmurje.

- let’s just get it over here. - come on, heave-ho! - å uta, let’s give it another go. - same thing. - is it the mic? - last time we recorded there werefour tonnes of pellets here, and now they’re gone. this means the garage sounds warmerwhen there are pellets inside. this time we’re gonna have to do without.

- let’s go without, fuck the pellets. after the first practice we startedto work on the new album which was in our languageand was later named firma illegal. it all started with the song "dosta", which we recorded to supportthe eponymous civic movement. since we recorded “firma illegal” the situation has been steadilydeclining instead of improving. - today we’re owed wages for 2003, 2004,2005, 2006 and, if you please, 2007. - this is bosnia and herzegovina.

- in this country robbery runs rampant. - and the common manwill pick up the tab yet again. - i’m not resigning, and thisgovernment isn’t resigning, for a thousand reasons. - when will the strike begin? - the parliament of bosnia and herzegovinahasn’t convened in almost two months. - in one fell scoop 64 million marks were stolen. - the state is going down the tubes, whilst thekleptomaniacs in power are getting richer and richer. - just put up and shut up, things will look up,they will look up.

- you couldn’t wish for a better country. - put up and shut up. during those 10 years, we participatedas a band in dozens of protest... - a great rally to support the citizenswho have been protesting because of the problems with the id numberhas been announced for today. - good evening. we’re going live fromthe bosnia and herzegovina square, in front of the parliament. behind us,a protest concert is going on. we have with us brano of dubioza.brano, what are your expectations? - firstly, we came hereas citizens, to protest,

and along the waywe decided to play. everything was peaceful. but it was clear that violencewas about to break out, and it did, a few months later. over those ten years we triedto treat the same subject matter from different aspects,in different ways, from openly calling for protests… "strike! strike! everyone, strike!" … to self-irony.

"sing: “things will look up!”in mud we’re left prostrate fuck the vexationwe’d better mind our prostate this is the anthem of a generation we subsist on vexation up the arse of civilisation up the arse of civilisation" on every album we’ve done so farwe’ve had at least four or five guests. we like having guests, we likehaving people on the album, because every person bringsnew energy for the song.

but for this album we've decided that we’re looking for new,different people, who may not even beprofessional musicians, but simply have somethinginteresting about them and are able to inspire us. we stumbled upon thedeaf band dlan on youtube and were fascinated by the story aboutdeaf people who made music and had a band. - i thought it was incredible, the thingsyou do, the way you do them. in fact, the most interesting thing to me

was why you do them in the first place. - there are things we’ve lovedever since we were kids. angel, draå¾en, nedeljko and mario... we were all growing up with music. ok, it is a bit weird, the lads are deafor hearing-impaired, and they play music, but the music is something that connects us. - when i was little, when i was at school, i was bored at nightand so i watched mtv. my parents would go to bed and i’d lock myself

and turn up the music. i perceive music visually... - when we started playing our first song we had visual signals: this is how the verse starts,this is chorus, this is solo… - have you got any studio experience.have you ever recorded a song? - it’s hard because the hearing aids... start to produce this whistling noise.it's not easy... - we’re here to test it out today.to break the ice.

- perhaps it’s better that you test iton yourselves instead of us. it’s hard recording in the studio. it’s different from playing live. - well, let’s experiment now. - right. - can you show us how you,how shall i put it… when the drummer is playing,how do the others follow? we’re trying to understand your experience. - in fact, we start with the bass line.i start with angel and mingo.

we have a blackboard, and i write on it, for instance, standard... fifth fret, fourth string, count to eight… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 then you press on, you count again. - all of that is eight beats?- let’s say, yes.… - and you piece it together going by the number of beats? you know what? that’s exactlywhat we do. honest. how ‘bout we taught you this song we wrote?

because we came here when we saw your youtube clip...it inspired us to write a song together. - have you been practising this song of ours?- no, we haven’t. - right, let’s go then…- we’re groping in the dark. no, we didn’t practise it on purpose because we’re interested in the process. sketch it out for us, too. - do you use more than two strings? - all our songs are played on one string.

- that’s enough? let’s use two... - now you know this better than i do.- what’s the title of this song? - i don’t know. we only come up with titles when it’s time to make the cd cover. name it whatever you want. - where does it start? - here. - so complicated? - blimey, did we complicate this thing or what?

- ok. - rolling now… - drale, send him just the kickand the snare. and a bit of bass. actually, this song best explainswhy we like to have guests to work with us on songs... we wentto zagreb with a rough outline of a song, the people from deaf band „dlan“recorded the rhythm tracks, and we returned to sarajevoand made music with that, then dino å aran took the whole thing and turned itinto something completely different. brano returned from zagreb,

phoned me and sent me an idea,one beat and one chorus. the idea was to make a duet, actually a "truet"... at any rate, dubioza are an energetic band,hard-working fellows... worthy of respect. what i never liked about them was the excessof daily politics in their songs. as an old school representative of poet rock i wanted to write them a love song to push them away from daily politics. my mum is from the village of botajice.

that’s between doboj and modriäa. in that part of the country peoplemake music called “the sound of kalesija”. the music is played on sharki and fiddleand the style of singing is quite distinctive. when i was spendingsummer holidays there, the music imprinted itself deeply on me, and i wanted to use “the soundof kalesija” in one of the songs. i was browsing the web for ideas as to how to do that,and i stumbled upon mr jovo from gradiå¡ka. - hello, i apologise for the interruption.my name is brano.

- nice to meet you, i’m jovo. - we are the people whocalled you about the recording. - that’s a good case, it can hold a lot of money... - what was the chord? - d minor... - we were looking for someone who can pull offsomething along the lines of the "kalesija sound", and we reserved a part of the song for that... - no problems! - we’ll play that part roughly,

and then i’d like you to try a few instruments. this is about how much we couldfigure out on our own. - where did you learn the fiddle? - in sarajevo.- you started on a flute? - started to play it when i was four. - you didn’t learn it at school? - it runs in the family. later i went to sarajevo,to the school from the blind. after primary i went tothe secondary school of music.

- and there you learntall these instruments? - i was in charge of the classroom... as early as the second yeari was in charge of the instruments. they prohibited folk music, though. - cheers, mates! here’s to work and play! (spoof) “… and the members of the fairer sex loved the lads who could play the sax in the town of sombor”

i played funk, pop,and before that classical music, i had no experience with folk music at all. my first band, ritch bitch, was made upof lads from my hometown of sombor. with that band i acquired preciousmusical and life experience. for a number of yearsour singer was tanja joviäeviä‡. after that i played in or collaborated with bandslike zemlja groova, st. louis, maraqya and others, and i worked as a session musician. i first heard of dubiozawhen they put out “firma ilegal”. rich bitch were putting outtheir second album on the same label,

so ognjen uzelac, the then director of pgp recordsgave us a copy of “firma ilegal” to have a listen. of course, we were hooked immediately. that whole summer we didn’t removethe dubioza cd from the player. we played it around the clock. in 2011 i heard that dubioza is looking for a sax player. i didn’t see myself asthe candidate for the post, after two days the whole thingstarted to nag me. i said to myself, “let me get in touchwith the lads and see what’s up”.

we met at the tramvaj pub in belgrade, and struck up a deal afterfive or six shots of slivovitz. over the next few days i was feverishlylearning the material off the cd and they sent me a set list. less than two weeks lateri was in a van on the way to sofia where we played in front of a thousandpeople or more, without a single rehearsal. it’s fascinating when you seeblokes like då¾ambo aguå¡ev who play like they aren’t of this world, whose style is so different

and at first you think there’s no wayyou could ever play like that. but, little by littlei got the hang of it and after all these yearsof working with dubioza i good hooked on trills, as it were. i think it was in 2005 when we first met. it was in my hometown of murska sobota. we played the mikk club, in front of some 70 people. that was the capacity of the venue,

and one of those people was jernej, of course. from that moment on we’d meet two or three times a year, at a party after a show,or at a festival. i kept informed about the band,i liked to be up to date, i knew everything and i knew, more or less,what awaited me. i’ve always wanted to play music, and my first band was psycho-path.

after 15 years with them,when we were done i was sure that was it in september 2008 we said that we were done and in october 2008i played in lollobrigida... in 2013 u orahovica at the feragostojam festival i decided i couldn’t go on like that and... and when everything endedi decided i’d never sell my gear, i had amassed quite a collection. in psycho-path i played guitar,in lollobrigida bass, with klemar i even played synth,i had an analogue synth...

and i figured, maybe my kidswould need it someday, who knows. and then vedran rang me... and from that moment on, things started to unfold insanely fast. early in 2015 i came over here, we had four rehearsals, the following month i packed my bags,kissed my wife and kids good-bye, took a pic of myselfand pasted it on the wall so the kids knew what i looked like. i’ve been on the road non-stop since i joined. that’s 100,000 kilometres a year at least,

86 shows in the first year,112 in the second year, this year there’ll be at least 60. i believe that people who observethe lives of musicians from the side-lines do not have a clear enoughpicture of what it’s really like. you have nine guys in the same van, and you sleep with them more oftenthan with your own wife. i sometimes say in jest that it’s likea former yugoslav army barracks, there are people from all overthe former yugoslavia. and, literally, somebody blows a fartand you know who it was,

just by the sound of it. we know each other a bit too well. it’s all been good karma since i joined. in my previous bands i often said, i often put dubioza on a repertoire: “look at them, if theycan do it why can’t we?” now i’m on the receiving end of that,. now i'm in dubioza and they give me shit like,“jernej, you’ve got to work harder…” so, you see, i live my dream in a way.

i was twenty when i feltthe first symptoms. a few days after that i was hospitalised and diagnosed with a severe autoimmunecondition called multiple sclerosis. all the prognoses and all the tests said i would end up in a wheelchairwithin a year or a year and a half. i reached a stage wherei took 29 pills every day. quite by chance i met jaka bitenc from the slovenian hemp social club. he’s the biggest fighter for the decriminalisationand legalisation of marijuana in slovenia.

one of the essential aspects of this story is the use of cannabis oilfor medical purposes. and jaka is counselinga large number of people who have opted forthis kind of treatment. after only a few days of cannabis oil therapy half of my symptoms were gone. my condition started to improve. i felt a certain amount of fear that i would be arrested,that i would get in trouble with the law. it was important to us as a band to get involvedin the slovenian hemp social club campaign.

the campaign has got a slogan,“hemp heals, trust nature” and its goal is to destigmatiseand decriminalise the use of this totally naturaland apparently very efficient therapy. now we’re talking about hundreds,maybe thousands of people who treat themselves with oil successfully,or have even cured themselves completely. but that’s where the story ends, nobody wants to speak publicly,because it’s about an illegal substance. today i’m a healthy man with no problems, i live and work normally.i do athletics.

i’ve recently run my second half marathon. i used my abilities as a runner to make a video forthe song “himna generacije”, which, to me, is another indicatorthat this therapy works and that it’s helped me a lot. a few years ago we playeda concert in dubrovnik. there i met my old friend haris äœustoviä‡who, up until then, had lived in london and i had no idea he hadreturned to dubrovnik. he gave me a demo of a song he worked onwith dino dvornik in 2003.

unfortunately, dino died in the meantimeand they never finished it, and he said he would likedubioza kolektiv to finish that song. personally, i found the idea interesting,because it would be homage to dino dvornik. i met dino dvornik sometime in 1999,when he played in london, at a club called "zlatni papagaj". i had my own studio back then,i worked as a dj and i had a band, i performed all over london, so the organiser asked meto perform with dino dvornik. actually, i was nevera huge fan of dino dvornik.

in 1996 i somehow ended upat his concert at "metalac" a playground behind the first comprehensiveschool in the centre of sarajevo. and that’s where i discovered his music, i saw his band, they played fantastic. sometime in 2002, we agreed to meetin dubrovnik, of all places, spend 7-8 days together and startto work on our first album. our project was called green cross. why green cross?it was dino’s idea. he said to me, “i’m a catholic, you’re a muslim- let’s call ourselves green cross.”

i sad fine, makes sense,especially in the balkan context. we started working on some 5-6 tunes,including “treba mi zraka da diå¡em” (i need air). i said to dino, “please, let’s do somethingcompletely different with your voice, your entire mode of expression. - what?- let’s make a socially committed song.” of course, for 15 odd years the songevolved, it had its mini evolutions, and now i think the time is right, now that it ended up in this studio. - everything sounds good...

we have two versions of the chorus... this one, with the guitars up frontand the vocals in the back... ...and this one, see? i think it’s a universal subject. the trials and tribulations of an individualin a dysfunctional society, it’s something that holds watereven today after 15 years. - somehow it’s off.it’s a bit unnatural here. - we’ll do it like this: we’ll probably leave this for the video,she has a brilliant scene where...

last year i was invited by theinternational college in mostar to hand out the school leaving certificatesto the kids who had graduated i was supposed to write a speech and i didn’t know what to do,i'm not professional speechwriter... and so i've decided... i remembered the solemnoath of the pioneers which my generation tookwhen we started primary. i wanted to connect itto the kids of today who finish school without swearing an oath ofany kind either to themselves or the others.

i wanted to try to translate the textof the oath for the international kids, so i doctored the oath a bit, made itinto what i thought it should be today. - you’re rhyming “-eer” with what? - “pioneer” and “political career”. - does that fit? - just add “pioneer” - never took no oath, never been a pioneer... - …but today i’m starting my political career... - i’d swap these two.

- which ones?- come here, have a shufti. - “evening is wiser than morning here”i’d swap these round. - you’re right. it’ll be better like that. - let’s try. we always have to hearthe same old story. ever since i was born,always the same old story. one guy tells you his history,the other tells you his, and so on and so on. billions of different histories.

- … buying jeans in trieste, holidaysin zaostrog, czech girls, the bench… - sleeping on a park bench. that’s a book title! “sleeping on a park bench.” that’s boring. it may sound a bit pathetic, but i’d really love it if everyonewould just try to move forward a bit. helem nejese is a sarajevanalternative organisation for musical, theatrical and radio production. we had dubioza kolektiv in episode 38, season 3... ladies and gentlemen, dear listeners...

neurosis collective - liveat helem nejse radio show tune in and give us a callat 861-436.. "let’s send the youngstersabroad to slog to dig ditches,to clean that bog let’s send the youngstersabroad to slog to wash dishesand live high on the hog" i hear it, but i even find it cute,it’s got a leap of some kind… i played percussions in dubioza kolektivfor about five years... i live in mostar, a divided city

which used to be a symbol of unity. that’s something that gets on my nerves,and not only mine, i think. for those who don’t know, this division into west and east mostaris very political and systemic. take education, for instance,where there is systemic segregation. kids from one side of the towngo to school in the morning, those from the other sidein the afternoon, but an hour or two apart, lest they brushed againsteach other, god forbid.

this division is one of the reasons i started rock school togetherwith a team of lecturers, because, let’s face it, that projectis about more than making music. that project gatheredyoung people in one single place. that’s one school under one roof. that’s the only school thatoffers a programme where young people work together,and it obviously comes to them naturally. because team working always yields better results. these youngsters are gettingan impetus and the hope

which they need to stay in this country. for those who want to makea career as artists or musicians, rock school is the only thing to hold on to. in 2015, rock school mostar organiseda huge dubioza kolektiv concert which helped us raise fundsfor a recording studio, which we named dk after the band, and we’re filming in it today. the inspiration for the song came fromsaå¡a loå¡iä‡ from plavi orkestar. one morning he wrote a facebook status:"bez neta nema selameta" (no connectivity, no prosperity).

i met saå¡a in a cafã© later that day and i told him i’d nick his statusto use as a song title and he said to nick it. - open up your vocal cords. - it’s just in the word “internet”,the end is a bit… but it’s not - i think the last one is better. - did i lengthen the vowel? “internet”? - you’ve got to flatten that out. that won’t do. - this is darkglass now...wanna try different sound?

- no. it sounds good. it's up to you...just try not to press it to hard. “5 do 12” is the first albumwe released as a free download. back in 2011 that was stilla relatively novel idea and all our colleaguesand publishers we mentioned it to thought we were off our nut. why would a band give away their musiconline instead of selling cds, and deprive themselvesof a source of revenue? back then web hostingwas quite expensive and the free downloadsweren’t actually free for us,

we were charged every timesomeone downloaded the album. for us, free downloading is simplythe best and fastest way to establish direct communication withthe people who are interested in our music. that way we avoid the establishedpublishing business which boils down to some companyholding your music hostage, printing it onto thousandsof pieces of plastic and trying to convincepeople to buy it. with digital downloads it takes you two clicksto upload the album onto your server once it’s done, and it’s immediately available.

that’s faster, more direct,and, ultimately, eco-friendly. - come on, lads, the pellets are here. - jerry, you’re gonna get yourself killed! - foot! foot! - what foot? - whose foot? piss off. - it’s ok, it’s ok. - oh, adis… - now i know how much on ton weighs.

- seems to me we’re gonnahave to track the drums again. another musical chapter is finished. we’re turning the page todayand starting anew. we’re waiting for the musesto assail us again, but until then, the circus has packed, loaded the wagons and iscoming to a tent near you. and so our story ends.

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